SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Walk Off Slams with Greg Zone on AM 1150.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Well, I can say this without any doubt. It was a hot one in Kelowna the other day. I don't know if it's just me or I'm not used to it, but after a few days of rain and cold weather, it is warming up. And it's a beautiful day in Dowtown, Kelowna. I am looking at Lake Okanagan from the beautiful studios of AM1150. This is Walk Off Slams with Greg Zahn, and I am your host. I am supported by Calvin Hector in the other room. I can see him right through the glass. He's giving me the thumbs up. He's wearing his Kelowna Falcons hat today, ladies and gentlemen. The Kelowna Falcons are two games under 500, but we are trending in the right direction. And I'm excited about our ball club. The cream is rising to the top. We're going to start seeing some spirited baseball out there at Elk Stadium. So now that I've paid the bills on that particular front, let's get into some Jays talk. Okay. The Jays have, in my opinion, officially treaded water. And I said that with all the injuries they needed to tread water, uh, the record's still not back to 500 after a series loss to the Philadelphia Phillies, but I wasn't expecting it to. That's one of the hottest teams in baseball since they made the move to relieve Rob Thompson of his duties. And I say relieve him of his duties because I don't really call what they did to him as firing, and I don't really think it was warranted. I think they just needed a different voice, and they brought in Don Mattingley, Donnie Baseball. And uh, if you don't know, it's one of the most unique experiences in the world when you're a manager of a big league ball club and your boss is your son. Yeah, his son is the GM in Philly. So, really, really kind of an interesting situation. But you know what? The Jays saw very, very up close and personal what a true number one looks like. And I'm talking about Christopher Sanchez. I mean, he was absolutely dominant the last month and a half before he came in to face the Jays, and they had him on the ropes. I mean, by his standards, he allowed two runs in one inning. That's rare with a guy like Sanchez, with a guy like Halliday, Verlander in their prime. You just don't see crooked numbers on guys like this, Shohei Otani, uh Tarek Scuble. There's a reason why these guys are perennial, Cy Young candidates. And it's because they don't give up a whole lot of hits, they don't walk anybody, and they certainly don't do it all in one inning. Uh, but the Jays had their chances. Uh, they had him on the ropes, they'd already scored two runs, and then all of a sudden, he goes into another gear, throws 12 pitches, sit down, Springer, sit down, Luke's, sit down, Vlad. The bottom of the order did it all on him, and he was just like, all right, I've had enough of this, let's go. Uh, hits the gas, and before you know it, he's gone. Uh, it happens though, but you gotta make sure that when you have a guy like that on the ropes, you step on the neck. Because when these guys are sniffing danger or even victory, big moments, there's a reason why they're special because they have that turbo elite hall of fame type gear that they can go to that the mere morals in the game do not have. And it's a calmness, it's an ability to slow down the heart, slow down the game. I don't know if it's God-given or if it's a byproduct of years of success, but they've got it. Look no further than Justin Verlander's no-no at Skydome a number of years ago. If you're a Jays fan, you probably want to forget about that. But if you're a baseball fan, you're a purist, you can look at that game and be like, wow, the last 10 pitches that guy threw were harder than the first 10 he threw. And that was after throwing a hundred pitches. He was sniffing no-no, and then all of a sudden he said, Yeah, all right, you're done. You have no chance. And not that he was giving them a chance before, but that's what elite pitching does. It's it's almost as if they're using the first time around the batting order to catch rhythm, to get warmed up. Not that they're cold, because they warmed up in the bullpen, but they're kind of getting a good lather going, the release points starting to get honed in, the mechanics, the sequencing, all of it. You know, there's a lot of guys in this game that if you don't get him the first time around the lineup, you ain't gonna get them. And Justin Verlander is one of those dudes. You just don't catch that guy late in a game. And when he was throwing that no-hitter at Skydome, uh, he was able to go to another planet where you're sitting there going borderline hundred mile an hour heaters every other pitch. And that's after I said a hundred pitches. Um, and and that's the reason why the elites are the elites. They don't have to go max effort from the get. They're able to kind of naturally throw hard, make it spin. Remember Yamamoto, Blue Jays fans? I bet you'd like to forget that. After an unbelievable start in the 2025 World Series, he comes in and shuts the door. And everybody was scratching their head going, how on earth is this guy able to do this after all the pitches he threw in his start? Well, the answer is simple. He is never max effort. The guy comfortably throws 94 miles an hour. The guy comfortably throws nasty off-speed stuff. He doesn't have to grip it and rip it. Uh he's what they call elite. And that's what everybody else in the game is chasing. It's why these so-called velocity laboratories exist. It's because they think that if they throw a weighted ball, if they do a certain exercise, if