Hey, everybody. Welcome to RotoR Fancy baseball podcast, Jeff Erickson here.

With my guest today is the great Alex Fast. You can catch Alex in a lot of places, pitcherless being the primary place, but you see them on TV a lot, either at ESPN or at MLB Network, Mass and Orioles coverage as well. Alex, thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and talk some baseball. Yeah, I think we talked

once maybe, was it last year that I had you on? I think so, like right during the pandemic,

I think, yeah. Yeah. And so this is good. We get normal talk now. We actually have covers

to discuss. You know, it's a good time. So I'm sending out a tweet right now for people

to kind of chime in with us. So hopefully people will jump in the comments section.

But okay, so last, we got to start with last night. That was, I don't know how much of that

Padres Dodgers game you caught, but that was insane, one of those game of the year type of

games. I had so much fun watching that. Yeah, I i only i didn't stay up for the entire 16 innings because i'm i'm getting a little bit old and i'm on the east coast but i watched a lot of the highlights today and i was i was i was like i saw the oriels break their their streak and that was it that was the only baseball i needed for for the night hitting three home runs off show a otani Otani. And I was like, okay, we're good to go. That was my game of the night. Okay, cool, cool. I've got the West Coast advantage. I don't have the age advantage. Dude, you say you're getting a little old. That's a lie. I'm the old one here, man. I mean, you're supposed to make me feel young. No, I came out of the womb listening to Steely Dan and complaining about my knees. I'm just an old soul. Nice. But I want to start off with Blake Snell. I mean, he pitched great against the Dodgers last night. He's pitched well against the Dodgers. You know, this is the one team he hasn't really been stymied by. He's had ridiculous home road splits. He's had problems

working deep in the games. He went seven and two thirds last night. It's a career high for him.

Unfortunately, seven and a third would have probably been a little bit better off for the Padres.

He gave up that homer to Will Smith, who only hits clutch homers. It's the only homers he types of hits.

But what do we make out of Blake Snell next year? I know I'm kind of jumping ahead into the problem pitchers for next year. But let's, he's top of. Let's jump right into Blake Snell. No, that's, you know, okay, there's a lot to kind of discuss here and a lot to really think about. And there is what we see analytically and the things that are the untangibles that we don't really quite know about, right?

So let's start with what we're looking at analytically, right?

A couple of weeks ago or maybe two weeks ago or so, we saw Blake's now with that 13 strikeout game, right? And we're like, oh my God, this is what we've been waiting for. Is this the Blake's now we're finally going to get moving forward? And one of the big noticeable differences that we saw recently that he seems to be sustaining is shifting more to a fastball slider, right? And just focusing on those two pitches, which is, if I would have said that to you two years ago, hey, he's just going to be fastball slider. You'd be like, well, that's not great because he's got two other great pitches in his arsenal. But that curveball and that changeup have not been good for him whatsoever. Both of those pitches have negative p-vows. And that's the first time ever in his career that either pitch has had a negative p-vow. It just hasn't been successful for him. What's been great about the slider is he's been throwing it in the zone more. He's been able to get ahead with that pitch. He's been able to throw it for strikes and not necessarily rely on getting guys to swing out of the zone with the pitch. So that's been exciting to see. That's the statistical stuff that has me a little bit more intrigued that we're going to get back to the Blake's now that we kind of know and love. There's another topic that I've been discussing with Nick Pollock, for those listening to the founder of a pitcher list, about, which is a little more

intangible, which is trying to really determine what is going on behind the scenes with

pitching coaches and with organizations and who develops pitchers well, right?

I, Larry Rothschild obviously just lost his job in San Diego. And it's no, it's no secret that that

organization has been sort of a letdown in terms of starting pitching. There's 17th in terms of

starting pitcher ERA. And I mean, between Chris Paddock being ineffective, between Blake

Snell being ineffective at the beginning of the year, between Joe Musgrove being up and down, between you Darvish having second or third highest ERA of his entire career, I just wondered about, you know, and McKenzie Gore being just completely lost in the miners right now. It's, it was like, okay, well, is this an organization that maybe isn't known for, you know,

helping pitchers along? And, you know, again, purely subjective. There's been plenty of

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