Aaron Civale

"...

Colin Ray, Aaron Civale, like you guys are going, and-"

You may have to.

"...

Yeah.

Let's bring him in here, right? And maybe there's other guys along with Peterson.

But in addition to that, I do feel like, Brendan, right now with Ryan Rolison, Zephyr John, and Daniel Palencia primarily, in addition to the starters, long guys like Javy Assad and Aaron Civale, depending on how you wanna, uh, flesh that out, I feel like they have a group that can figure out how to get 27 outs.

Like, before I turn it to you, last seven outings for Ryan Zephyr John, five and a third, six hits, just one earned run, three walks, seven strikeouts, good for a 1.69 ERA.

Uh, Zephyr John seems to be in a much better place.

Uh, Aaron Civale is kind of finding a role here as well.

Uh, and Ryan Rolison finally got some strikeouts, which he had not had in a while.

Uh, even without those strikeouts, he just isn't giving up a lot in general.

It just doesn't make sense to me.

But the bullpen does finally seem to, like-- It seems like you have three or four guys that you can trust right now, and I don't, you know.

Uh, I did not expect to be thinking about Aaron Civale in those terms, but, uh, here we are.

Uh, we'll see what Jacob Webb can do and, and if he can, uh, [laughs] if he can bounce back.

Uh, and slowly but surely, I think Zephyr John is starting to get some believers.

Uh, Civale in the eighth inning on Saturday was really interesting.

Um, a lot of things happening with this bullpen that I think are interesting.

Uh, Palencia's probably the most important, though.

And, you know, Counsell's other main idea was, like, you never have the bullpen figured out.

Like, [chuckles] they still have to go out there and perform, and their performances are, like, inherently volatile and unpredictable and just, you know, um, influenced by these small samples in high-pressure situations.

It's interesting, um, you know, if Civale is gonna be this high leverage guy now, if Palencia's back, Zephyr John feels a little more stable, and then you have Rallison as the number one lefty.

I mean, you kind-- That's-- It's not dominant yet.

Let's move on, though, to the final leaderboard, the final level that we're going to be talking about improving pitchers, and that is pitching plus, which is, of course, the, do we call it a black box model, I suppose? The, the, the fancy new wave pitching analytics that have been around now for a few years, which look at things on a pitch by pitch level and ignore the actual results, and they say, "What, what did you throw? How hard was it? How did it move? From what angle? And where did it go?" Uh, this is certainly a useful way of looking at pitchers, but I think we can tell right from the first name on this list that it's a little bit harder to figure out just how useful.

Uh, that first name being Aaron Civale.

We can get to him in a minute.

The rest of these names, though, are pretty similar to a lot of the names we've already talked about.

Maybe that's just blind faith in a more old-school approach, but I don't think that's what's going on here.

Let's talk, though, about some of these pitchers who did make big leaps forward in pitching plus, and if it did or did not come with big leaps forward in the other categories.

Aaron Civale up 15 points.

I think this is the first time I've said Aaron Civale's name this year, not just on a podcast, but period.

The guy could have pouted, said he wanted-- he could have said he wanted to be traded or whatever.

Could have pulled a Aaron Civale.

He didn't.

He stuck with it.

Um, last night, uh, looks, oh, yeah, 40.

So Civale went 45, threw 45 pitches on Sunday.

Asad went, had 30 last night.

Home at night, four of seven.