WAF 227 - Labor Day Lessons Learned

0:00You're listening to wins above fantasy. Part of the Pitcher List podcast network with Van Bernette and Steve just Swelley. Welcome back everybody. It is wins above fantasy episode 227 Thursday September 3rd as this comes out. Record Wednesday night. Van Bernette joined as always by Steve just Swelley. Welcome to you to you die hearts who are joining us in September. Hopefully your seasons are still well alive. I think last week I marked the end of my all-important home league season and this week's Steve I think we go ahead and put a nail in the coffin for both our seasons which is ceremonious for the topic tonight. We're talking Labor Day lessons learned. We hope you guys geek out on this as much as we do because kind of the mission statement a waffer years in the running has been having some accountability and having a little bit of looking in the

1:05rear view and not just taking victory laps but also looking at things that we might have missed where we can improve. Hey but when we get stuff right we also want to look at that too and see if we can learn year-over-year. So very fun show I know Steve leading up to it. It's a long lead up because all the way back to April second show episode 208 as we're now on episode 226 we said things all throughout the spring that were oh this would be a good show to come back to we got to look at this later in the year and see how this stuff worked out and this is the show exactly for that where we are going to hand pick five of our crystal ball episodes from April and early May and basically talk through what the hits were what the misses were and the bigger process learnings are what we might take into next year either from a managing standpoint or from actually running wins buff fantasy as a podcast Steve because we might be like oh we got to circle that episode can't wait man a lot of fun and now that we're both out

2:10it feels appropriate so how you doing how you hanging in it's good I'm still we were talking a little bit off air I'm not and like that I miss this yet mode just because of how frustrating my team was all year it was great sneaking in and making the playoffs and keeping that streak alive I think I've made it you know every year but one since like 2014 something like that yeah that's a good yeah I think I missed it like 2022 so I have a decent these everything was going everything was going against you yeah that's fair and yeah kind of the same for me dude we like there's some bad beats like yeah so to get an injury yeah yeah out for the season like it when you know that it would take kind of a mere put the win at that point it's kind of like I'm gonna go down swinging but put me out of my misery it's actually funny this is like the best year I've had elsewhere other than my home league I'm in second in my tgfb I league not gonna win it because the person in first overall is in my league by like mile so you know that would be

3:15a nice finish I'm close to the money and in my NFC C50 and then two other you know smaller home leagues that I do I'm you know bouncing back with the fourth between first and the road in the road oh league that I do and then it's second and the other head to head like keep her league that I'm in so you know still can have a good overall year and like the other like yeah like two days ago I literally turned off the underdog notifications with like all the line-up posts you know like that that tweets it out I'm like actually I still need this like you know I still I I can't just completely check out yeah I'm not a different second that's impressive I've landed in seventh purgatory for for tgfb I think that was one of our new used resolutions so good on you Steve yeah so thoughts a quick thoughts on the topic itself Steve and then we probably got about 10 minutes per of the five episodes to just dive in so it's gonna be a speed test for us tonight answer right um I think that if anything this isn't this is less so

4:22of us being right or wrong which is important but I think it's it's helpless to develop good processes and like a lot of these episodes are recurring topics because they've worked before right I think that's sort of the biggest thing that that we take from this and you know we're not gonna be a hundred percent on our takes or even close to that but at least we'll understand what the processes are and like you know why we talk about the guys we talk about when we do early season you know observations and and why maybe there's some more signal than noise or at least that's the goal right so um if anything it's a it's it's a good start to like audit season you know this is like the tax season of of of of of Waff right we'll we'll go through our chalkboard picks and and all that as the season comes to a wrap here but we do come at throughout the year like you say for a lot of episodes and say oh we gotta come back we gotta come back and see how we did with this we'll check in on these calls so be true to our word here which is which is which is good

5:23yeah I like I think it was maybe our first year or two is we're now in like year six that uh we we would say that a lot and never actually do it yeah other than the chalkboard episode so it's nice that we're holding true to it but and it's also it's also hard because there's so much stuff to talk about right like the the the the content sort of or the idea sort of make themselves not like too hard to think of topics each week and we're not a daily show so a lot of things go on there's a lot of stuff to talk about as well but yeah it's good to come back to the episode so really fair yeah and it sometimes it takes three time three years in a row of saying every April we got to come back to this before you wake up to the the reality of it all right so we'll dive in and this is a little bit different of a format for for the regular listeners we a lot of times we tend to have our minds made up on a player take or where we want to take the topic we've kind of got the table set to look back on these but there's gonna be some freestyle on the fly I mean like our rundowns usually it's just like a list of 12 players which is fine but it's it's gonna it's