they take off their shirt and surround themselves by a bunch of knuckleheads and do pull downs into a tarp, that they're somehow gonna have what these guys have. They're somehow gonna unlock this hidden ability that they have in themselves that's untapped. It doesn't work that way. Guys like Yamamoto, Verlander, these guys are elite, they're special, they were gifted, they were born that way, uh, they developed into that over time, but it's natural. And everybody else that doesn't have it, hey, it doesn't mean you can't pitch in the big leagues. It just means you're not going to be that guy. So try to be the best that you can be. You know, if your kids are listening out there, parents of youth players, uh command and ability to pitch and manage the game out there on the mound are more important than velocity and movement most of the time. Because every hitter has a hole. Some of them have multiple. If you don't have the ability to throw the ball in that hole, it doesn't matter how hard you throw it, how much you can spin it. Uh that's the problem with what we see in the game today. And that's why you see massive peaks and valleys in the performance level of these max effort type guys. One day, they're absolutely lights out, and it usually corresponds with good sleep, good nutrition, everything, all the stars aligned, and they're able to just rip it for five or six innings. Dylan Sees is one of those guys. Not that he's a max effort dude, but he grips it and rips it. And you sit there and you scratch your head sometimes and you go, golly, this guy just struck out 11 dudes in six innings. Why can't he go seven? Well, we'll talk about that later. Um, because he's certainly talented enough to be more efficient, but it's a mentality. It's like, do I want to pitch to weak contact or do I want to avoid contact? Do I want to make everybody swing and miss, or do I want to get one, two pitch outs? And so when you look at the mileage on the arms, the fatigue, a myriad of other variables, you get these guys who are literally unbelievable world beaters one day and making you scratch your head the next five times they go out on the field. And it's usually because they're not in good enough shape to push the pedal to the metal for months at a time. And I'm here to tell you, nobody is. Flat out, nobody is. So now we get into Dylan Sees. The guy comes off the DL, he returns, he threw a gem, an absolute gem, punched out 11 and six innings of work on 93 pitches. It's pretty efficient. Pretty efficient. So it still makes me wonder why can't he go seven? Why did we need to get the bullpen involved to cover one third of the game when you got a guy making $30 million a year? And I know it's not his decision. I'm sure the Jays made that decision for him. He probably didn't pull himself out. But you're telling me that a guy like this uh can't go 105 pitches? Like, give me another 15. Give me another 15. And let me let me give somebody in the bullpen a night off. And that way I don't have to go to Jeff Hoffman in a tight ball game to pitch the seventh. And he didn't have a clean inning again. He didn't give up a run, but he didn't have a clean inning. And, you know, then we get Flu Hardy, Varland proved to be he proved to be human. That guy's been absolutely robotic, just lights out. Um love the way that guy pitches. I just wish he'd be a little less stingy, let not show everybody his entire pitch arsenal, but he's been great. He's been absolutely great. Uh but why not, you know? I know he just came off the DL, but it wasn't an arm injury, it was a hamstring strain or a twinge or whatever. He threw 93 pitches. You let him go close to 100, why not get 15 more out of him? Uh he's gonna go out there and probably strike out two out of three, even if you just get two outs, you know, and somebody's coming in with two outs and nobody on base. Great. But extend. That's why you're paying him the big bucks. George Springer. George Springer. I talked about him a lot uh as you know, being the straw that stirred the Blue Jays drink last year. I mean, we got unbelievable production, but he's struggling right now. He finished third in the league in OPS last year, third leadoff hitter, 959 OPS. Absolutely insane from leadoff guy, and even more insane from a 35-year-old leadoff guy. I mean, the ripple effect alone on the rest of the lineup had to have been paramount. I mean, a guy hit 32 bombs. That's nine more than Vladdy did last year at age 35. You know, people are pointing the finger at Vlad not hitting for power. Well, if you expected the Jays to do what they did last year and you're not pointing fingers at George George Springer's performance this year, well, then, you know, maybe, maybe Dell uh, you know, split split up the blame. Because minus George Springer, the Jays don't go to the World Series last year. They flat out don't. In fact, in my opinion, if that guy doesn't get hot, if he doesn't show up for the Jays the way he did last year, there's no way everybody else gets hot. Because you're looking at a star player, a guy with unbelievable postseason pedigree, a name like George Springer, doing it at a pinnacle level at 35 years old. You don't think the youngsters are looking at that cat going, wow, I gotta be like George Springer. You're darn right they are. You know, and minus that performance, who's on base in front of Vlad? Who's putting pressure on the opposing pitching staff? Nobody. Like who what have they had out of the leadoff spot so far this year, including Springer? Nothing. They haven't gotten anything out of it. So it it sets the table. It's a ripple effect. You hear me talk about