Ross Atkins

And it's... Everyone loves attention to be seduced and the thought of coming into Yankee Stadium and coming into the Met Stadium and being essentially serenaded.

You know, that... He's human.

Yeah.

So those things were going through my head.

Like, okay, you know, we'll see how he handled this.

But I did believe, because of his desire to be a Blue Jay, that we were...

more likely to be getting something done than not.

Yeah, and the thing that's interesting about Vladdy is I've known him well for 10 years.

Yeah.

So he wasn't going to fool me, and I wasn't going to fool him.

As we were having heart-to-heart interactions, and in the end, I had to believe what I was hearing and seeing and feeling.

Yeah, I mean that – I think there's several layers to that.

Just Jeff as a player, he was a former Blue Jay.

We had – I didn't know him.

He was drafted the year before that I got here and then was – or he was traded the year before I got here.

He was drafted a couple years before.

But –

We knew people that knew of him, and then certainly we had scouted him and followed him and had a good feel for the competitor, the person, the teammate.

The way that his stuff turned around when he went into the pen, that arsenal's unique to be able to get right-handed, left-handed hitting out so effectively, the swing and miss, and just the compete.

We had conviction that that was a very good fit.