Craig Breslow

Um, and you know, what, what Ranger does very, very well, uh, is he's, he's got excellent command.

He's unpredictable.

He's got a very, very deep repertoire, uh, that keeps hitters off balance.

And we feel like he's going to be a very good pitcher for the next five years.

Yeah, so if you look at, you know, kind of the pitch usage, even last year, right, like, you know, kind of sinker and change up the predominant pitches.

But after that, I think the next three pitches in the repertoire all had equal use of like 16% per pitch, which means that if you are trying to predict the incoming pitch,

probably going to get it wrong and so when you think about velocity sure it gives pitchers more more room for error right there's some trade-off between velocity and command and the less command you have probably the more velocity and vice versa and uh you know ranger's just a guy who's been successful on the other side of that equation where the ability to locate five or six pitches and keep hitters off balance has been uh you know been the the recipe for success for him and it's one that we believe will uh will have real staying power

And also, do you feel like the training from that group to address the other needs makes some sense?

So there's no such thing as too much starting pitching.

And also, we'll continue to look at ways to improve the team.

And if that means, you know, potentially talking about trading from an area of depth in order to address another roster need, it's something that we're going to be willing to hear out and be open-minded to.

We talked at the beginning of the off-season that free agency and trades and internal development were three ways to improve our team.

And we'll try to leverage all three.

Sure, defense is a significant contributor to run prevention, right?

We tend to get caught up in the pitching side of this, but there are other key components as well, defense being the most obvious.

And so it's really important that we improve our defense, particularly our infield defense.

I would argue we have the best defensive outfield in baseball, but we led the league in errors last year and our out conversion needs to be improved.

I think there are some things that we've already started to do internally to reprioritize that, but also any additions that we may make, we'll be very mindful of the defensive skillset.