Derek Van Ryper

Hey, I'm doing great, Blake.

Great to hear from you again.

It doesn't feel real to me, to be honest.

I think every spring we have this sort of nervous energy that this will be the year that they cut it too thin, that they traded one too many of last year's key pieces away, and the next guy up doesn't take the step forward that's expected, right?

And it's only June 3rd.

There's a lot that could still go wrong from a health perspective.

But I just think about where...

We all thought Jacob Mizorowski was at the end of last season, right?

He fell out of the rotation, worked in kind of a longer relief role in the playoffs.

He was certainly important in the series against the Cubs, and we knew he had electric stuff.

But if you told me in October that Jacob Mizorowski was going to put together a stretch like he did in May and show the command that he has shown, the improvement in command from year to year, I don't think I could have believed that.

I think there's still probably a little bit of softer load management.

What I mean by that is stretches where you're going to use six starters, stretches where maybe the pitch count's only at 75 and you've opened up a big enough lead, you take him out of a game anyway.

Different little things like that.

But I do think, given the state of the game right now, there's a world in which he does throw enough innings to stay firmly in the Cy Young Award race in the National League.

And it's going to be a loaded field this year, so...

Maybe workload will be the kind of thing that keeps him second or third in the end if everything else goes to script.

I think their pitching depth is just ridiculous.

I mean, we're looking at a team that calls up guys that were 12th round picks out of Mississippi State and you read the blurb over at Fangraphs and it's, oh yeah, they converted this guy from...

reliever to starter, and it's gone exceptionally well throughout his entire development.