[SPEAKER_01]: Hello everybody, J.J. Cooper, Ian Cuddle based on America, Prospect podcast, and I'm going to start with a little bit of apology.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did say last week that we were going to talk about complex league and younger, well, complex league DSL, ACLSCL players this week on the podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to push that back main reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: be crazy not to have Josh Norris on that podcast, Josh Norris as we are recording this is literally on the field at the draft combine right now in Arizona.
[SPEAKER_01]: So don't make a whole lot of sense to do that and not have Josh who is bouncing around the complex as we speak when he's not at the combine.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to have him on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we got a little bit of a different topic today, but hopefully one that you will enjoy just as much.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to really drill down on two players and the reason we're going to do that is is both kind of hopefully you'll be
[SPEAKER_01]: because we love to talk about the ranking's process here, how the process works.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I will just kind of start off, Ian, like, we both been doing this for a while.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what, this is one of the reasons that I love doing this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it never gets old at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: It also could be said that this is one of the reasons it gets really difficult, which is players change for good or bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when players change, you then have to determine whether it's good or bad is this a a little bit of a hot streak a cold streak something off the field going on something is this something permanent is it sticky is it just a fleeting moment and we're going to talk about a couple of players that we have moved down in the rankings interuptics or in the season will explain why.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also kind of set the stage a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got a big update coming next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are busy working on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why this one also be a little bit shorter to also just be transparent about everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: We love doing these.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we love doing all the stuff we did.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not complaining, but at the same time, there are weeks like this where it's like, okay, how am I going to get everything done?
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the ways you do that is instead of going for an hour, we're going to go for a tight 30 minutes hopefully you're on the podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: But to just dive straight into it, Ian,
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the guys we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, we're going to talk about is the red sucks right hand or kysum with a spoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fell down in our slid down in our red sucks rankings and the top 100.
[SPEAKER_01]: But before we get into what's happening now, kind of just lay out why that happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: What were we seeing that led to whether spoon dropping?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so with the spring, it was funny because I saw him in spring training and he looked a lot like the guy we saw in college, you know, fastball was 95 to 98 had multiple, you know, really polished good secondary storm strikes just looked very good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a very crisp outing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what J.J. was saying, development's not linear, you know, if there's going to be Ebson flows both in season and from season the season and in Whitterspoon's case, it was this was his first pro season and I think it's just a little bit of trying to do too much and he kind of lost who he was as a pitcher and you know, this is a guy who is a highly successful college arm, pitch it Oklahoma, you know, year or four, they win the national championship, he got out of there but
[SPEAKER_00]: he was a very good college pitcher and he was very effective, you know, pitching at the top of the zone of this fastball and then he had several secondaries that he could bring and missbaths with down in the zone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And during the off season, you know, he started trying to tweak some things.
[SPEAKER_00]: They tried, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: There was obviously a very popular video of him going to drive line and trying to learn his sweeper.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think just as the season went on, those little tweaks started to impact his ability to throw his fastball.
[SPEAKER_00]: His fastball started to progress pretty considerably.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was not just one, you know, multiple sources talking to people that get in grades that you just wouldn't expect for him on his fastball.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because coming out of the draft, I think we had a 55 or 60 on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It became a dead zone festival, dude.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was kind of the worst kind of movement profile you could see.
[SPEAKER_01]: And without a leap of velocity to go with it, either, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was 93 to 95 with dead zone shape.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was getting grades of like 30s on it, which is not good for someone that was a 65, 65, 65 fastball in college last year.
[SPEAKER_01]: Explain if you would to someone who doesn't understand, when we say dead zone fast, but what do we mean by?