6:28our bread and butter is totally different yeah it is different so we are we're getting we're jumping in the time machine way back to April 2nd when you know spring was in the air we were all we're watching every single at bat and it was I think our first episode since the season had begun and the show topic was what you should care about in one weekend and kind of looking basically at early season observations now for that we are basically saying as we do every year that it's it's overreaction season and it's too quick to look at anything around you know surface stats or barrel rate as you know things haven't stabilized yet basically but the stuff that has the bigger denominator which you've called out Steve that tends to be the stuff we look at in a handful of these early season shows so for this one one weekend it was really looking at bat speed changes for hitters and then velocity gainers for pitchers or pitchers who added a pitch mix and there's kind of

7:37a theme throughout our whole season which I don't know about you Steve but it surprised me I know he's in name that's easy to talk about especially how loud the production's been this year but PCA popped up in like three or four of our episodes early on and he didn't really like light the world on fire from a result standpoint the way that he eventually did throughout the rest of the year but PCA was a really big one and then a name we just talked about last week Liam Hicks which he did have some loud production early on but we assessed and basically said this is encouraging that some of the swings of the bat speed had picked up and for a guy like Liam Hicks I was actually just listening to it in my card tonight which is always funny like let's go listen or I sold from five months ago talking about how Liam Hicks was like a seller dwell around bat speed or like 20th percentile up to like 50th percentile where like oh well now at least he's middle of the road and he's had three home runs as well and what we ended up finding is Hicks wasn't this Cal Raleigh type of

8:43home or production but the hit tool was great so like I think an early lesson for these just on the hitter side was that Michael Harris another one some of those bat speed gains I think you're allowed to get excited about that I know you can't look at it in a complete vacuum but some of those name and there were miss a little bit of misses there too so you have to look at the process because I know a guy like Matt McLean was one that we were like he let the world on fire with spring training but then he started out ice cold his bat speed was still up so maybe you have to accept that you might hit on you know two and miss on one but overall I think first week April next year I'm totally endorsing that is a helpful show right and I think you're you're maybe given us too much of a haircut or a discount on the PCA takes he was on a lot of our early season

9:43rundowns and we'd like the lot about that and he was term memory loss or traded for very very cheap early in the season because people were panicking after the bad second half and the slow start right he really did not pick up the pace until the middle of May maybe even a little bit later and there was a great article in the Wall Street Journal today I think by Jimmy Diamond by it was I believe is in the World Street Journal look it up when you riff here but there were some adjustments he made to his stance that maybe we didn't pick up on but there were some other things that we did and I think we were sort of carrying a torch when a lot of people were out on PCA because they combined the slow start with the concerns from the second half so I'll give us some credit there but yeah overall like this is a list that I'm pretty much buying like the list the the seven names that we had was PCA Liam Hicks Matt McLean Isaac Collins Cam Smith Michael Harris

10:50and Jackson Merrill it's really just like Matt McLean Isaac Collins and Cam Smith and you know that and we can't submit the Matt McLean have been usable at points Isaac Collins we we qualified that as an extremely deeply take right so yeah overall like if we were just looking at guys that were rostered like every single one of these guys we pretty much wanted I know Merrill took a while but it was still there and I think our position was that okay he looks healthy now and even during his poor production months overall he was still providing homeers and speed so I'd still tend to count that one as a w I think this is definitely going to be something that we look at early in the season next year yeah and I think Merrill is right there with PCA that it wasn't just the early bat speed but it was also on the Bilo hitters because the bat speed was still there some of the bad at ball day data was up there so I think that's a lesson learned too that it's

11:51you know bat speed might take a minute to come around yeah and I think maybe we could we could sort of like okay is this guy healthy you know whoever we have a health concern with like Jack Samarro you know come off an injury riddled year swing the bat harder great sign right yeah yeah yeah we could we could apply it to you know better refine where we where we who we choose to look at in the gainers less than not just necessarily look oh automatically bat speed up great you know yeah there can be some sort of qualification and you know I test too and you an element that you can apply rather just filtering a leaderboard you know yep yeah and I think it's a fair reminder and and kind of the subtle victory lap that for how good PCA now has has been on the season right 38 homers 32 steals a 280 batting average month of April it was a 6 83 FPS 237 batting average

12:56even in people were people were panning and people were panning because the cost was still super high and the second half was so bad last year yeah and but it was not just the bat speed it was also the whiffs were down I know as jacers were up but we were kind of citing that uh you know bat speed with elite athleticism can afford to have some swing and mess in the game and I think that still holds true on the pitching side of this uh let's look at some of the some of the topics on this so pretty much we had fastball velocity as its own group and kodai sango was a funny one now I was like looking back at the time yeah but Steve I was cracking up listening to it because I was basically like all right Steve take your victory lap you read the industry and you literally were like I will not take a victory lap on April 2nd it's a good sign that saying as healthy so

