Paul Gibson

What I mean by funk is he hides the ball in the back really well,

and has an unusual type stride to the plate.

So the hitters have a hard time staying on time with him.

So, no, there's no immediate concerns about injury risk.

And, you know, if I had to make a comparison, there's a little bit of Chris Bubich in his delivery, kind of the way he hides the ball.

not very it's not easy to teach it and it's not easy to teach out of it you know it's sort of the naturalness of the delivery and it's sort of what makes some guys go you know there are occasions where a guy will come into the system and we know that this is going to lead to a problem or baby has had previous problems that are ongoing so

In those cases, we might intervene.

But when you draft a guy where we drafted him and we went through all of the processes, we're more inclined to stay with the program and let guys' naturalness work for themselves.

And where are you at with Michael Lombardi?

So Michael's a really interesting case.

He was a two-way player at Tulane.

So this is going to be more of a little bit of a slow play in terms of innings.

He would play in the field and then come in the game out of the bullpen.

We view him as a potential starter.

So we have him in a piggyback in Columbia right now where we can monitor the innings.

We want to keep him in the 70 to 80 inning range this year.

And that'll take some management, particularly through a piggyback situation.

a good fastball, a plus breaking ball.

Learning his other secondary stuff as we go.

He's got a lot of swing and miss in there, and he has the ability to land that breaking ball for strikes.