Hello everybody. Welcome to the Shag Anything podcast. I'm Doug Williams. No, I'm not. I'm Andy Martino.

Doug, I fooled you for a second, but Doug is gallivanting around the globe. He is probably not even thinking about baseball right now.

So I'm here with Nelson Figueroa, my good friend, who's able to break things down, probably

better than either of us who normally sit at this table for the podcast.

So Nelson, welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, thank you.

Normally you're filling in for me when I'm gallivancing, but today you're filling in for Doug. So, I want to start with the Mets offense, which if you may or may not have

noticed over the weekend, has not been particularly effective lately. I find in covering teams

and in trying to ask managers, hitting coaches, hitters, what's wrong with your slumping offense? It's probably

the hardest question to report on, write about, or answer, because it's pretty mysterious,

right? It's just like, I don't know, man, we're all talented and we're in this huge group

slump. Do you see anything with the Mets offense right now, Nelson, that tells you big picture

that they've got something to worry about.

The first couple of weeks were Mirage, and this is really bad? Or do you just see one of those

things that teams fall into? You know, at this point, this is my fifth year of being on S&Y,

and seeing it happen almost every year, right? Yeah, it's weird. I thought this year it wasn't

going to happen. And you didn't think it was going to happen because you had enough guys who had veteran qualities who understood

the whole team first initiative, hit the ball the other way, put the ball in play, doing the

little things. To me, it wasn't that it was a mirage because we see they have the ability to do

it. I think one of the things is, is that teams teams make adjustments and you have to be able to adjust back. What we're seeing a lot of is a lot

of off-speed pitches, a lot of breaking balls. The slower the breaking ball, the better because

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