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, okay, I'll start with saying, as crazy as it may seem, 93 to 95 does mean that you don't have the velocity to over, if you throw 101, you can have whatever move that you want to your fast thought, it doesn't really matter that much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep, 93.95, you can have a very much of a dead zone fast thought, so what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, especially from the right side, too, because average fastball velocity from right hand or MLB this year, I think it's over 95, I think it's like 95, point something, it's in that range.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's, you know, frenzy below average velocity from the right side.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what it would, dead zone fastball is just this, it talks about the shape.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we talk about, I feel like, you know, we talked about a lot a lot on here, induced vertical break, release height, vertical approach angle, things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all the comp, everything that goes into making a fastball where it has that effective carrying when it's up in the zone.
[SPEAKER_00]: or, you know, because you have the sinking fastballs down and then you have the riding, you know, cut carry, there's a few variations of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when it has explosive life or it kind of plays above its perceived velocity up in the zone, dead zone fastballs are ones that kind of just don't really have any characteristics that you're looking for.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not sinkers, they're they're not four seamers with ride.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just kind of caught in between.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if generic movement profiles is how
[SPEAKER_01]: And the worst thing you could be as a pitcher.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hate this, you know, this, but the reality of it is, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The worst thing you can be as a pitcher is to be very much like something that hitters regularly seeking.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way that, again, no hitter, Ted Williams could not track the ball all the way to contact at the plate.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not how your eyes work, that's not how you can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You basically see the pitch and then your brain, visual chunking, tries to fit it into
[SPEAKER_01]: the closest thing it sees to what it seemed like that before.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if your pitch is unusual, you kind of break the brain a little bit there, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you have more life on it, at the top of the zone, then the brain thinks that it should put the back here and then the ball ends up being above it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, what hitters do now, having a much, this is a cat and mouse game, okay?
[SPEAKER_01]: they'll get a visual, they'll get a cue, they'll get a cue that says, hey, this guy's got really good life on his fastball, try to swing a ball above or two balls above.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, and they work on that, and, you know, drills, drag-check machines, other things, but you work on teaching yourself to hit that pitch, but,
[SPEAKER_01]: best world if you're a hitter is when someone's doing a fastball that is exactly what your brain thinks it will be.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a dead zone fastball.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, a dead zone fastball.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, sorry, we have taken into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what did that lead to?
[SPEAKER_00]: It led to about a 10% strike out right on his fastball, which not good.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's like well below average.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a concerning level.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it like even if you throw in the high 90 or high 80s,
[SPEAKER_01]: And it has cascades effects too because what that means is hitters have, they're not fearing your festival.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not saying I have to look fastball to not get beat.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're hoping to see your face.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second area is do not play as well off of that as we've seen because what is the idea of a change up?
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like a fastball until it's late and it falls off the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: If your fastball is not very effective, your second error is not going to be as effective.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can notice with Kaisen with her spoon, if you look at his season statistics, his April was not very good.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has 7.13 ERA and 17 and 2.3 earnings.
[SPEAKER_00]: He allowed 21 hits, 12 walks.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had 20 strikeouts, but that's a ton of bass runners.
[SPEAKER_00]: You go into the month of May.
[SPEAKER_00]: first two starts were kind of more or less the same thing, culminating in the May 12 start where he had one strike out in foreign two-thirds innings.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a guy who has seen his, you know, a potential top 10 pick.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the best college right handers, the type of profile of a player who moves very quickly by this point Anthony Ionson, who the Red Sox draft at the same year, was Oriy and Double A.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have guys in with this one striking out one guy in foreign two-thirds innings in high A.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's, you know, obviously a concern.
[SPEAKER_00]: He got skipped after that start.
[SPEAKER_00]: Since his skip, he's thrown 20 and a third innings.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has labed 16 hits.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has struck out 24 hitters.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's me 22 hitters, so more than a batter per inning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh wait, sorry, excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's struck out 28 hitters in that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his numbers are just back to kind of what you expected from a college player performing as they will.
