 Why don't you go through the quality control responsibilities that you have taken over? First off, pleasure to join you guys. Appreciate you having me. I'm honestly trying to navigate some of that myself. This process, having started now, having a break and now back in it, I'm really just trying to figure out how I can insert myself in different spaces. This is obviously a very robust operation as it is. So I walked into a really good situation. So really for me, it's been about trying to develop good rapport with our current staff, developing tight lines of communication with our analysts and figuring out just where I can assist. I know a bulk of the role is designed to be around kind of the game planning, picture catcher dynamic and how we can implement information in a more systematic way. And then also on the flip side of that, be able to look backwards at times to review how we're doing. I think most organizations do a really good job from the advanced scouting perspective in terms of putting together really sound plans. But I think there's still a lot of room to figure out how we can do a better job of evaluating how well we do it at actually executing those plans instead of just moving on to the next opponent or the next day, I think as the season speeds up. That's probably more the norm. It's always looking ahead and maybe not as much fact-checking and seeing how well we're actually dealing with our processes. So that's kind of the scope that it's been presented that way and I think that fits kind of what I've done in the past. And so that's a bulk of them. We're trying to navigate that now in terms of what exactly that looks like and there'll be some road bumps, I'm sure, along the way once we actually get into gameplay. But just trying to tie up those processes behind the scenes to make sure that from a catching standpoint specifically, we're making really sound decisions based on the information we have. All right, let's do what both of us love doing. That's talking about catching, breaking down, catching. And give me a little bit of your background because I think I read something that said that you look at the catching position with a fresh set of eyes because you maybe don't have the scar tissue like an old backstop like myself had where we were taught the position one way and that's the only way you can do it, but you see it differently. So can I explain that for me? Yeah, I think it's, I think that the position is changing really rapidly. And I think really the genesis is that is just we now have so much more information that we can utilize to question, to build off kind of existing methods and figure out what were the strengths of what's been done in the past and how can we maybe supplement that with maybe some alternative ideas. So I think that's one thing that's a little bit unique about myself is that I grew up around the position, my dad played briefly professionally as a catcher, left-handed catcher actually for the Portland Mavericks, which is a whole another story, but I've always had this deep rooted passion and interest for the position, but I didn't play it. I was an infielder in high school and college and I played it as a kid, but really my first coaching job, my first major coaching job at the University of Washington, I kind of got just thrust into it and was forced to really learn on the fly and to try to, I tried to look at it from a 360 degree kind of view and evaluate what has been taught traditionally, take the good and then maybe question some things that maybe I didn't have deep rooted biases about, well, this is just how I was taught. So this is how I'm going to teach it. I didn't have those. So I think from that perspective, I got to look at it really from a clean slate. So that's kind of been the approach and it's allowed me to take some deep dives that maybe others would be turned off to because maybe it's so foreign compared to what's been done for a long time, really. Now, during my career, I would always get asked by a lot of people how important certain parts of position were in my mind. And I would kind of grade it out that I felt like my number one responsibility to work with the pitching staff first and foremost, I felt like number two was blocking, number three was probably gonna be throwing out runners and the last piece of the puzzle was receiving. And it's amazing to me now how the game has changed so much. And with your fresh set of eyes on the position, how would you grade those four out and levels of importance? Yeah, I think I'd look at kind of that mindset of being a servant leader and doing everything within your power to get the most out of a particular pitcher and a pitching staff as a whole. I think that still is a foundational piece that is highly valued, right? That will always be highly valued. So if we call that one A, I think one B would be the pitch framing. I think those two things are pretty equal. But the pitch framing thing is really coming to light just with the information that now is available that tells us just how big of an impact this really has on the outcome of a particular bat, a particular inning and a game and as a whole throughout a major league season, it just has tremendous impact in terms of run prevention, greater so than anything else that a catcher can tangibly do on the field. So that's really come to light. I've talked to other catchers, former catchers like yourself, Dan Wilson and pitch framing, just it was never really even talked about. It was receiving was, it wasn't really a thing. It was just, you really just catch the ball and present pitches within the zone just like any other pitch. So it really has come to light in the last probably 10 years or so. And now you're finally seeing, I think the methods are starting to adapt to what we're learning about how valuable this skill is. Yeah, one of the things that we were taught at old school was try to get as low as we possibly could and give a nice low target. And now I'm noticing that guys like yourself are teaching catchers to drop to a knee, get that glove out in front and low and kind of try to steal that low strike. We would always try to steal the pitch in or off the plate, but now it seems like the emphasis is knee down and try to steal the low strike. Yeah, and part of that is, and you're absolutely right, part of that is looking at just the evolution of the strike zone that the physical strike zone has changed over time, you know, from a very wide, you know, horizontal strike zone where you could get two or three balls off the plate. And then those pitches just simply aren't called strikes at the same rate today as they used to. However, the strike zone is relatively the same size. So if it's shrinking horizontally, it's growing vertically. So there's an opportunity