it all the time. Uh baseball lineups are symbiotic relationships. If one guy gets on in front of the power and he's got speed, they're worried about him stealing bases, then they got to throw more fastballs. The hitters get more fastballs they hit. If they don't want to pitch the Vlad, then they need somebody behind him that can drive in runs. I mean, this is a guy, George Springer, who literally is the quintessential leader. It's it's a veteran guy who put up numbers. You know, he genuinely cares about the team, he genuinely cares about the kids. He's a leader, he's an example. The kids are going to gravitate towards this guy. And I'm here to tell you, it could be fickle. You know, you got the old guys who don't put up numbers, they're just old guys. Sorry, but you know, they they they just become old guys. The the respect for the game's history and tenure, it's long gone. I mean, these kids don't respect anything, you know. So if you're not putting up numbers and you don't have that name attached to those numbers, they don't care. So very important for us to get, and I say us as Blue Jays fans, it's important for us to get George Springer going. So if you want to see, you know, the Blue Jays take off, let's get George Springer feeling good. You know, in my opinion, you know, he's swinging for the fences a little too much. You know, but that's pretty much been the guy he's been. But he's a year older, he's coming off an injury, and us older guys, we don't recover as fast as the youngers. Um, you know, you look at his absence in the lineup, and it coincided with the losing skid, complete derailment of any momentum the Jays had coming into the season. I mean, it was just one domino after another. Injury, injury, injury, slow start. So, in my opinion, it's gonna take something major for George to recapture the wind. He's gonna need to go off. Something great's gonna need to happen for the Jays to kind of you know re-kindle it. It's not like he's not trying, it's not like he's you know, not interested or completely invested in what's going on. It's just it's just hard, I'm telling you. At our age, you know, I'm not saying when you're a veteran player, it's hard when you've been there and done it so many times, and he's been to the World Series and he's played all these years, it's tough to maintain your desire, that little extra something, you know, and sometimes it's the kids that inspire you, sometimes it's the energy from the kids that get you going and give you that that little boost that you need. You know, but right now, you know, to me, George Springer, he looks more like he's trying to set the hook in a bash fishing contest than it does like he's trying to hit line drives. You watch his swing it straight up, ripping it with his hands, uh just up, up, up. And what we really need for him to do is just get line drives and hard ground balls for a few days, and he'll start catching them out front. He'll start hitting the home runs. I mean, it's it's just that's who he is. It's what he's been his whole life. But he's not 28 anymore. He's 36 years old. He's coming off a fractured toe. You need your feet to stand and stabilize yourself, you need your legs underneath you to hit for power. He was gone 18 days. You know, how strong are his legs right now? Did he do a bunch of legwork? I don't know. And I've I've I've accused Major League Baseball of just crazy nonsensical fitness regimen. These kids aren't in baseball shape. How good a shape is George Springer in at 36 years old after a foot injury? I don't know. But it looks like he's just trying to go deep. It looks like a home run hitting contest, and I don't think it's good. But I'm, you know, that's me. I'm I'm gonna suggest maybe a more line drive approach for a few days. Uh Alejandro Kirk is coming back. Uh, but you know, I'm a catcher. I was a catcher. Uh I'm wondering, four games? Was that enough? Three as a DH, one game behind the plate. He went three for twelve. Three for twelve, and he caught one game. Uh, in my opinion, he needs to be catching nines, and he probably should have got five to seven starts behind the dish. I would have preferred him to get a little more work in that situation because he's got to come back and catch nines. Now, the Jays are gonna get an emotional boost no matter what when this guy returns, but it will fade very quickly if he doesn't put up numbers. So I'm saying maybe you should have caught him a few more games before you brought him back. Uh biggest problem facing the Jays right now is the offense. 25th in OBP, 19th in slugging, translation. They don't get on base, they're not hitting any bombs. Uh, you can do one or the other and win, but you can do both and win rings. Uh, teams that rely on power, really prone to being shut down by postseason type pitching because it's top tier. Uh you want to see how it's done? You want to see how it's done without a bunch of home runs? Look at Milwaukee. Second in OVP, middle of the pack in slugging, but they're in first place. Pitching, defense, timely hitting, always the formula. Look at the stats. Look at the teams that pitch well. Look at the teams that have the lowest whips. Look at these teams. Uh they're in first or second place across the board. It ain't rocket science. Just be good at three things. Throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball when it matters. Uh, it's pretty simple stuff. When we come back on Walk Off Slams, we're gonna talk a little Major League Baseball news, and we're also gonna sit down with my roomie, my pitching coach, my local pitching guru, Josh Towers. You won't want to miss this one.