13:57you he was a hard cause you know and then he was right but I think that's the the right idea I do think it's still interesting that uh Dylan Seas who ended up with you know an excellent almost like saw young were the year in terms of the line uh and Dustin May who it took a little bit of bumps in the road but he ended up having a you know basically a miniature breakout year that they both had substantial vilo jumps in the first week uh imanaga you talked about health he was on the list uh al-kantra and then there was I guess when you look at some of the guys that we had listed for breaking ball velocity where it was like Mike Burrows Kevin Gossman imanaga like maybe this exercise yeah i don't know if i know if i care care is much about that yeah yeah right and liberator on the flip side of that if you remember he had that really strong spring and i know he just talked about him on last episode as still being you know doing interesting things

14:58but his velocity did come down in April from where it was sitting in spring and liberator did not turn into some you know fantasy breakout so i think basically speed wins early on to be like for fastball for fastball for fastball and for bad speed yes yes it's first week speed check is the idea there we go that's our that's our uh you got to show topic and a show name for for next year shoot and radar let's go uh so that is that is episode 208 uh i can scan to see if there's anything else i mean there was there were certainly misses in there but um i would just highlight for the pitch makes changes like you know Sasaki maybe that wasn't the adjustment but that he was tweaking i think that was a good sign um sending all guitar overall another were some rough spots you know in April may and then he got going really uh in the second half here um Kyle Harrison definitely it was it was a good call there too yeah yeah so i think uh worth noting but

16:02velocity uh it seems yeah is the primary we could probably do a topic just on that based on you know are are sort of post mortem analysis of that episode yeah i like it uh okay so that was 208 so let's fast forward a week from then a whole week and get to april 9th uh at this point it's like match up week three and our chat back and four steves like what do we want to talk about it's gotta be waiver wire where that this is the show where it's like if you add a guy who pops on april 9th you are getting so much production throughout the rest of the season the flipside is of course giving up on other players too early which is always the challenge um but pulling up this episode log i think one that jumps out which was so deep um in terms of the roster ship was was Sean Burke who was just six percent rostered um this was one that we had talked about in years

17:06past we liked the extension at the time we thought the white socks were not going to be a playoff picture team it was only early april and we were kind of joking and laughing at like who is in their rotation they're gonna need to get innings out of some of these guys and Sean Burke is one that if the strikeouts are truly a strikeout per inning it looked like he really had uh got the walk rate and check and looked super productive with the big frame and everything um he was a follower at the time as well so Sean Burke was a good one there um for what it's worth on how we got on our radar that was a guy who had some back in the baseball card production and he was we talked about how he was hyped up heading into last season two um so maybe a little bit of a post-hype yeah yeah yeah i think that's fair because that that would apply to max Meyer who is only 12 percent rostered at the time um and he was mid for those first couple out yes but the sliders

18:10still looked great in terms of swing and miss uh control was troublesome and that was one that we were like okay let's watch it and then i know personally Steve it took like one more really good start before i jumped in major bummer that Meyer got injured because before he got injured he was looking like honestly a top 25 pitcher with the production he was he was bringing uh maybe maybe even better yeah um you know it's unfortunate that he's hurt again um it's a neck though this time which is a little bit better i know that is you know connected and everything close to the arm and shoulder and he's had that issues in the past um but you know he he he was something that i drafted because he looked somewhat better in spring it took a bit uh and it was just like getting used to that adjustment coming back from that major hip surgery and and it paid off it's now just a question like all right is he ever going to be good enough to last the entire season because there are three month stretches where max Meyer pitches like a top 20 pitcher he just does not

19:13have the longevity to do so yet he'll be discounted i'll you know i'll treat him like Chris Boobitch right like i'll bank on his three great months till June until he either you know gets hurt or proves that he could do it for longer so um sure i still like max Meyer uh for for next year even it'll probably be uh discounted if he doesn't return this year which doesn't look like he will i do too um and and broader than the the player itself i think with Meyer kind of like Burke names that we liked in the past that were still young enough to make like meaningful improvements but Meyer had changes as well like his sweeper usage had had jumped uh from like 10% up to 25% or something crazy and i think it's just a sign that even if the results don't look good the swing and miss stuff looked good um so that's where i think some of those things early on

20:15like pitch mix or swing and miss can be more effective um are still very like effective tools in there what was Jordan Walker's roster ship percentage i know it's not on the notes here i don't know if you listen then and we mentioned it but well i'm curious as to what that was on April 9th i don't have it right in front of me but what i want to go look at is so okay and in in the march run of games he already had homer was hitting 294 with a 988 and so at this point April this would have been a full week of April after that which was his eight home or month i'm pretty sure Steve to be fair now we did talk about him in the offseason but i'm pretty sure how he positioned this was all right you're probably not going to be able to get Jordan Walker but we got to start out by saying he looks like a priority ad so i guess what's the lesson learned on Walker because he ended up being one of the like hallmark early ads of the entire year

