Arden Zwelling

that's just what he says it's just amazing uh you know it's a home run in his first career played appearance and he's just like very understated and direct about it um he's he's an entertaining guy to to talk to um and yeah i mean he's look he forced his way here this coming out of spring training josh kasovich was the guy who if you had asked around everyone would tell you he'll be the first one up because he had a really impressive spring

and like plays on the infield and hits from the same side that McAdoo does and there's he's not the guy who's here it's Charles McAdoo because of the first two months that he had because he upped his contact rate and really furthered a lot of the adjustments that the Blue Jays had asked him to make he went down to the development player development complex mid last year maybe even like towards the end of the second month of last year because the strikeout rate had just gone out of control and

spent like a week and a half in the hitting lab working on some just technical mechanical stuff with the coaches down there came out of it better for it and really showed the blue jays throughout the offseason and into this year just the work ethic and commitment and buy-in to what they were asking for from him um

I know he can look kind of bizarre in the box now.

It's like, wow, this guy's just really closed off and it's a really odd swing.

But trust me when I tell you it was even more closed off and even more odd before he went into the hitting lab.

Like this is the improved version, but it's working for him.

You look at the contact numbers at AAA and the strikeout walk numbers.

These are all things that have gotten better as he went from AA to AAA.

That's not typically the case for young players as they face more advanced pitching.

So it's a credit to him

Think about how many big league debuts we've seen this year.

So, Casmo, Komodo, Brandon Valenzuela, Charles McAdoo, Johendrik Pinyongo, Spencer Miles, Tanner Andrews, Hayden Yinger, Adam Mako.

That's like, what, eight names?

And I'm probably forgetting one or two.

That's just an incredible amount of big league debuts in the first two months of a season for a team with a $300 million payroll that's built to contend now.

and that has a bunch of veteran pieces on it.

Since we're here talking about the rookies, I do want to just make a quick comment about Kazuma Okamoto.

And it's actually like, I think it's okay that he's leading the team in strikeout rate.

And I think that just strikeouts are just going to be part and parcel to his approach.