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You're listening to Walk Off Slams with Greg Zahn on AM 1150.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Welcome back to Walk Off Slams. I am your host, Greg Zahn, and I am really fired up about a few things. Uh MLB. Uh, a ridiculous rumor came out that the Red Sox were gonna fire Craig Breslow. And I laughed because I know that you know it's just a ridiculous rumor. Uh because people that hire guys like Craig Breslo or, you know, I mean he and he played in the big leagues, which is, you know, it's it's hard to imagine some of the moves this guy made uh having played in the big leagues, but then again, he was a pitcher and a reliever at that. So um not exactly going to count that dude or those guys as baseball intelligence. I don't care what college he went to. But you just scratch your head and what what are these moves? But that being said, the rumor about him being fired, well, it should have happened already. It shouldn't have been a rumor. The guy should have been canned, you know, a month ago. Like he should have never even been allowed to fire Alex Cora and any of the other actual baseball people. I mean, look at the moves he made. Uh brings in a 26-year-old kid from rookie ball that never played Pro Ball. I don't think he even played indie ball, got out of college. It's just and he's the hitting coach or one of them. Like ridiculous. But, you know, Breslo is a guy who is hired by people who are unwilling to admit that they've made a mistake. Look how far the Red Sox organization has fallen since Alex Cora led them to the best record in the organization's history and a World Series. And you ask yourself, how is this got night this guy not royalty in Boston? I mean, the the great players, the great managers in this organization are revered, and you let a guy like Craig Breslo fire him. Uh unbelievable. So I can tell you it's a ridiculous rumor, and it's already been proven that the Red Sox brass never even thought about it. Now, I don't know if that's a lie, but it makes sense to me because it seems like there's a whole bunch of organizations out there who should be thinking about fire in their front office, like all of them. Like big league ops, minor league ops. I mean, there there's teams that that are we're gonna talk about later, probably in the roast I'm smelling. Um that just it's it baffles you. It wonders, like, do they have incriminating photographs of their bosses uh that allows for them to keep their job? Because I don't understand it, but there's no chance the Red Sox were gonna admit that they were wrong. Um look at what look at what we've what we've seen from this regime. You saw how poorly they handled the Rafael Devers situation. In a million years, you never treat a guy like that. Say what you want about Rafael not being a team guy, and oh, I don't want to move the first base. But when you find out about some moves that they're gonna make like that, and you find out in the media or after it's done, like, oh, we just signed Craig um uh Bregman, Alex Bregman, and he's gonna be our third baseman. Well, hey, shouldn't you have called Raphael Devers and asked him if it was cool? Sorry. Um you should have. Uh the communication there is just Amateur hour. The way they've treated Carlos Narvaez, ridiculous. This guy played himself into the everyday catching job. They've shown him no respect whatsoever. And now all of a sudden they've they've let some young kid come in and take his job when it should have been the other guy's job to lose. But communication. So like, come on. Really? Let's let's clean it up. Let's let's let's really clean it up over there. Because you you're gonna end up losing a roll as chapman, you're gonna you know lose probably anybody else of value, you're gonna have to trade them away. So uh get ready to do that and watch the Red Sox skid even further. Alright, that's enough about uh MLB and the lowly Boston Red Sox and all the poor decisions that they're making in Boston, but uh now let's let's shift to something else. You might want to grab your notepad and your pen and your pen, uh especially if you got kids. Uh young pitchers, have a listen to my interview with Josh Towers and take some notes. I'm with my pitching coach for the Kelowna Falcons, my former Toronto Blue Jays teammate, uh Josh Towers. I mean, it's just an awesome chance to kind of share with you the conversations that he and I have around the campfire every night about pitching and baseball. And we've had some interesting conversations about pitching recently and how we're seeing things change in the game. And I really wanted you know the listeners to hear it because I know we've got parents out there, we've got current players, both high school and college level, you know, and you should listen to the things that that Josh has to say because he's got a pretty perceptive eye and you know a mind for the game that really should be listened to at this point because in my opinion, the industry is lost when it comes to developing pitching. And uh, you know, Josh, you said something earlier in the week uh about what you've seen lately with pitching, and I want you to explain exactly what it is that you're looking at in the game and how you think it's changing again.