21:22we did talk about him going a driveline in the offseason like does this also fit into the the post type sleeper category when a guy with that much underlying quality contact skill shows any stretch of results run don't walk to add you know if cam smith next year comes out and pulls five fly balls in the first week of the season it's a sprint yeah yeah don't question it uh yeah you know who you know some of that we'll talk about if cal rally you know it continues the hot stretch at these on in september and late august early next year you know put it out of bump them up around or something next year right like yeah mark vn to it's just like guys yeah guys that think are yeah are you know i mean in a way you got to remember where we're at

22:23with jordan walker he was still playing but it seemed like a guy who you were no longer i mean he wasn't pretty probably wasn't projected for the like a starting role like for the most part like that's how he was drafted basically yeah it was just because the cardinals were in blowup yeah it's like yeah what why not we'll see but i think a combination of driveline but honestly like Sean berk's a little different because max mire and jordan walker both came up with the expectation they were top they fight the world right far yeah and shan berk obviously nowhere near to that extent but six foot six pitcher that you know seven feet of extension and it like he was on our radar prior to i think in past year's day we've talked about lessons learned as like it's a young man's game but it's kind of also like bet on the tools in a way and especially if tools match up with a narrative of something they've tweaked or changed but i think overall like when you look at both of these episodes combined

23:28right where if you're just talking about the waiver relevant ones that would be uh dust in may it would be maybe a little bit of roe key sasaki in the right league size granted he had his ups and downs shan berk jordan walker max mire like i think part of this story is still you want to be pretty twitchy on adding guys that have either like name or prospect tend to agree paired with vilo or bat speed or a notable change like i still think it's worth swinging and missing on three of those yeah if you hit one because those are kind of league winners right be aggressive early on that's uh that's the mantra there yep and it was a it's Jared diamond at the at the Wall Street Journal wrote on pca great article today on uh the stand adjustments that he had so shout out there that's good luck uh okay so that is uh first two weeks of april uh early season

24:29observations the waiver show uh we're gonna take our our first ad break and we'll be back with our next one which is hitter changes that matter in early season we'll be right back after this okay so steve uh just scooting on down to episode 210 on april 16 so this now mid april but still not quite deep enough to get into like uh meaningful badid ball samples on barrel rate anything like that so we're looking at uh this might have been a stop she let me pull it through and uh yeah it was it was it was this was a great stop she where it was combining a handful of ingredients of chase rate swinging strike rate bat speed uh all overlaid which honestly what a great like topic let's just cement that as one that we got to pull it next year right yeah for sure I mean so because what what things do you want if everything we talked about on bat speed gets

25:31paired with plate discipline as it relates to swing and strike and chase so some of the names we talked about which there are a lot of names on this show um but some some hits of misses so the guys who were chasing less and had more contact were kileshwarber briseterang riley green luise robert who's out of a gig uh taylor ward then willia domis mat maclean mcgel vargas was a really interesting one i i briefly listened to this episode steve just prepping for the pod and popped over to the vargas segment at the time of this episode he was hitting 176 or something uh um and in our defense it was like man we he's built us up to let us down in the past but he's only 26 years old he could be a good like corner guy right he still got that in him and we had no idea he was about to we were even talking about like who knows he could get up to 20 home runs here is

26:32september second 29 homeers 13 steals so you got to take your your victory laps there but at the same time process wise there are a handful of misses in here too so that that was one section the next one was more power less swing and miss so this had bat speed gains and then the swing strike rate improving Freddie freeman mc mic trout mat maclean again on their brine rentals mcgel vargas pca there he was lindore who got injured kind of shortly after so not a full full fair crack and then the next were junior camon arrow jackson maryl colquith mark viento spread and oil came smith hunter goodman so thoughts here steve it's kind of a mix bag it almost feels like a 50 50 hit rate but as a topic it seems pretty iron clad on the stuff that you want to be looking at three weeks into the season right yeah and i mean most 50 50 maybe i mean yeah like i asked Freddie freeman's a little bit

27:35this appointment clean the end of that then but pretty much everywhere else like lindore hurt colquith didn't really play much mark viento's i think i'm officially done with him you know goodman maro camon arrow pca vargas even brine rentals like trout had a bit of a bounce back like a lot of these guys had really really good years i think this is overall a pretty good process yeah and i guess even uh oh i was looking at uh yeah rentals i mean rentals had a bounce back comparison but yeah i mean he definitely seems like father time has started to bounce him off of that like eight years stretch of being a 25 home or 280 guy but um it's just odd that other ones this early on i guess it's just maybe hot hot streak when you look at i don't know you're not even looking that much data for like a Bretton Doyle so maybe that those are so yeah maybe yeah maybe it's a little irrelevant yeah tighten up our sample size there brought in our sample size yeah uh for a guy like colquith i'm

