When Do You Worry About Secondary Pitches?

Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball

The Athletic

Baseball, Sports

4.9 • 746 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eno, Trevor, and DVR discuss a few of the 16 'other' baseball figures reinstated by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred this week including Shoeless Joe Jackson and several members of the 1919 White Sox, and when 'bad' secondary pitches become a problem by looking at six pitchers whose fastballs currently exceed the quality of their breaking and off-speed offerings.

Rundown

1:05 The 'Other' 16 Reinstated by Commissioner Rob Manfred

12:50 No, Oyster Burns Wasn't Banned for Life

15:31 When Are 'Bad' Secondaries A Problem?

19:46 Robbie Ray's Limited Arsenal

22:20 An Attempt to Understand Bryan Woo's Success & Splits

33:13 The Andrew Heaney Odyssey

40:05 We're Still Puzzled by Taj Bradley; Is It All Linked to Poor Command?

53:01 Do Ownership Blueprints Come From Ownership's Approach to Other Businesses?

Related Reading

SABR's Eight Myths Out: https://sabr.org/eight-myths-out

Matt Moret on the 'other' 16: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6354320

Zach Buchanan's 2019 Story 'A cold case, not a closed case: The baseball obsessives correcting the record about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal': https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/1260436

Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social

Follow DVR on Bluesky: @dvr.bsky.social

Follow Trevor on Bluesky: @iamtrevormay.bsky.social

e-mail: [email protected]

Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe

Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels

Hosts: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris

With: Trevor May

Producer: Brian Smith

Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Rates and barrels Thursday, May 15th, Derek Van Riper, Unisarous, Trevor May here with you on this episode.
0:17.2	We'll talk a bit about the other 16 people reinstated by Rob Manfred earlier
0:22.4	this week, along with Pete Rose, we talked about on Wednesday, so I thought the other 16 were
0:27.7	worth at least a few minutes of everybody's time this week. We're going to dig into a question,
0:32.1	are the secondaries good enough with a group of six different pitchers? We'll try to do some
0:36.7	deep breakdowns there.
0:38.3	And if we can, discuss which teams we might be able to predict behavior with at the trade deadline based on their owners.
0:45.6	A really interesting thing Trevor has started to drill into.
0:48.0	So a lot of ground to cover today.
0:50.9	It's been a busy, busy week on the news front.
0:53.6	As far as the other 16 people reinstated by
0:57.1	Rob Manford this week, and I keep saying I have to emphasize people because one, one was an owner,
1:03.1	15 players, one owner. There are some wild backstories in there. The biggest name for everyone is
1:09.9	Shoeless Joe Jackson.
1:14.9	Shulis Joe Jackson's among those 16 people reinstated.
1:23.0	And I think the interesting thing here, for most people, the movie or the book, Eight Men Out,
1:31.8	is probably as much as most people have taken the time to learn or try to learn about the 1919 white socks, right?
1:38.2	And there's, of course, missing information in the movie and the book.
1:44.3	And the good folks at Sabre have been focused on this for a long time trying to correct that.
1:46.1	They have a post eight myths out.
1:52.1	That will unpack a lot of things, change a lot of things you've thought you've learned already, right?
1:54.0	That off the top is really interesting.
	...

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