SPEAKER_02 24:22

Yeah, our game is is wild because it's it reminds me of a life where it's there's so many followers and and very few leaders, and you get people who want to be told what to do that's gonna change the game and change them, make them throw harder, make them better, but there's nothing that I can say to you that's gonna do that. Like I was telling the kids, I look at baseball as 365 days a year, and there's routines within routines within routines, and you have to create some sort of consistency. Analytics came into our game, what, 10-15 years ago, and the development of pitching in baseball and watching the game and watching hitters and learning how to disrupt timing and reading swings and understanding that in one day, if somebody has a hole, that cannot change in one day. Muscle memory will not allow that. So you have a hole there, and then how you simplify pitching where doubling up on a pitch becomes one of the most important things we can do because we're talking about angles, we're talking about energy, but I'm also talking about disrupting the batter and what he feels like, kind of like into old school techno baseball where you throw a pitch inside and the batter backs up. They're not necessarily gonna back up, but internally they did back up. And I have to understand that type of stuff. We only fail for so long in the big leagues before we say this isn't working, and you can see nowadays in baseball, and I talked to a lot of major leaguers a long time too, they've kind of got it rid of the analytics thing. They use it for bits and pieces of information, but you see the kids like Christopher Sanchez and Zach Wheeler, and you see the Dodgers guys, and you see there's a certain amount of baseball players in our game whose ERAs are like in the ones and they're starters, and then you see the complete discrepancy where the ERAs are in the sevens, where the guys are just out there throwing as hard as they can and looking at strikeouts. And for you, youth baseball players, the two worst things you can ever do is look at your velocity and tell me how many strikeouts you have. Because that doesn't tell you anything about how you did what you were able to control, what you saw. Tell me about your walks. Let me know if you're throwing strikes. Tell me about the quality of pitches, how many fastballs did you throw? Did you throw how many strikes? Did you throw first pitch strikes? Did you get ahead 1-1 to 1-2 opposed to 2-1? Are you pitching at the knees where everything gets to work below it to the hitter so that they can't lift it, and then you can change their eye level later? But we're starting to see that transition back into the game, and we're starting to see Major League starters for the most part go a little bit deeper, which for us coaches sets our bullpen up beautifully.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Yeah, I'm I'm looking at it in a similar way because you know, I'm on the receiving end, you know, mentally, uh, of a pitch, with you know, having caught you and you know, us being able to go out there and do precision things without you know necessarily premium exertion. You know, you we we we talk about where does a guy sit? Where does his velocity sit? And what's his max velocity? And people look at us like, oh yeah, well, what do you what are you asking those questions for? Well, where does the guy sit? It tells me where where can he comfortably Where's on time? Yeah, where can he comfortably throw strikes where he wants to with his fastball and something off speed? Uh is he max effort? Because if there's only a mile or two difference between max effort and you know where he sits, then we know that that everything he does is max effort, and it's gonna be hard to repeat.