28:44just kind of bouncing around yeah i mean that was kind of that's been kind of middling for him being like a platoon guy but you're right i mean a lot of them if you remove kind of the injury frustrations um maybe these are good ones to be like by-lose as well because uh for a guy hot a good minute and a hunter good minute PCA you know camon arrow me you know i did he got off to a little bit of a slow start i think um yeah and the marital team right right now i wanted to see i know camon era had a big April but where did all those home runs like when we did this show camon era was sitting at four home or yeah four homers he had just gone back to back so i mean i guess that was still at a time where like you you maybe could have got him cheaper than what we now know yeah like a 900 opus 37 homer guy um so it's early in the season to be

29:44be trading but i i think a lot of these were heads um and then a few a few outliers so good good show topic uh on this one as well um let me look at season change so that was april then we we kind of fast forward because after that steve we looked at uh barrel rate which that one that one is kind of an interesting one because a lot of those names were more just calling it where we talk about something's more of like a descriptive yeah yeah like i think it's still worthy of talking about but i don't know that those are as much like crystal ball ones i mean i would say i would say barrel rate it's probably pretty predictive like you know that's true i mean i guess i i think it's fair i know i know we didn't have it in the run that but i think i think it's fair to to run into it if we if we want um that's why we do it you know um barrel rate is more predictive of than a guy so they did hit five home runs right uh if he

30:49was five home runs uh that three just scraped the wall right it's almost less meaningful then someone that's running a 15% barrel rate after a 5% barrel rate that you're before you know yeah i guess honestly it's it's one of the original like predictive ones what i was thinking is i wonder how many of those their barrel rates were high because they were already on fire yeah south i'm i just pulled it up i can i can uh drop it because i know we're just kind of kind of freestyle about drop this rundown in the uh in the discord but looking at episode two 12 for barrel rate on april 30th which was right when we got to the point of like 50 batted balls in play uh like south steward at that point was already i see what you're saying like it's more of like validation in a sense like all right south steward's legit you know like that's but there it's kind of a mix of both so maganago was another one that had a really loud start but then you look right after maganago we talked about dilland dingler who at the time was hitting

31:55247 yeah and his barrel rate was super high um and he went on to have a 26 home or a year still the batting average kind of held around there um kacy smitt was another one i know we talked about before we started rolling maybe not the the overall line that it looked like his first half was kind of capable of but still a pretty productive year at like 21 homers like you know there was probably a five or six week stretch where kacy smitt was one of the best guys on my roster for a home you're telling so interesting name and he was one that at the time that that i'm pretty sure he was like nine percent roster yeah you know um so uh yeah just keep looking down this list what's kind of interesting is Spencer steer popped up on a ton of these shows and he just kind of was ho hum at the end of the day i know he that's kind of the nature of the Spencer steer experience but

32:57yeah some of these guys tend to be on here like elia ramos is another one that it seems like he's always up on you know pitcher list uh like leaderboards and swing acceleration and stuff but maybe those some of those names again like is elia ramos one it's not quite doesn't quite come with the buzz of jordan walker in terms of the history but he could be a one one that like if the bat speed gets even higher next year and he's got four homers in the first week that might be like a don't wait till made to grab a guy like that yeah i mean like Spencer steer to like it's the best power rate of his career by like four points it's the best hard hit rate of his career by like five points um you know he despite having a 12 percent power rate is home and fiber already is just at 15 percent like he's having sexually the same years last year but he's doing a lot more things better uh well yeah yeah so like i guess to be to be fair to him so pretty much the last three

34:01years Spencer steer is averaged 21.5 home runs per season that's been with an average of 152 games yeah he's at 16 and 98 yes okay yeah so on a rate basis yeah there you go yep so yeah steer is kind of projecting out at one of his best like power outpits so i think that's fair and as a 28 year old maybe we should uh seem like he'll be a great uh hey this is it's early talking but this is a great deep you know this is going to be a he's played at outfield and where else is he played this season he's played first base he's played second base yeah he's going to be an nsbc darling next year yeah the other thing is um um it terms of like he sits against lefties every now and then it last year against lefties a 229 average 727 opus and his share right now he's on this year at 342 average against lefties

35:03with a 1062 opus so he's kind of uh oh weird but then he's just been struggling versus righties yeah he's an interesting yeah interesting use case um but yeah i guess to be fair the the barrel show could have been on this rundown before we just chucked it on yeah yeah um should have it because yeah i think it's i think it's a fair topic to keep coming back to and it's totally valid all right so that was end of april um we get to may and now we are looking at by lows on may 14 so this was basically what you might say is kind of a hallmark episode for our calendar year Steve yeah because it's got probably the best data points on buying a dip versus trying to just justify a player that's like on the extreme decline but our lead in was talking about like trade season um who to buy back on and naturally

36:09buy lows are going to be like bigger ticket names um so i guess give me the lesson learned because we let off a Fernando tatties junior who's been one of like the just the ultimate roller coasters this year and i know you've been on the coaster so talk about what we talked about on this episode and what what kind of lesson learned you you might take away from the the tatties junior run that we had this year so this is silly but if you traded for Fernando tatties on May 13th okay you got an eight sixty eight OPS 298 average 19 homers in 21 stolen bases hmm I traded for Fernando tatties on May 6th so a week before that um no hi so and look to be fair