to exploit the bottom of the strike zone. And then you're also seeing just trends in terms of how often, you know, we're throwing four seen fastballs to the top. So it's become a much more vertical approach. But generally when you pitch up in the zone, it's to try to induce a swing. You know, that's where we're trying to get swinging this and generally, you know, pitches at the bottom of the zone, we just see a higher frequency of take. So there's a lot of opportunities when you look at just how often pitches end up in that location and then how often they're taken and then couple that with what's changed with the strike zone. And then this kind of newer technique of manipulating the baseball, which is a relatively new thing as well. You know, we've evolved from just kind of catch it and stick it and present the pitch, you know, where it's pitched to trying to manipulate it or move it back towards the strike zone. And I think the cat's out of the bag on that. That's a pretty universal thing that most catchers are employing. So yeah, it's changed from that respect, but the genesis, like you said, is to really try to own or dominate that bottom quadrant of the strike zone just because there's so many opportunities to create additional strikes down there. And as a result, you know, getting as low as possible and yes, in my opinion that these knee down positions aid our guys in doing so. Okay, so knee down would help with receiving and stealing strikes. And I would agree with that. Is it fair for me to question blocking and throwing in a knee down position? Sure, and I think that's the common criticism. And I'll tell you this, from my perspective, you know, I think it could aid guys' ability to block. When you look at just again, the frequency of where balls in the dirt end up and a wide majority of pitches that do end up in the dirt are within the catchers, you know, the width of the catchers' knees. And being in this knee down position, I think allows catchers to aid, they get to stay committed to that bottom third of the strike zone a lot longer where they don't have to make such an early decision about is this ball gonna stay in the bottom of the zone or is it gonna continue on its path to the ground? Thus, I have to work into a blocking position. So what we've really, what we're doing is we're merging our blocking and our receiving positions into the same. So we don't have to make this early distinction about where the pitch is going to finish. And I think that decision is becoming increasingly hard with how hard pitchers are throwing, right? We're throwing harder than we've ever thrown. We're throwing more breaking balls than we've ever thrown. Right, and breaking balls tend to finish in the bottom of the strike zone. And we're throwing better breaking balls in terms of the quality of the movement. So I think blocking in itself is becoming harder than it's ever, and it's not easier, right? So I think one of the benefits of these need-out positions is that we just get to start in our blocking position. And really now we can focus on just tracking the pitch and the duration of its flight without having to try to make that early distinction which often leads to bad decisions where catchers are falling to a knee because they think it might bounce, but it doesn't, right? And they can't capture the pitch very well or vice versa, right? They think it might stay up, but it ends up bouncing and now they would have to rely on trying to pick it. So I think it simplifies it in a lot of ways and just puts catchers in a position where now the only real adjustment they have to do is to turn the glove over. And then the follow-up question is, well, what about pitches that take you laterally? And that's a real thing. And I think it's a fair question. Are we gonna give up maybe a little bit of lateral range? I'm not ready to say yes, because we still work on moving laterally from these positions. But on top of that, it's those big wave sliders that are in the other batter's box. I just don't think catchers block those pitches at a high rate from any position, right? And so trying to kind of eliminate those outlier misses and focus on where do a majority of balls in the dirt end up and it's generally over the plate. And what I've found is that catchers can block those pitches at an increasingly high rate from these knee-down positions because they're not colliding with the baseball. They're just starting in that position. It's a much softer collision with their body and the recovery distance, I think, is shorter. So I think there's a lot of value. From the outside perspective, it looks like we're just kind of punting on blocking and throwing and all we care about is this one skill, but you won't hear that out of my mouth. We care about blocking, we care about throwing, we care about preventing 90 feet. It's all important. We're just trying to do it from our best receiving positions. Music to my ears. And one of the best parts of my job as an analyst tenor and being an ex-catcher is analyzing Gary Sanchez on a day in and day out basis. I mean, we both know how talented this guy is and I watch him sometimes and I'm amazed at some of the things he can do. But then on the flip side, one of the toughest parts of my job is to be critical of Gary when, you know, maybe there are pitches that I think should be blocked or pass balls that happen. With all of that being said, how about the opportunity to work with Gary? I know you're just getting back to summer camp now and you've haven't seen him in a couple of months, but the work that you have done with him already, give me your impressions. It's been outstanding. I think he had, you know, one of the best, if not the best spring trainings from a defensive standpoint in his career. And I think, you know, when I was an outsider, kind of looking in and before I joined the organization, just looking around the league, I thought that this system would really help a guy like Gary Sanchez, where the ceiling offensively is so high. He has the framework to be a complete player. It was just about putting the pieces together and getting him in the right positions that would allow him to do it. And I think we're inching closer to that. I'm really optimistic about the small sample we saw in spring training and then, you know, having now this break that really I think will benefit him, you know, allowing him to kind of take the foundation we laid during spring training, 1.0, you know, and he got to go home and work on that stuff for the last three months and really figure out how he could adapt it to, you know, to fit his current skill set. So I'm really excited to get back to work with him and kind of see where we're at and keep building on, you know, some of the success we saw in spring training.