SPEAKER_02 27:47

Let me jump in right there, too, because it's like a car. Go 120 miles per hour, tell me how hard it is to control and stop. It's gonna take a long time. Like I always say as pitchers, especially as starters, I need to be somewhat tired to be able to add and subtract off of every pitch. So if I'm my max is 95, there's no way I'm sitting 95 all game. I can't give 100% effort on every pitch because I'm gonna burn out, and the ability to take off means that it's not through my grip, it's gonna be through slowing down my delivery. So I need to be somewhere closer to like 85-90% of what I can do because my timing's perfect. And so I can always back you off by throwing off speed with the grip and slowing you down, and then I can step on the gas just to have your timing disrupted. But if I'm throwing 100%, my ability to control everything goes out the window.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

You know, you brought up a great point. Uh there's a huge gap between the elites and everybody else, and you can tell. Um, I you know, I I bring up, you know, guys all the time. Um, you know, I can compare a Yamamoto to a Dylan Cease. You know, people ask me, you know, well, how does he do what he does? Because he's not max effort.

SPEAKER_02 28:55

I can compare me to Yamamoto better than I can compare Dylan Cease to Yamamoto. Velocity-wise, they're the same, pitching wise. And that's what I was saying in one of the series. I said, I'll say this again on air, man. Blake Snail, we caused him to go throw 30 pitches in the first. That doesn't happen for starters, and he had to get into stressful pitches in the first inning. It burns so much energy that by the fifth and sixth, I was telling everybody, he'll be he'll be missing his spots in the fifth and sixth because he gassed out in the first inning. He doesn't know how to control it. And so now, next thing you know, the fifth and six comes around, the blue jeans are taking, and they got to him. You can't do that to Yamamoto, and you can't do that to Josh Towers. I'm never gonna miss my spot, and neither is he. So whether you load the bases or I get you out or you score two runs, it's still gonna be 12 hitches. It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

My job as as a catcher was to keep Roy from being predictable. But he was, and he didn't care. It's why, it's why I hit him so good when I left, because I knew what his mentality was gonna be. It was on off. Exactly. I mean, it's like he early on until we got him to throw, you know, front door sink and backdoor cut. That was later on. That was before he went to the next level. We did the same thing with AJ Burnett. We took their game to the next level. But Roy was diligent and adamant. I always only throw cutter to the glove side. I throw sinker to arm side because I never want the ball coming back to the middle of the side.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

But for youth baseball, that is such an important philosophy. It's it's it's a beautiful understanding. Throw your four sandwich, your glove side, throw your two-seamer to your arm side, let them start on the corners and stay or run off. Let everything run to the handles and run to the barrels. Hitters have no idea you're doing it. Right. They have no idea. But why have anything come to the middle of play where the barrel is? It was a beautiful philosophy. And with him, Roley's fastball was a cutter, too, so it kind of barreled in on him. But then, yeah, late when he got later with the Jason into the Phillies, he's sort of missing this, mixing in that front door sinker. But it wasn't like a pitch he'd live with, it was like a show pitch just to put it in your head.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

Yeah, I mean, but he also set it up well. He would get, you know, a righty on the mound, he would get you to move your hips out of the way for that turbo sinker. And then later on in the ball game, maybe even later on in a big at bat, he had that front door cut, which was, you know, tunneling is what you know Maddox and those guys would call it. They had three different pitches, three different speeds, a couple different movements going to the same area. Crisscross. Yeah. You know, a left to right, a right to left, and a straight.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

Look at Jacob DeCrom. He goes bottom left corner, glove side corner, and he throws all three pitches in that exact corner 90% of the time. You can see his metrics. And every pitch, is it the fastball, it's the changeup, it's a slider, and they all break within seven feet of home plate, so the whole to be you've already swung at the fastball. That's too late for you hitters not to swing, obviously. You swing about halfway. So everything stays in the exact same spot till the very end and it just disappears. And and what you're saying is command. It's coming back to command. Well, command, no matter what conversation we ever have with pitching, no matter what you say about every hitter, their tendencies, I don't care what you say about pitching, command it always comes back to, but if you locate, you're gonna be more successful. Here's the other thing about locating your pitches. That means your consistency of your delivery is the same every single time. That means your muscles are developing the same every single time. That means your velocity is going to increase faster.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

