Welcome to Ray, to Barrel. It's Thursday, October 17th, Derek the Riper, Inoceris. On this episode, we discussed some fatigue factors in October baseball and how catchers might be particularly affected by the grind of the long season.

We're going to take a look at gold glove finalists and talk a bit about public-facing defensive metrics and how they've come along over the years, how we feel about the current state of things, trying to evaluate players quantitatively with the things we have at our disposal. And a quick

snapshot of where we are right now in the postseason. With it being Thursday, October 17th,

you might know that today, game three in Cleveland for the ALCS gets underway. It's probably

already happening to listen to this podcast because my internet was not working this morning, so we have a delayed recording. The good news is we are not

previewing that game and we're not previewing game four of the NLCS because you'll get to

watch those games as they happen. But we will talk about some things happening in those

series of great interest. So, you know, we begin today with Walker Bueller was his start on Wednesday the best

stuff he has actually had in his arsenal so far in 2024 because it certainly looked

like that watching him.

We can't get an official number just yet because we're working on trying to get

unlock the postseason numbers, but he had the best drop ever on his knuckle curve, the most

sweep ever on his sweeper, and I think the most fade ever, most horizontal movement ever on his sinker.

So, you know, before the game, I saw Xavier Scruggs mentioned that, you know, he should throw more sinkers and sweepers and mix it up a little bit because he'd been getting really locked into cutters and curves, you know.

And I was like, our sinker and sweeper all that good,

but they look great in that game.

I had like a little bit of like,

so check out his spin rate in this game.

Now, it's the most he's had since Sticky Stuff Enforcement, basically.

But if you're looking at this graph, when I say it's the most spin he's had since Sticky Stuff Enforcement, that makes you think, oh, my God.

But when you look at this graph, you're like, oh, but he's kind of been here three times already, you know, in post.

It's very obvious where sticky stuff enforcement is on this graph, but he's not back to where he was with sticky stuff.

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