37:10it was a struggle for for most of may and even even with June like his June wasn't that great um no but at that time in four home runs our show yeah is that a two forty five bad average so definitely so for me here's the hard part right because maybe his numbers weren't as bad right now like he was being buoyed by average and lbp like Vlad jr is is also a similar call to like I the lesson is okay you know what i was about to say it's like okay a big name like that you just hold your nose and trade form the next two guys on our list are probably examples why and maybe you've lied junior why that may not not be the case um and there's still some downside but you know I also think for Vlad there's been like on and off back injuries all year like he's talked about him like you know taking hundreds of swings like he's clearly not there mentally

38:16but at the same time the same thing was said about the tatties right like him he's time working with mani machado out in the early season like Stephen Susa getting slippy with the with the press the podras hitting coach right him not him you know blaming the like not you know being clearly like upset when asked about when the homer was coming like he didn't know when it would come right like so some of those things apply too so it's it's not as simple as just okay yeah just buy who whatever superstar player is struggling in May and it's also not going to be as bad as what the t-shirts was doing and have zero home runs through through memorial day but well part of your yeah go ahead I was just going to say part of your discussion for tattie the case for tatties aside from just the it's Fernando tatties he's going to come around is he was still hitting balls extremely hard there was the singular issue of like launch angle in the batting

39:20stance and and all that was kind of weird I think gunner gunner you you mentioned the next two names which were Gunner Henderson and Calarali I think Gunner is a really tough one to discern from tatties because he was still hitting the hell out of the ball he was still running on the base paths and still have like hitting marbles yeah so if you would have told us at the time you know to both of these guys bounce back for the same reasons we would have said yes gunners ended up just being like okay and the metrics have been just okay too right it's very much not a gunner season no it's it's not at all and last year you heard about the shoulder that that was hurt and spring right and he came back from you haven't heard anything about that just yet like but his metrics last year with that shoulder injury at least the average of velocity and the hard hit rate were better which is strange and the bow rate is exactly the same 8.6% last year for 46%

40:23tile 7.1% this year for 46% tile like crazy all right we need to look at something here I'm going to go to a to Gunner's hard hit rate month over month so yeah it was better when we were looking at this so that's what makes this hard yeah and it's different because like it was literally that open stance of like every you know semi analyst was like you know go back to that go back to that go back they finally went back to it it worked yeah whereas with Gunner and Vlad it's like okay is this just who they are now I think Gunner Gunner is a deeper case but to paint the example we did the show mid-May in April Gunner Henderson's barrel per battered ball event was 11.4% in May 8.7% in June 3.4% barrel there's gotta be some sort of a bit of it stay down there in

41:27single digits so in our defense a little bit yeah there was a collapse that came after the show that maybe the symptoms were there now if you flip to Cal Raleigh the reason I brought that up is Cal Raleigh we were trying to kind of justify it with no no path at all like our our run down notes on Cal Raleigh being a by-low was the bat speed is down he's chasing more making more contact outside of the zone which is a bad combo like you don't want to burn your swings reaching outside of the zone so like if your by-low case is basically bolstered by all things that are just like yeah you don't see how it could get better but it's got to right then I don't know if that means you like drop them I mean when in reality outside of Cal Raleigh coming around a little bit you actually would have been better going to a Liam Hicks or another catcher but maybe you could try to trade some of those guys you kind of go down with the ship on like I remember

42:32thinking that with like Raphael Devers you know what I mean but I do think there's a difference in the case for what that snapshot of Gunner and Lindor or Gunner and Tatis was versus Cal Raleigh to be fair yeah I mean I'm in on Cal Raleigh next year like like there's not that much different than what he was doing the year before yeah sure like the overall exit velocity and the the Whiff rate that slightly improved and the chase rate that slightly improved last year is back down again but still got good bat speed still got a great power rate like I see I project him as a 220 35 home or catcher next year yeah I want to do one more Steve going to Ronald Acunia because he was another one at that at the time of the show it felt like man if you could if you

43:36could get a manager who would be willing to sell low on Acunia you're in great shape um he had things that we were pointing to that were encouraging and I guess you know maybe it's kind of like the Gunner thing is his hard hit percent in May was 53 percent in June it went down to 29 percent July 41 so you know maybe it was just he he ended up struggling to a point that he wasn't struggling in mid May but it's just a head scratcher to me I mean I guess there was in like the hamstring injury was sprinkled in there so maybe chalk it up to that um but it's just crazy to see such a down year for Acunia I mean he was kind of a league loser for a lot of guys that invested right yeah you're you're looking at one of them um it's hard with the injuries like