Yeah. I mean, I I I spoke earlier about um Justin Verlander and the no-no that he threw. These elite guys that have this turbo gear, this gear that they can go to when they're sniffing it. But, you know, if I'm hearing you correctly, and I and I feel like I already know the answer because I've caught a bunch of these dudes, it's like they're not working max effort. They're actually have the ability to throw harder, deeper in the game than they do in the first inning, because they're just still kind of getting it going, and they have a little something extra to reach back for. And I look, I remember that game, and I and I know for a fact that the last 10 pitches he threw in that no-hitter against the Jays at the Sky Dome were harder than the first 10 pitches he threw.

SPEAKER_02 32:39

I told everybody I said, if I'm 85, 86 in the first, if I'm in the ninth, it's 93. My velocity will increase the whole time I go up the game, it will never decrease. It only increases because you start getting into rhythm. You start, you don't even feel good to the fifth inning. You know what I'm saying? You start to feel better and you start to have all this confidence. If you and I are in the seventh inning, we're in full control of this game.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:57

There's nothing you're gonna be able to do. And so then there's so much a relaxed state where the velocity can just add because I have all found all my field already, I have all my sights on my pitches, and that's how it should be for starters. They should be like that. And with that said, with Justin and Clayton and some of those guys, there's there's like 5% of them that are there just freaks. Yeah. And that's not who we should be comparing ourselves to. You know what I'm saying? You're gonna watch them and kind of see how they pitch, but there's freaks, and then there's the rest of us. And and everybody's progress is different, whether you max in 98 in high school, which is rare, or your velocity just slowly increases through time, through college to the minor leagues, right? You gotta just let your body do its thing. But again, the reason they throw harder today is because you're just playing more baseball at a younger age, and where you and I started, I think I got in the gym for the first time in my career in 1999 in double A. The first time I trained like an athlete was the 0-2 offseason. I was already going to the gym, but I went to the train in Vegas, and I was like, oh, so there's a difference between going to the gym and training. I didn't know that. It's not the same world. These kids are doing this now at 10, 12 years old, yeah, and they're playing more baseball. So the velocity naturally increases, but I don't care what level in the world you play, your ability to pitch is the most important thing that you can do and learn to throw your off-speed for strikes.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

You said something interesting the other day about the ability to throw harder as the game goes on. It kind of like you get loose, you get confident, your timing, your sequencing all becomes better. It's kind of like, yeah, I might be able to absolutely nut that first pitch of the game timing-wise, but what are the odds? But 50-60 pitches in, I've done it already a bunch, and now I should have it locked in. But now in the game today, 50-60 pitches in, they're they're looking over their shoulder, going, hey, when are you getting me out of here?

SPEAKER_02 34:42

Well, that drives me crazy because you know, at our level, if if I can't throw in 18 innings, then I'm not in shape. If I'm working to just throw nine and I'm gonna fade as I get to nine, I shouldn't be in the big leagues. I still give you all the time, Gibby, stop, pull me at 5-6. I don't have to work out to throw five and six. Like, I can go to the bar and five and six, Gibby. I go, you gotta let me pitch, brother. This is crazy. We're in such good shape that like if Roy wanted to go 12, he can go 12. If I want to go 15, I could have go 15. Easy. I'm not wasting pitches and I'm never gonna get tired. But this is our whole job. That's why looking at it as 365, it shouldn't be like that. And you know me, dude. You caught me a lot. If I was 91, 92 in the first, I was getting rocked because I was too flat.

SPEAKER_01 35:18

Too flat.

SPEAKER_02 35:19

And I had to back off and get downhill.

