Welcome to Rates and barrels. It is our pre-winter meetings special. Derek and Riper, Enoceris, Trevor May, and a guest, Brent Rooker, all here today. Very full house. As we record this here, Thursday, December 5th is the date of this show. You may hear it sometime around Sunday before the winter meetings. Brent, thanks so much for joining us. Absolutely. Excited to be here. Always a pleasure. It can be on anything with Trevor. It's always, you know, always a blast. So what are you up to this time of year? What's the main thing you're focusing on in the early part of December coming off of such a great season? A lot of dad stuff. You got a three-year-old and got a three-and-a-half-month-old. So it's a lot of dad stuff. As far as baseball goes, I started hitting. See, I had a, I had surgery right to the season. I start hitting again next see I had a had surgery right to the season I start hitting again

next week which I'm excited about up until now it's just been a bunch of PT stuff trying to get

you know back fully healthy which I am what you get fixed elbow extensor tippin so that where is it

that guy oh wow got a scar look like a pitcher out there yeah i know so got that fix pt's been

great feeling fully healthy just normal workouts besides that uh get ready to get rolling swing the bat

next week this is like such a loaded term behind schedule but are you like it's would you have

been somewhere else i mean maybe like it might be like week later as far as starting hitting than I would have done normally. So it's not. No kind of delay or behind schedule or anything like that. You can't really approximate game, you know, stuff in the off season. I always feel like the pitchers have a better time in the off season because they can, you know, pitch design and do all that

sort of thing. So how do you, how do you do hitting in the off season? I do B-Lo machine is kind of my way to simulate velocity, the simulated game type environment. Just fastballs, turn that machine up pretty high, try to get the reaction time to being, you know, where it would be with an elite, elite four seamer

or whatever. And besides that, I mean, for me, it's a lot of flips, a lot of, you know, short toss, a lot of dark toss, some BP mixed here and there. But I'm not a guy who likes to do, I don't do any live at bats before spring training. I know some guys do that. I don't do that. I do hit the machine, like I said, a lot of fastballs and then some breaking balls mixed in too.

So that's kind of, that's my way to simulate a game type environment or a game type pitch is just kind of use the machine. Do you track your swings at all so that you know, like, not really? As far as like number of swings or quantity or whatever. Just wonder about fatigue. I mean track everything so they're right no that's i mean it's interesting it's interesting concept but no i'd never have i mean i'll gradually build up right so like the first two weeks i hit it's not going to be a ton and then as i get further and further it's more of a field feel yeah the quantity will pick up just to make sure that my body's ready for the first break training, stuff like that.

When we talk to pitchers, you know, they talk a lot about like learning new pitch,

trying to design something new in the offseason.

That's a lot of now what the offseason looks like for them.

And you and I have talked a few times already this off season,

but just to reiterate real quick for those people who haven't heard, it's just about how you're trying to improve a lot of the little kind of minutia parts of your game.

You know, working on the strikeout right a little bit, up in the walk rate, and all those things are trending in the right direction.

Going into this off season, is there anything new that you're implementing in that,

that you think will then produce those kind of improvements in terms of a new drill

or maybe just a mindset thing, anything?

I think a lot of the things that I want to improve on in a lot of the areas, a lot of the

margins, I think I can see improvements.

They'll allow me to take more steps forward. It's going to happen in spring training because it's going to be pretty specific to approach stuff into game planning stuff and to things that are going to happen in a live game like a bat um so i think a lot of that's going to happen in the spring which i'm excited about for me the off season as far as hitting goes it's just like i know i know my swing when it's at its best

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