00:00Game one is tomorrow night, and a little bit of a surprise, right, Craig?
00:04They installed Nick Martinez as the starter for the Tampa Bay Rays
00:12against Mizorowski.
00:15Yeah, what do you think of that move?
00:17Yeah, surprising, yeah.
00:18I mean, you generally think the guy that goes in game one
00:22is the one prepared to go in game seven,
00:24and I would assume that you would want Rasmussen for those three.
00:28But, you know, in knowing a little bit about how this works
00:32and sort of, you know, being behind the scenes,
00:35you know, maybe what it tells you, Scott,
00:38is maybe Kevin Cash had a conversation with Rasmussen.
00:43Maybe Rasmussen is not 100%.
00:45You know, maybe he's 92% right now,
00:48and maybe the Rays think another day will get him to 100%.
00:52So, you know, that happens a lot.
00:54They talk to pitchers, and they ask, and they say,
00:56hey, you know, what would you rather do?
00:58I'm sure the Rays would have preferred to have him go game one,
01:02but let's not, let's get it twisted here.
01:04They're pitching Nick Martinez, I think, for that reason.
01:07It doesn't mean Rasmussen is not great.
01:09It doesn't mean that he's not healthy,
01:10but this is the most he's ever pitched.
01:12And having dealt with this before, you know,
01:14covering the Marlins and Major League Baseball,
01:16these are real things, Scott.
01:18Managers have talks with the pitchers and say,
01:21where are you at?
01:23And they will never admit it.
01:24Why would they give that away to us?
01:26They'll never do that.
01:26But if you're asking me,
01:28I suspect that Rasmussen needs another day before he pitches.
01:31That's it.
01:31Simple and plain.
01:33You know, it's weird, right?
01:34You think, you know,
01:35the World Series is so far away from the ALCS,
01:39in this case, or the NLCS.
01:41And it is.
01:42It's like, for a fan, it's like, oh, my God,
01:43I've got to win another day, another day, another day.
01:45It's true.
01:45Three days, right?
01:46But the dude did pitch Sunday.
01:49So, normally, with four or five days rest, right,
01:52I guess they switch sometimes.
01:53So, this would be on just four days rest.
01:57So, you're right.
01:58Maybe they just said, all right, you know what,
01:59we're going to wait one more day.
02:00It'll be a deal.
02:01It does also move Freddie Peralta back to starting in Tampa.
02:06There was some speculation about how they wanted to avoid him pitching
02:09in Milwaukee, since he's a former brewer.
02:11But I don't know.
02:12I mean, he's a veteran pitcher.
02:13I forget the circumstances, why they traded him to the Mets,
02:17but I don't think it was a bad thing, right?
02:19I don't sense that he would, like, not do well in Milwaukee.
02:23Maybe I'm wrong.
02:24But, you know, they were talking about that on MLB today,
02:28about that was one of the benefits of this,
02:30having a pitch in Tampa versus Milwaukee.
02:32Yeah, I think they, you know, in these sort of situations,
02:35you can go one or two ways.
02:37And it's either you believe that Peralta is going to go to Milwaukee
02:42and have all that emotion, harness it, and stick it to his old team.
02:46Or sometimes, Scott, you think maybe the other way.
02:48Is it just a little too much here?
02:50Should we, you know, protect him from himself against that?
02:53And it does seem like they're going with option two.
02:55Doesn't mean that Peralta couldn't go to Milwaukee and win.
02:59And by the way, there's no, like, bad blood, as you said there.
03:01I mean, simply put, Peralta's contract was coming to an end.
03:05And just like they did with Burns,
03:07they traded him away before his contract was up.
03:10And that was it.
03:11So he costed himself a lot by not pitching certainly well at all.
03:15He was not good with the Mets.
03:16He, by the way, was horrible with the Rays, too, for about three weeks.
03:19And then the Rays finally tinkered enough with him
03:21to get him where he is right now.
03:23And I'm sure that they loved what they saw when he pitched at home.
03:26So my guess is they're just going to what works there.
03:29And, look, the Rays are very smart.
03:31So is Milwaukee.
03:32So who are we?
03:34I guess we could challenge it after the fact.
03:36But these are two of the sharpest teams in baseball, without a doubt.
03:39Oh, without a doubt.
03:40He did pitch there one time this year.
03:42And, you know, as a Met, right, not good.
03:46Seven runs in five and a third innings.
03:48So maybe the base of that.
03:49But he wasn't good all year with the Mets.
03:50Yeah, he was horrible with the Mets.
03:52How do you explain that?
03:54I mean, if you're a Met fan, right, you've got to be so frustrated.
03:59Agreed.
03:59This fight was brutal, brutal.
04:01And yet he was phenomenal.
04:04He was better than the Milwaukee Freddy Peralta with the Tampa Bay Rays.
04:08His last one, two, three, four.
04:11Listen, he went how many starts without allowing two runs or more for Milwaukee?
04:15Throw out the first two, bad outings.
04:18Every outing after that, he had two runs or less except one.
04:23And that's about 10 starts.
04:25I mean, could he have been, like, screwing up that badly that it was so easy to fix a couple
04:32of starts and we know what you're doing wrong?
04:34I mean, amazing.
04:37When he got traded to the Rays, I remember having these conversations that people thought that he was going to
04:42be good with Tampa Bay.
04:43I'm like, well, maybe, but it ain't going to be right away because that's not what happens.
04:46You don't just automatically get a guy and within a week completely change what he does.
04:51You watch it.
04:52You see some of the good, some of the bad.
04:54And, of course, they have this data previous to the Mets.
04:56But what the Rays absolutely did is incorporate more of a changeup.
05:00I mean, that's not something that he was throwing almost at all with the Mets and maybe not even at
05:05all with the Brewers.
05:06But this is why, Scott, the Rays just, they have it figured out.
05:12You know, they know how to get the very best out of their guys.
05:15A great example is this guy who's pitching the ninth inning, this guy Baker.
05:18I was talking to Joe about this last night.
05:20Take a look at Baker's stats for his entire career.
05:22I mean, how could you possibly have projected him be this good?
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