Mark Shapiro

Then he gets drafted late as an afterthought.

Then he has Tommy John.

pitches 11 innings last year.

We take him on a roll five and he gets a win on Saturday, you know, first major league strikeout.

Those are, those are the stories that are just great stories, but he felt the level of support, you know, from his teammates and that, that matters.

That can make a difference.

And Cody will feel that tonight.

He'll feel 35,000 people pulling for him here, you know, million more watching, but he's going to feel those guys in the dugout on the top rail, you know, up there and there'll be in it with him for every pitch, which is pretty cool.

I think our jobs are to be more supportive and to not read in anything too quickly.

You're looking for signs that what our baseball operations group identified in each guy is still present, that the opportunities we thought for them to be even better are being utilized and those resources are being utilized.

But our jobs as an organization are just to put these guys in position to be successful.

You know, it's to to allow them to be in an environment where they can relax as much as humanly possible in a game that has so much anxiety built in and stress built in and expectations built in.

So to put them in an environment where they feel like they're supported and relaxed and to provide them with the best resources in all of Major League Baseball.

mentally, physically, and fundamentally to compete, to prepare, to recover, information, coaching, everything else.

And so we're more focused on our part of that deal right now than we are on evaluating them.

I think you try to withhold evaluations until the 40-game point and just look at are we doing everything possible to put these guys in a position to be the best they can be.

I mean, Schneid set that tone with his talk when the guys first got into spring training, but I really feel it's veteran players.

Veteran players understand.

I mean, think about Max Scherzer and all that he's been through, how many world championships he's won, but how many times he's fallen short as well.

Our guys, I think, just basically understand that.