44:39it's one thing like to have a year like last year it's like all right yeah he was injured but then he came back and he was Ronald Acunia this year he was injured and when he was on the field he was not Ronald Acunia um you know sure the 13 homers and the 19 steals in the 378 play-to-prieances you know you you want to give him in the full season 22 homers 30 steals yeah that's that's okay but that's not what you're hoping for from Ronald Acunia and also the fact of when does he play a full season you know it's it's tough um that being said like I think he'll be drafted it'll be it priced at a discount next year he should be healthier there's no world-based ball classic he plays even though he doesn't play a lot of major league games like he plays a ton of winter league ball like I'm hoping that he doesn't do that this this off season um and sort of prioritizes being

45:43available being on the field um and then we could see what happens like because his underlies his metrics aren't they're down but they're not like whoa like is this the end for Ronald Acunia sort of down right as I try to load up his uh his sub-aunt page here like it's not super bright let red MVP Acunia but it's still good right the bat speed stole elite the bow rate still really good the hard hit rate still in there um yeah the cave rate is is down from that MVPC isn't but it's still you know a palatable 24% still walking doesn't chase like there's there's still a lot like there's not much to to improve for him to being all bright red and in all the areas that we expect him to be um it's not like a Gunnar Henderson falloff right there's still a lot a lot here handy dealt with yeah the hamstring yeah and and with players like this like you see it with tattis right it takes one of those superstar months and then there you go you have the bright red

46:48pages for for the entire year right um and when you when you're battling injuries and on and off and and and have a hamstring injury go on the aisle come back finally getting a groove go in the aisle again with the same hamstring injury like that's what leads to sort of lost seasons yeah it's fair um you know it's it's maybe once every two years we make a fantasy football reference but uh with my my draft last night Steve it feels like kind of a Christian McAfry yeah it's like there he could be your out and out league winner one year and you could guess wrong on on the wrong year but um to to quickly get through the rest of the by-laws because it was just such an interesting show the next one we talked about was PCA so again this is like the third instance in a row where we were saying improved bad we deserve credit we deserve credit yeah the PCA we're all over it we I wish personally I would have been a little more actually you got traded in my league for I think Nico Horner oh yeah can you imagine uh but

47:56then a couple other ones we we had marked that bobe shirt was the third unluckiest hitter to the uh at the at that point of the season through May so I trucked in April yeah in April he hit 260 and may hit 207 June 321 July 275 August 29 so he still hasn't turned into like prime bobe shirt but for what you were kind of if you if you acquired him in the middle of May or the end of May you got sort of what you expected from yep and then one that I had thrown on and added in was Corey Seeger who is another head scratcher of like what do you make of it it the power never got there like his overall line is like oh my gosh 223 and and 13 homers but second half of the the year you had to wait because he was on the aisle for a while but second half of the year is a 295 average and 837 opso overall I think the by-low show it's like yeah there might be a cal

48:57rally where you just kind of throw in your arms up and say and it has to get better or a gunner where they continue to to spiral down but there's a lot on here that was like you would have done a huge service to your team if you if you reached out and grabbed these guys on May 15 process was very good for these shows you know even if you did miss you probably should try to acquire all these guys yep okay so we'll take our second ad break we got one more bid after this and then broad lessons learned we'll be right back after this all right so Steve we've talked through a handful at this point that was by low hitters and then the show right after that we jump to under the radar starting pitchers so this was May 21 and looking at overall it was basically looking at a handful of guys that were either producing well quietly like bigger names who were quietly productive or a

50:02handful of names that were just flying low and we felt like you know this point of the season mid-May it's already pretty picked over in terms of the waiver guys so that was actually our working title for the show is waiver SPs in the wasteland so some some funny names looking back on here because you got like Griffin jacks Ben Brown that gallon that we kind of acknowledged at the time was like you know I think he had finally had one one good start Zabby was in there Anthony K so these were like super deep options in terms of what what to find one that we did talk about was Troy Melton read Depp Merz those were ones that you would call hits Drew Rasmussen who is like widely owned but one that we were basically breaking down like just how good he's actually Ben

51:03handful of misses though as well Steve that admittedly they were super deep ones right when you're talking about an Anthony K Brandon Sprout what do we make of this kind of like I know it's a tough exercise of if you're looking at SPs that are like under 20% rostered with the with the exception of like you know Rasmussen that we mentioned what can you can you ever find value with guys like those like I guess what do we what's our takeaway from how many of these low roster guys just didn't really turn out to be that effective I think we are really dig in we are really dumpster guy in here um and honestly like in Jackson Brown and and even Kay and Rocco to an extent maybe a later on for those two that's true still provided deep league value um but for as nice it would be

52:04to find guys like a Drew Anderson that was 1% roster at the time Zabby Matthews 26% roster at the time brands brought 7% roster at the time like it's hard um and you maybe you don't want to fit a square peg into a round hole a little bit here um but that being said you know Ben Brown jacks those are really really nice finds at the time mm-hmm just to kind of stream for a little while yeah something that a broader pitcher lesson learned for me was and and I kind of want to pull up the uh player rater on pitchers because there were there were a few that one of my lessons learned was like moving on too soon from certain pitchers like I mean we just talked about Sean Burke I actually dropped him then he went off and some manager like dropped him prematurely when he had