[SPEAKER_00]: His strikeout rate on his fat, excuse me, his whiff rate on his fastball has jumped.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's above 30% I haven't looked since his most recent start, but it's well like back to, well, it's an above average right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's back, the velocity is back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he's sitting in the mid 90s again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he looks like the pitcher you expected coming out of Oklahoma, and it was just little things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was basically just getting back to who he was as a pitcher, just going out there and competing, attacking the zone, and not trying to worry about changing anything or any of the tweaks that
[SPEAKER_00]: maybe he worked on in the off season or even in the start of the season.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just go back to what you do well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just completely shifted his profile, you know, there were, you're talking about scouts before and it was like, and the sky might be a reliever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not something you usually hear in the first month of the guy's pro career coming off of with the pedigree of Tyson with her spoon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, it's back to hey, this guy's, you know, this is more like, I was expecting this is more, you know, a potential starting prospect.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's completely flipped and all, to me, it all goes back to the fastball because everything, I mean, as me know, everything with a picture, especially if you're going to be a starter, you have to have a fastball, you have to be able to pitch off your fastball.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with this fastball back to missing bats, everything is playing better with to no surprise.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you watched his most recent start against Jersey Shore, he was dominating just by throwing fastballs up at the belt and then just ripping breaking balls and change ups down on the zone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a pretty, you know, it's it's simple when you when you boil it down, but it's a different sort of execute it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it just shows that, you know, it's really like pro baseball is it's very different than college because you're focusing on this full time and you're going out there and you have so many different things that you're having to think about you have development goals, but at the same time you're also competing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think at times it can be hard for pictures, especially to kind of blend those two things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you're so focused on, hey, I need to execute this pitch in this specific spot.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the same time, what matters more is, is it that or is it just going out there and saying, hey, just get results and what is the best way to do that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's why it can be hard when you're evaluating pictures, because you don't know, we don't know a lot of the time what they're working on developmentally in a given start.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I've gone to games before, and you'll see pictures and they're throwing,
[SPEAKER_00]: 70% breaking balls and you're like this makes no sense just throw a breaking wall in the situation That's a developmental goal and I think with wither spoons that kind of got a little a bit out of whack And now it's just back to hey just go out there be yourself and the results are showing and he's been Excellent as of late as I said, you know the month of June at 18 strikeouts and 15 and a third innings He had the two starts at the end of the month last year we only gave up one run
[SPEAKER_00]: Last outing he had eight strikeouts, which was the most of his career.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it shows that, you know, when stuff like this happens, you can't overreact too soon because that's the hardest thing to do in this is everything when we're putting these rankings out, we're putting in the top 100, the top 30, it's all a snapshot in time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very fluid, situations are going to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the witness movement one is a great example, because if you talk to a couple of scouts who saw him at the beginning of the season, you're going to get one report.
[SPEAKER_00]: You talk to someone who saw his jersey short start.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're getting a completely different report.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why I think it's, you don't want to overreact especially with the pedigree guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, he did move out of the top 100.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he's not going to drop far in the red stock system as a preview.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, he's going to still be right on the verge of the top 100.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, he's, I wouldn't be surprised to be ends up back in there at some point this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's, you know, he's getting back to more of what we expected when he was drafted.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, that's the challenge here.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's by the way, 27% strike out with for a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's around 30% yeah, that's what yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was down a 10% before.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you see that to balance that out, that's yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a truly massive difference, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the challenge that we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, so I kind of wanted to talk about this partly because it's like, okay, we try to also lay out when we make movements as much as we can.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's why guys move it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's why guys move it down.
[SPEAKER_01]: The part I want to make clear is it's not something we're just looking go, oh, where there's been to have a better month this month.
[SPEAKER_01]: He moves back up.
[SPEAKER_01]: better month, that's not, that's not worse month, better month.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are times that guys have a month statistically terrible or have a month statistically's amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when you dig in and you talk to people and you do the reporting, it's like there's really nothing new here.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is something tangible that's changed that when you make, and again this seems like
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the perfect example of, do we think this could be sticky?