SPEAKER_01 35:20

Yeah, if Haliday was in the mid-90s with his sinker, it's for sitting too flat, he's throwing it right through it. That's what it's it comes down to a lot of things that I've said that people look at me like, oh, you're crazy, you're an angry old man. Yeah, and I don't want you on my lawn, especially with your dog. But you know, the these kids are not in baseball shape, they're not in shape to do things that they're being paid huge dollars to do. It's like it's all showcase, it's one rep max. Um, you know, if it weren't for the pitch clock, uh I would imagine that a lot of these kids would would absolutely gas out. You know, I don't understand.

SPEAKER_02 35:58

Right. For pitchers, it was one of the greatest things you could have done for us as pitchers, and these games, these guys don't understand how beneficial that is to us.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

Yeah, you you the hitters can't re-reset. They don't have it. You're never gonna see Nomar doing the 14 folds of his batting gloves, stepping out, fixing the jersey.

SPEAKER_02 36:16

How about this story? Do you remember this?

SPEAKER_01 36:17

Can't happen.

SPEAKER_02 36:18

We were in Toronto pitching, and we're playing the Yankees, and I was not having the best starter, and Jeter comes up, and you know he puts his foot in, he puts his hand up time. Remember, I walked off the mound and sat down behind the mound? Yeah. And I sat down, and the umpire and Jeter are like, What are you doing? And I was like, just let me know when you're ready. Whenever you're ready, I'll get on the mound. So take your sweet time and just let me know when you're ready. And I sat there, and Derek just jumps back in the box, you jump down, the umpire gets back, I jump on the mound immediately. He grounds out, doesn't look at me, doesn't say anything. Grounds out, next at Vat, what did you do?

SPEAKER_01 36:48

Yeah, probably nothing. Yeah, I let him and he said, I was so mad.

SPEAKER_02 36:52

Yeah, but it's like, dude, like you'll never be able to do that in 20 seconds. No. And he and all I did was give him time to rethink about what I throw, reset his mechanics, reset his timing. I let him take it all back, and I took it away from him before that, you know?

SPEAKER_01 37:05

Yeah, well, these guys are these guys are max effort from the get-go. Yeah, they run through a hundred pitches in five innings, their max effort, they're never gonna be able to survive. And now that they don't have the pitch clock or that they have the pitch clock, they gotta go quicker. So they it's even more important that they're in shape.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

So then that comes into our cardio, yes, right? Because I gotta run distance for nine innings and I gotta run distance for a season, but I gotta run sprints for a pitch, I gotta run jog sprint walks for my throw pitch, get over first base reset. I need to be able to reset my full energy in that 15 seconds before I get back on the mound. So then my cardio has to has to simulate that. So whatever I'm doing cardio-wise, I gotta mimic that clock.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Yeah, it's it's definitely a different mentality the way that people train, and you know, there needs to be kind of a mix between old school and new school. I think it's great. Just just just like I think, you know, there's a room for analytics in the game, but they're tools. They gotta be they gotta be put in the hands of skilled workers. It's an addition. Exactly. It's a it's a value add, not the ultimate and not the decision maker. Um, Josh, thanks again for jumping on here with me. Uh, love talking pitching with you. Good thing for me we we get to live together this summer and and do it every day. But I wanted to share some more of your insight with the the listeners uh there in Toronto and you know throughout the country of Canada. Um I definitely will get back on again pretty soon. When we come back on uh walk-off slams, you get a chance to hear the Sunday roast.

SPEAKER_00 38:33

And now, the Sunday roast with Greg's on.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

Where has the accountability gone in Major League Major? Players are judged, now even umpires are under the microscope with the advent of the ABS system. When you look at where these guys are coming from, you have to wonder how why they would even hide it in the first place. My question is why do security school even exist? Could it be to train people who never played out of the water multiplayer? Why would you just go find guys who played it as they want a multiplayer looking like? If you're looking for something that cracked it as it has a water trade under here, how many of us could point me in the right direction? Not an account. Go look at the track record. Very few of them have any significant assets, any significant level. You would think baseball would want to see the master apprentice relationship. Even if you don't want to get it right, the gen IDs and the paddle, and the paddle passes a series of tests before hearing the title of Jen ID. After only a couple training seminars on raps, and tracking don't care where the personnel comes from or what their lifestyle is. They care about wins and losses and sometimes, they care about the quality of character and the players that represent their city. The players are the property.