#5 Homers, shortstop and the "The Drive In" on the road.

[00:00:03] I almost changed the name of today's episode to Crawl In. That's what I get for leaving a little bit later here on 285 and dealing with some traffic. Tough loss last night. Graham Holmes, Tywin Walker, the two starters there. Walker was actually pretty good, and it's kind of reinvented himself and we'll see if that holds or not. But after a disastrous season last year, he's looked pretty good so far. Through his first two. Grant Holmes battled. He talked about it after the game. The command still isn't there. A couple of starts in a row, right? The two starts that he's had, he's walked four batters. But he kept the Phillies off the board. That's the biggest thing. And although he wanted to get deeper in the game, you'll take those four zeros, but he's still working on that fastball command a little bit. The breaking ball to the arm side wasn't as consistent as I remember seeing from a year ago. That backdoor, especially curveball to lefties wasn't quite right. But the thing that I wanted to talk about with that game yesterday, that kind of stuck out to two big home runs, one against Dillon Lee, the other against Iglesias and how they kind of happened. And I mean, this is just baseball, but thinking about Dylan Lee in particular, first against Bryce Harper, he ends up getting beat with a fastball. We actually talked about this, I think, yesterday regarding Dylan Lee and the slider. It's his go to pitch. We all know that. It's his best pitch. It doesn't mean you can throw it all the time. And I feel like he's trying to get a little bit more respect on his fastball. We joked about him hitting 97 the other day. It wasn't about the pitch for me. It was about the location. He just missed his spot. It was 95 miles an hour. That's a good fastball left on left, but it was a the middle of the plate. He's trying to go down and away. If he gets it there, we're probably not having this conversation. But it's fine. Things happen. That's just kind of the way that baseball goes. It was a big moment, obviously, and it matters, but he's been so good. You don't mind it if you don't mind it, but you know what I mean? You got to leave some room for these kind of things to happen. The other home run for Trey Turner against Rycel Iglesias, that one's a little bit tougher to swallow. When it comes to pitch selection, we know that Iglesias change up fastball, those are his top two pitches. He's got a good slider. But when we think about Ricell Iglesias, we really think about what he's bringing to the table. Of course, with that great change up that he has. So the issue there was Trey Turner's been good against him. He now has three home runs and eight plate appearances. That's kind of a big deal, right? And so he knows that going in, tried to do something a little bit different through a first pitch slider. Kind of what we call a get me over slider. Can you get that first strike maybe to get ahead against the guy who's been good against you? He was ready for it. He went after it. That ended up being the difference in the game. So a couple of home run against a couple of relievers not using their best pitches. And really, again, it's always going to be about location. It is rare that you're going to get beat with any kind of extra base hit when you hit your spot. So it's always about location over pitch type anyway. But a couple of tough ones that ended up costing the Braves that game. I'm really curious to see how things are going to go here at shortstop. Stitt talked about it a little bit. Matchups are going to matter as far as the playing time between Orlando Garcia and Nick Allen. [00:03:02] These guys are similar players outside. If you get more power from Orlando, but you get a little bit more speed from Nick Allen, you're going to get a little bit more contact. And it's not just going to be about matchups. That's how the game has changed so dramatically over the years. Yes, the matchups matter, the history matters, but there's not going to be a lot of data necessarily. So I think it's going to be more about the type of pitcher and not just left, right, but the type of pitcher. What does he have? What is the velocity? Who's better at getting to higher velocity? What breaking balls are those pitchers throwing? And then how do each of these guys match up against those breaking balls? There's no exact, perfect, perfect formula, but this one is going to take a little bit more digging, I think, to figure it out. So I don't know how exactly they'll make these decisions, but I think a lot of that is going to come into play. And then you also have to trust Snit to make some decisions based on instinct. How a guy's going, how he's looking. There is something to the confidence that a manager picks up on from the outside that you can't quantify, but it's important. Obviously it's an important position. The good news is they're both very, very good defensively. So you know you're going to get a good, good glove every night. But how they actually divvy up this playing time I think is will change quite honestly throughout the season and we'll see how it goes. But no one necessarily has taken the lead on this. Orlando really contributed these last couple of games, but we'll see. Got some time on that one for sure. I think it's probably going to be a little bit of back and forth. I don't know if anybody's ever going to take over as the full time shortstop unless there's any kind of major injury. So we'll see. Good matchup tonight, man. Jesus Lozardo. He's got 19 strikeouts in 12 innings so far. He was very average and missed some time last year for the Marlins. This is looking, looking like a really good pickup for the Philadelphia Phillies, especially at a time when Ranger Suarez is down. So they got this big lefty in Lozardo who throws really hard. He's got good off speed pitches. That will be definitely a fight tonight. But the good news is it's Spencer Schwellenbach. And I think we got to be honest at this point so far, this early in the season, until Spencer Strider gets back, which should be pretty soon, sounds like Spencer Schwalinbach is the ace of this team. I don't mind saying it's not meant to take anything away from Grizzle. He's obviously off to a little bit of a slower start. And Schwalmabach threw two starts, has been absolutely terrific. 14 strikeouts, I should say, in his 14 innings. But he just carries himself like an ace. Two. Which is also amazing because a year ago I don't think I could spell his name or even say it properly. I didn't know who he was. He wasn't in camp, he wasn't in the big leagues. And now here we are less than a year later and Spencer Schwal is the ace of this club. But again, as I mentioned, the good news, Spencer Schwalm. Now I'm going to confuse all the Spencers. Spencer Strider was really good in his rehab start. Pretty will make his next one at the big league level and so we certainly look forward to that. So really good game tonight. I want to say it's a must win, but we talked about winning series, got to win this series right now, get some of that momentum going in your favor. Thinking about this road trip that's coming up, you'd like to have a nice happy flight. Everybody feeling good about taking two out of three from the Phillies and you head to then Tampa and Toronto. Those are going to be winnable Series as well. And when you're behind the eight ball with the slow start, you got to win Series. Especially to get a bunch of those knocked out this month, I think is really, really important. I've said that a couple of times. I had a guy stop me yesterday, stopped down to see a friend during batting practice and said to me, hey, man, I really enjoy the drive in. And that made me laugh. We started this like four days ago, five days ago, and I appreciated it. It's very humbling when you sit here and you play around and have some fun and, and people actually say that they like it. So I appreciate the comments that we've gotten, but it was kind of nice to get one in person as well. I have no idea how I'm gonna do this when we get on the road. I definitely can't do it on the bus. That is a no, no. [00:06:51] We'll see. Maybe I'll walk around a little bit. But I appreciate the positive feedback. It's been fun to talk with you all and quite honestly, the questions that you put in sometimes, and I see pretty much all of them on social media sometimes help fuel this as well. So it's, it's been a good time and, and I've enjoyed it. We got some rain in the area tonight. My wife is not a meteorologist, but she said like 8 o'clock it's supposed to start raining. Let's hope that's not the case. We talked about this before as well on Sunday when the did get rained out. How you handle this when you got a couple of really important pitchers, I mean all the time, but especially right now when you got these two pitchers that are scheduled to go, the last thing you want to happen is start this game and you don't get through five and you end up burning your starting pitchers. That is the worst case scenario for everybody. I don't know how bad the rain's supposed to be, but we have heard about some of these rainstorms that are coming in. We'll see if there's any adjustments that need to be made. But again, I don't want to say must win, but really, really need to win tonight against the Phillies.