Justin Willard

Again, like crochet is a perfect example.

When we acquired him last year, we're like, okay, this guy's really, really cross body.

There's an aspect of his cross-bodiedness and his stride that makes him really good.

But if it goes too far in one direction, it's going to really hurt the rest of his arsenal and the rest of the effectiveness of his pitches.

that guy can spin the absolute shit out of the ball.

Obviously, profile is dialed.

He has to be able to locate the ball pretty well now, like real spin talent.

I think like, so when you think about like athleticism and the core traits of athleticism, it's body control and understanding where your body is in space.

And then you talk about this idea of like repeatable mechanics, which I don't think is a real thing, right?

But it's basically like you have a narrow bandwidth of mechanics and guys that are athletic are able to manipulate their body through space just better than everybody else and understand where their hands in space and get to those kind of consistent release points more so than anything else.

It's just pure velo coming at you like, let's go.

It was really interesting.

I was there, his AAA debut when he was in Syracuse.

I was actually there because I think Fitz was pitching.

So I drove out there.

Or Penrod.

We were actually moving Penrod to the pen.

That's why I was there.

And he was an interesting one because throughout the minor leagues, his fastball was kind of his superpower.

And I was really interested to see how the new ball going from the minor league ball to the major league ball is going to affect the movement of the fastball.