We Love Stats, But What Are We Missing?

Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball

The Athletic

Fantasy Baseball, Mlb, Baseball, Sports

4.7 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2026

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eno, DVR, and Jed discuss ongoing RSN trouble the likely impact on several teams this winter before looking at a few things that the stats we love might be missing. They also discuss a report from Patrick Mooney that the Cubs are nearing a deal for Edward Cabrera. Plus, they examine a few mailbag questions including the difficulty of maintaining a change in swing tilt, and what hitters with high in-zone contact rates and low outside-the-zone contact rates, inspired by the small-sample results from Red Sox infielder Marcelo Mayer in his big-league debut. Finally, they share a few of their favorite bobbleheads in honor of 'National Bobblehead Day'.

Rundown

1:42 More RSN Troubles For Nine Teams

13:34 What Are the Numbers Missing?

20:58 Yet Again, the Wind is More Important That We Thought?

25:45 Matchup Difficulty Relative to Team Quality (Do Bad Teams Face Tougher Pitching?)

43:05 Edward Cabrera: Nearing a Trade to Cubs

48:27 How Easy/Difficult Is It to Maintain Swing Tilt Changes?

54:31 Good Zone Contact%, Terrible Chase Contact% Players

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Rates and barrels, it's Wednesday, January 7th, Derek Fennrefer, Enoceris, Jed Lowry here with you on this episode. We dig into
0:23.2	a question. We love numbers, but what are we missing? It is inspired by a piece that Eno wrote
0:29.7	with Will Salmon earlier this week. We figured having Jed here with us, we'd get some good perspective
0:34.5	on things that us nerds who've been on the outside may have
0:38.2	overlooked. There's some great stuff in that story from Tommy Fams. We'll dig into all that in just
0:42.9	a few minutes. Jed, how's it going for you on this Wednesday? It's going. It's going well, guys.
0:48.0	I'm happy to be back. 26. Weird to say.
0:56.3	Another one of those fake years that we're living in.
0:56.6	What's up?
0:57.3	Fake years.
0:58.7	All right.
1:00.0	Yeah, you're all right.
1:00.4	You're good.
1:01.5	Yeah, good.
1:05.2	Today was a hard morning.
1:06.4	Bring in the heat.
1:29.4	The first morning we wake up after vacation is hard, but you knew it was going to be hard and you get up and do it. And then there's something about like second and third morning. You're like, oh, this is just now the new normal. Today was hard. Back to the boys. Really did not want to get out of bed this morning. It just school. Yeah, school's back. You had the buffer day on Monday where your kids didn't have to go to school,
1:31.0	but now they're back at it.
1:35.3	So the realization hit in that this is the new norm and they, they didn't like it.
1:37.1	They were both borderline late today, we'll say.
1:41.9	Well, on to some better things, hopefully, but not actually at first.
1:47.6	I was reading some stories on The Athletic this morning, just getting caught up on the news.
	...

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