Simon Mathews

But to the second part of your question, the most important thing I can do is listen.

It's listened to our players.

It's listened to our front office.

It's listened to Blake, listened to our staff, whether it's the strength coaches, medical groups, sports science, R&D, what have you.

And my job is to really truly listen and then be able to sort of amalgamate all of that information and put it to use to help our players.

Yes and no.

Ultimately –

players are going to react and retain information based on their performance, right?

So you can tell a guy in rookie ball that he needs to work on something with this slider.

And if he goes out there and works on it and stinks, even if you're thrilled about the process,

he's going to have his experience of that new slider grip or whatever it is really colored by the fact that he went out and wasn't any good today.

And that just becomes more true at the major league level.

The beautiful thing about the major league level is that we have so many more resources, right?

So before I bring something to a guy, it's my job and our, and our job as a staff and an organization to be pretty darn sure that

that we're at least directionally correct.

And we are, like I said at the beginning, really valuing and celebrating that player's individual gift.

And this is going to be either feeding directly into that or complementing it in a meaningful way, right?

The other fact of the matter is, is like the Washington Nationals are going to have to develop our next really competitive team

um and so there's a little bit of patience uh sort of inherent there right where we if if we're sure it's going to work uh or if we're sure we're moving the ball in the right direction then we can be a little we can withstand a little bit more um short-term difficulty um

while, again, like I said, honoring the fact that the player, the fans, the whole organization is going to really acutely feel success or failure in the moment.