Ben Shulman

I think that that's kind of invaluable in his relationships to pitchers.

I do think, like you said, that Valenzuela has called it pretty well, though.

So I think it's more correlation than causation.

I think with Eric Lauer specifically, I talked to him after his most recent start.

He's still sick.

And they don't want to make that excuse.

He's not going out there and using it as an excuse.

But he's just clearly not 100% right now.

Patrick Corbin was kind of an unknown quantity coming in.

So I think that one's hard to compare.

And then for Max, it's been interesting the last two starts.

Because there was the start where the stuff was down and he came out early.

And then there's last start where the stuff kind of ticked back up.

But he just didn't seem to be hitting his spots and they really made him pay for some mistakes.

So I do think it's an impact.

Kirk is one of the top defensive catchers in the game in a couple of different ways and you're going to lose something from that.

But I think it also happened to coincidentally line up with some tough luck or some different variables on the pitching side that ended up contributing to some of those huge innings we saw for the Twins.

No one has said anything specifically to me, but I do agree with you.

It's been something to notice.

There's been a couple routes where Dalton Varsha has taken a wrong first step, and it's hard to hold someone to a 100% standard, but first step is what he's so good at.