Rob Ratner

So when you go in, so as I said, you had your meeting with the media, sort of like the beginning of spring training meeting.

Am I wrong?

Like you had that, right?

Yeah, I did that.

Uh, when you go into that, like, what do you, how do you feel about that?

Like, do you dislike, I just want to get this over with, or I know that this question is going to be asked.

I know that that question is going to be asked, like, can, you know, compared to whenever you started this thing, I'm always interested in the team meetings and the first interviews.

So that expert segue into, did you think – I know that every offseason is different, but I think we did one of the podcasts leading into the offseason or early on in the offseason, and you have best late plans and you have an idea, and you think, okay, I think that when I do my press conference –

to meet with the media in Arizona, it might look like this.

You never know for sure.

How different did it look?

How many times did you have to zig when you thought you were going to zag?

So how, how did the, this is a bigger picture question, I guess, but how did the off season, like you said, you never quite know, but how did the off season as a whole change or differ from what you thought it was going to be in terms of the market, whether it's free agency, whether it's trade talks, every off season is different.

It seems like it drags on more than every single year than ever before.

And teams are more willing to do it than ever before.

From your perspective, how has this been different?

You mentioned those two guys, and immediately when I saw you guys acquired them, I'm like, I thought of Longoria a few years ago.

And I'm not saying it's apples to apples, but we talk about the importance of having those guys, those sort of guys, these, okay, you get the information from the manager, you get the information from the coaches, but it's different when you get information for young players from players like that.

How much do you put in that stock into that?

Do you look at, you just said, do you look at the beginning of a season different because of what you said so expertly about the last three seasons?