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do we think it could be sticky?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because he's really kind of more back to the guy that was the guy who was drafted.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's kind of what you're expecting to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a look at a picture who has gone through a little bit of a roller coaster.
[SPEAKER_01]: When we come back to this break, we're going to talk about a hitter who did very much the same thing right for this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Ian, I'll do more of the talking on this one because I do the Tigers.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do the Red Sox for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Tigers were stopped right there, but we've talked about Bryce Reiner.
[SPEAKER_01]: You and I have.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's an example of how this can work for a position player, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So Rice Rainer slid in our top 100 rankings last month, and not really in the Tigers rankings, because it really wasn't anywhere for him to slide.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was behind Max Clark before, behind Max Clark now.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not moving further down from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: His way of saying you has a played yet, basically, because of injury.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but in the 100, he fell.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm pretty happy with what we did on this, which is,
[SPEAKER_01]: We talked about it at the time that we had a group of players who we kind of said like we were putting them in time out basically they were moving down, but they weren't moving off of the hundred right they were putting them in a position where if the trend line kept going in that direction they very well likely would move off in our next update, which I'll just again point out July 1st is when we're planning to roll these out, but then.
[SPEAKER_01]: You also are doing it that because you also know players change.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you don't want to overreact to something.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in Bryce Rainer's case, coming off of a shoulder injury, significant shoulder injury, custom, most of the second half of the last season.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a little bit more than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Came back, we saw him in spring training.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: I will say, I saw him the first time I saw him swing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I went like, that, that, that, that's yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I showed you to you guys, and everyone was like, just, was Bryce Rainer like this before.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it was one of those things where,
[SPEAKER_01]: When we, okay, we talk about noisy setups, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you talk about a noisy setup, really, there are different ways to hit.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are, I've talked to a lot of scouts about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've talked to a lot of coaches about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a lot of theories and a lot of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, but we talk about noisy.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about what could best be described as extraneous movement that makes it more difficult.
[SPEAKER_01]: that makes it that adds length, time, difficulty of being consistent in going from you're ready to swing, and I'm gonna do it right hand because I'm not left handed like Rainer, but you're going ready to swing to contact, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And in Bryce Rainer's case, and we wrote about this at Baseball Market.com, talked about it with the tigers who were said, we're very aware, we're working on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knows that he's working on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had gotten everything again again, gotten no easier.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had this bat lago, which wasn't the bat lago of this is my way to get the timing, because it wasn't consistent.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't something where it's like, okay, that flows.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something where it's like, you could almost see like if he was wagging about more, he was gonna be a little bit more lost in the app app.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it became a little loopier on getting from there to into a swing, swing got longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: strikeout rate, the misrate skyrocketed, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's what we saw.
[SPEAKER_01]: Strikeout rates that were way too high, power was still there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in his case, basically, I went to June 1st, and I'm not saying that was an arbitrary endpoint.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you could say that it was happening in May.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who would we saw signs of it even like early May?
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw signs of it in late April, that you would ever now even see it at bat, where it's like, oh, he looks more like the Bryce Rainer we saw last year.
[SPEAKER_01]: But since June 1st, as we record this, Rainer is hitting 356, 435, 635.
[SPEAKER_01]: And most importantly, with the 24% mist rate, you have 32% mist rate up to the end of May.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cutting your mist rate by 8% allows everything else to play a whole lot better.
[SPEAKER_01]: And,
[SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of why, again, this is going to be a little more subtle.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say in Kaisen with her, in this case, you're probably going to notice more on his movement next week when we roll this out.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Rainer's case, you may not notice it as much, but I'll still say,
[SPEAKER_01]: what you're going to know is he is much closer to the prospect that we thought he was coming into the year coming off the injury.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because he's getting back to more of why he was a elite top of the first round, a short stop prospect who was like, well, do you like Conor Griffin or do you like Bryce Rainer more coming into the draft?
