Welcome to Rates and barrels.

It's Tuesday, August 13th, Derek Van Riper, Enocerous, Britteroli here with you on this episode.

We dig into a few pressing questions, including who would be on a Team USA roster for the 2028 Olympics if we can build it with major league players.

Maybe it's a pipe dream, but there are some stars that want it to happen.

So we figured we'd go through the process of actually putting together a lineup of who could be on that team four years from now.

We're going to check it on the NL West, which is going to be a battle over the final month and a half of the season.

And we're going to take a look at the possibility that a few teams followed the

Angels lead from last August and cut payroll using the waiver wire during the second to last month

of the season. Kind of a new thing we saw last year in mass. Maybe one or two teams could try to follow that this year.

Let's get right after it though. Team USA in 2028. When I bring that up, Britt, who are the

first few names that pop into your head as current stars that will still be good and are very likely

to be on that team if we do in fact see major leaguers in the Olympics four years from now?

Yeah. Well, I think we're lucky in the games at a place where so many of these young stars are up here already. It might have been very difficult to predict even 10 years ago.

But I think of Bobby Witt Jr., I think of Jackson Holiday, I think of Gunner Henderson,

Adley Ruchman, right? I think of all these guys who have yet to hit their prime and they could be in their prime years when we look down the road four years from now.

I think, and we did this yesterday, spoiler alert, this all came out of our pre-podcast show yesterday.

As you guys know, predicting pitchers is very difficult.

Outside of Paul Skeens, who if he stays healthy, I think we all know could be one of the best pitchers in baseball.

You know, you can make that case probably already.

But it's so difficult to predict what these young arms are going to do, guys in the minor leagues, guys who haven't really figured it out yet.

We see this every year. We'll all of a sudden add a new pitch or add 15 pounds. And,

you know, Mason Miller with the A's is a great example and kind of almost come out of nowhere.

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