CJ Nitkowski

You go into the bullpen for pretty much every reliever who at one point was a starter, that repertoire more often than not is going to get pared down to find just a couple that you can dominate with in the short term.

If you don't have two pitches that you can throw six innings with, though, and again, Kevin Gosman, Chris Sale, they could do that, then you have to have a deeper repertoire.

and you've got to be able to figure it out.

I think you want to go third time through, which is always kind of the big storyline these days with starters now.

There's probably going to have to be something else than just two or three pitches.

Couple of things.

First of all, I didn't think he was going to get the job this offseason, to be honest with you.

I just thought for Alex, this was going to be his first opportunity to hire somebody.

And I think we all thought maybe he was going to go outside.

Maybe he had somebody else in mind from all the previous relationships that he's had around the game.

We were thrilled here, I will tell you, and me personally, knowing White for a long time, that he ended up getting it.

The relationships were already established.

That's a big one.

I know that sometimes that gets glossed over in today's front offices.

I don't think Alex does that.

And they're very careful about who they bring into the

this organization and I played here 22 years ago and I think not much has changed since Bobby Cox was running things here to where we are now with Walt Weiss and that is that who comes through those doors is going to be pretty heavily vetted and you never notice like you never see drama really here you haven't in decades you don't see players leaving firing shots on the way out right so I think that with Walt they wanted that continuity

I think probably, and I don't know this for sure, but my guess is that he got the seal of approval from a couple of guys that were likely asked by Alex when it came to, you know, what are we going to do with our manager for 2026?

And now what we're noticing on the field, like we had a lot of fun with the Anaheim situation and him taking down Jorge Soler when benches cleared and kind of showing who he is and he's got your back.

But more importantly, what I've noticed with him,