[SPEAKER_01]: That kind of player.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, but I do want to run one thing by you and see what you think of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: The one thing is fascinating
[SPEAKER_01]: Rainer has real power, like you see EVs, you see home runs that are like mammoth, but usually when you see that in a teenage hitter, it is something where they get a fastball in to get the bat head out and that ball just goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Rainer's case, almost all of them, he's hit seven extra base hits in June as the time we record this.
[SPEAKER_01]: none have gone to right field.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's left handed hitter.
[SPEAKER_01]: One to center, everything else to left center or left.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, he hits home run sometimes that have to still have carry, but it's for him, it's about getting his hands extended and then kind of flicking the bat.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not about getting something in, usually you see a lot of left-handed hitters, who their dream is as you come in down and in on a fastball with them, and they can get that pitch that they can just absolutely drop.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not Rainer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it's something that it's
[SPEAKER_01]: struck me for now as interesting more than like yay or nay.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't I love seeing opposite field power as part of a whole field approach.
[SPEAKER_01]: Junior came in arrows opposite field power when he was in the miners really kind of was a selling point to me, but I will point out with that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was something where Junior came in arrow would pull a ball 450 feet in first and then you
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you might want to center to, you know, 425 and 20 like works for me like he has the ability to go away.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can go away if you come in, I can go in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you a little more concerned when you see a young hitter who doesn't yet like he does not pull the ball.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you look at his spray chart, which I'm sure if you're on a video actually, you know what?
[SPEAKER_01]: I will share this, let me put all games on here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is for the entirety of this, you know, this, and I'll put it on the YouTube channel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will just kind of add that as something for us to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is something, when you see that, how worried are you, when you see a guy who basically, this is a left-handed hitter who has yet to make, is yet to head them all to the wall to right field.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it it two things come to mind and number one is that he just really likes as you said he likes to get extended likes to let the ball get deep and that to be would lend itself to someone who swing is maybe a little slower, which is that would be a concerning element, but I know in Rainer's case, we've seen the bat speed is not really an issue, especially what he's a guy producing, you know, is 90th, I think is over 110 miles an hour.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're not one thing with that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to have like a 115 EV with a slow bat.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying that and that's what I was going to say is yeah, like when you see a ZV is it's probably not the bat thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that to me, it led to itself to more being probably a mechanical situation where the way that his swing works, it just takes him a little longer to get going.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then he's plenty quick enough once he gets going.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like with left hand and hitters two and I think the most extreme example of this in the minor leagues is someone we've talked about a lot
[SPEAKER_00]: Where everything is pulled side with him and the way he does it is he's catching the ball way out front of the plate and he just it's just home runs right field left and right
[SPEAKER_00]: You can get around it a different way, and with Rainer's case, if his situation is he likes to get the ball get deep and he just trusts his hands, then you can make that work too, but at some point you are going to have to start pulling the ball with authority, because otherwise, if teams notice this, and especially when you get up into the high miners, and this is something where I feel like it doesn't really get exposed until you have to double a triple a, because that's when pitcher starts to be able to execute is, hey, I'm just going to jam you with fast balls in on your hands, and if you're trying to go, if you're trying to get extended, if you're going to be laid on it,
[SPEAKER_00]: that's not going to work anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're just going to get sawed off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's something that will be interesting to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I obviously have not dug it in the rain or as much as you haven't watched as much video of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But how does he handle fastballs in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what is what is his efficiency there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think that's going to be the indication of whether it's more of like a bad speed thing which I don't think it is and more of just the way his swing works and the way his swing is tuned is more towards just going left field right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's Bryce Rainer, who again, I would just point out this is encouraging, this is a month that is very much what we wanted to see from him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, not even that, like, that's why we didn't drop off the 100.
[SPEAKER_01]: This wasn't something where it's like, oh, this was not fixable.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, we've seen a better swing than this before.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're seeing a better swing than this again.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say that that gives him some stickiness to the possibility that this is really,
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not something where he went away for the off season and basically just reworked to swing for no reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was a player coming off of a significant shoulder injury.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you have something like that, it's not shocking that it takes you a little while.