53:05one bad start and I picked him back up which was helpful for me but another one was like Kate Cavali yeah and I'm just wondering if um part of the process like Foster Griffin was another one that we like talked about early in the season um I'm trying to find some of these guys and Milton like Milton was productive but were there any of those kind of mid season emerged as an excellent option that we just kind of missed from a season standpoint or was it just I mean pitching Cavali Cavali I think is a really good is a really good one um just looking at like all pitchers um Ian Seymour popped up and had some yeah um kind of up and down um I mean Eduardo Riez um I think maybe qualifies there um I don't know I guess my point is like

54:09in the past where there's it seems like there's a June July August like at least some pop-up pitchers that become really useful was there not that many this year right I mean Cavali's the really the biggest one to me right and even Cavali like I was I'm pretty sure I was rostering him and like May so yeah yeah when you get to like the mid later months it's just kind of hard there's been some weird like Noah Cameron's had like a great run here um yeah some I guess some of the cardinals guys yeah Logan Henderson um I think Logan Henderson may count for that um this is first start in me he may and then he came up for good in July I would say Logan Henderson's a good one um who else there uh he's touched but like there's been some yeah Taj Bradley has it up down season it's been great recently you're right and it's sort of salvaged the season after

55:10not being roster ball um Nick Martinez is quietly been really good but it's been more of a year all year type of thing so I get your point that yeah there really hasn't been like oh these guys came up in May right and I just wonder if it's kind of the broader trend of the industry and we've talked about it that like we all know the pitchers yeah including a lot of our like leaguemates I'm not talking about like TGFBI I am talking about like home league we all know the the pitcher sleepers as deep as like 250 300 so in a way in a way there's there's so much more work to be done in the first six weeks of the season with scrounging on pitchers or even in the draft room and maybe having a little bit more patience before you move on from one that looks truly effective like if somebody gives you signs of life like we talked about the game log process Cavali had like a 10 strike out

56:13game and then had another like really solid game and then there were a couple clunkers middling stars and I bet I dropped him for same dude yeah some like flippant oh I'd love to grab this guy you know where he is like this guy makes you know the pirates you know where I don't know the the marlins today you know right and just what a stupid decision that was for me because then I was like oh my gosh he's been that good for the next two months and now I got to hear about how we got to take him seriously it's like a bonafide low threes he or a guy so yeah he already popped up to 415 after a start against Minnesota on May 5th I think that's probably what it was because where was the game log in in April the two games before that he had 10 strikeouts and 10 strike out 10 strike out so just because he you know he follows up to 10 strike out outings giving up three earned runs

57:18two earned runs and only has two or four strikeouts he's already demonstrated he's got that like big game ability and how much better of pitchers are you finding in May and June than somebody that's like a bird in the hand so yeah like just looking at wasn't necessarily one of our episodes but I think that's just like a broader lesson learned that guys who you believe in that you draft or even like our first our very first episode on of the playing season on April 2nd we had Dustin May there he got added a bunch he got dropped a bunch and then by the time we were in August we were like oh Dustin May is one of the more promising name now he's had his blowups with the brewers but there some months in there where he was helping you way more than most guys on the wire mainly like yeah May June when he was well over a strike out in innings sub four so yeah how to know just pitching is way harder on the way for the wires obviously so it is really is there's maybe you know K Kavali

58:23doesn't go unrostored like I look to see okay when was he dropped in my homeland he was not like he was rostrum all year right then right right fully yeah and then there's even like a Kyle Harrison right this obviously had a worst second half but he's in the first half was like vaulting managers up the up the standings and he was a name that probably would have been gone because where was his yeah his ADP was 432 but everybody knew the pitcher and then he was scooped up you know in the first week or so so I guess yeah not to be a broken record but I think all you might learn most of the pitching landscape in the first six weeks before six weeks of the season that's lost the pitch mitch early in the season and then go from the cows on it all right well good stuff any big picture takeaways as you look at this this whole list

59:27Steve before we wrap I think we have some pretty good pretty good topics you know like we said they're we're not gonna have every single take correct but I feel comfortable with with how we approach these episodes yeah which is which is which is nice and that's that's what we want to be doing yep I dig it all right well thank you guys for for tuning in and feel free to shoot us any feedback like we said this is fun to look back in the in the rear view even when it when it stings at times but plenty of good shows good hits and informs us for how we want to structure going in the next year but until then until next week good luck for those you guys who are still grinding Steve could look in a tgfbi as you kind of close out although it seems like you got a ceiling there and yeah be on that I appreciate you guys joining us as always thanks for talking about these both yeah thanks for listening to the September guys really appreciate it later