Ben Schulman

And you're talking about the ninth inning of an 8-2 game.

That's the thing that baseball can do sometimes that other sports can't.

You know, if it's 5-0 with three and a half minutes to go in the third period, nothing fun is going to happen for the losing team in a hockey game.

But you can still get something good in baseball.

To give him some credit, I mean, two three-ball counts on the night, he was clearly a little bit more patient.

last night than he is on a typical day I think they would hope for more of that going forward and we'll see how much opportunity there is dependent on Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

's availability because like you said there's only one lefty starter in the upcoming week and I do think with Trevor Rodgers up and down struggles this year there isn't even an

absolute guarantee that you see him and so i don't know how often sosa's gonna end up starting over the next seven days and getting that many at-bats but uh it is nice to see him take a couple more pitches i mean if he could do some of the production he posted last year without taking very many pitches at all if you can somehow get that chase down i think that that there's something to unlock within there but uh if nothing else we uh we have a moment and i no longer have to go to the leaderboard

for how far ahead is he in plate appearances without a walk?

Because it was, I believe he was about 70 ahead of the next player with no walks going into last night.

But now he's off the list, and he's joined everyone else in the walking community.

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, it's him and Matt Olsen still, unless Olsen doubled after I looked at that last night at 17 to lead the majors.

One thing that I've really liked from the recent production of Ernie is he's gotten back to hammering the fastball.

I think...

He kind of had to do a dirty job to begin the year because he was so fantastic in the postseason, because he gave all the notoriety.

The team scattered him a lot more aggressively and just started spinning him to death.

Just breaking ball, breaking ball, breaking ball, breaking ball.

And he actually, he fought him off pretty well.

And he was hitting decently on breaking stuff.

But I think he had to make that so much of a focus that fastballs, which had typically been, you know, really was bread and butter,