[SPEAKER_01]: that to me is not surprising at all, that this was kind of like a working your way back.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we wanted to lay out a little bit of an example, okay, before we wrap this up, what is an example to you of something where something that you don't feel is sticky, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
[SPEAKER_01]: Almost everything, like to some extent, Hector Rodriguez, to bring up in a guy since my reds outfielder.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hector Rodriguez, I want to say it was a 60% swing percentage when he was an Abel 59.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was one of those things where, if you said, here are the mass of every hitter in the minors and you said, what is Hector Rodriguez swing percentage?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like, yeah, I'm gonna be a standard deviation above almost anyone else.
[SPEAKER_01]: put bad on ball even on pitches that he probably should not have put bad on ball.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a skill, but it's also kind of a detriment to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you watch him as he's come up the ladder and all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And every year his swing percentage goes down.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, now it's still aggressive, but it's not Uber aggressive.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the example to me of things that you would expect to see a player improve.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say the flip side of that, though, is if you say like what is something that's kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: not as sticky to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be the player who does not have bat-to-ball skills.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really hard to, if you have swing a miss in the zone, consistently, when you're a younger player, unless you have strength issues or things like that, like physical development still to go, that's one that to me is often a little bit tougher to.
[SPEAKER_01]: get to a point of, okay, that's no longer an issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think Chase Rate too is similar to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pretty hard once you have an established track record of being a high chase guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it more applies to the guys that are in, like, you know, the 35, 40% range in the low miners.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just feels like that really sticks with them throughout their minerally career.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a really tough thing, I think, to kind of get by.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's just, that's who they are.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's in aggressive approach.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a pitch recognition issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's combination of the two.
[SPEAKER_00]: outgrow that, you know, for every Ronald Acunia, there's going to be way more guys who do not ever change really with that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would also say with that, like, okay, if you tell me that in a 17 or 18 year old in Abol has trouble with that, and then doesn't have that problem in a 1920 year old, they were in 18, as they were in Abol's an 18 year old because they're so good at everything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whereas if you tell me that a 21, 22 year old has that problem, they won't, it's probably a little bit harder because they're not, they don't have that, that headroom of all these other players who are more older than them, and so they have time to catch up.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're already league age appropriate or later,
[SPEAKER_01]: probably a little tougher to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although I will say also, like I've always said, I've used this story before, but it's like going into the whole thing, I'm not sure, but Andrew Jones, when I saw him as a 17 year old, he said, well, what is this big weakness?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like rolling over on sliders, and if you said 28 year old Andrew Jones, he said, well, this is weakness.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was like rolling over on sliders, so like even the great ones, the ones who can do most everything, they still have these flaws that are.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even when we say like, oh, you know, sometimes we'll say a player as a wholeness swing inside like down low inside or whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it's not that they can't make adjustments to cover that whole.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, often most hitters don't have the ability to cover the entire strike zone on every swing.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they go to cover that hole, is it going to create a bigger hole or a more problematic hole?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is it something where
[SPEAKER_01]: If you know that you have a hole and you know that hitters, the pictures are going to try to go there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they going to be able to execute it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because sometimes if you have a hole, and it's in an area where okay, a picture may miss a little bit outside of that hole in a place where you really can do something, sometimes you almost kind of, it's a catty mouse game, it's very fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, there's going to be a lot more coming at baseballamerica.com, but we did want to talk about a couple.
[SPEAKER_01]: a couple of prospects who are showing some encouraging sciences about one of the red socks, one of the tigers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is this week's Baseball America Prospect podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Much more over at the Baseball Market YouTube channel.
[SPEAKER_01]: We had live shows from after every cultural series game, we have the hot sheet show, we have the draft podcast, we have future, we have so much over there, check out, but also check out Baseball