 Welcome to Yes, We're Here. I'm Meredith Moracovitz, alongside James Paxton, who's hanging out in Wisconsin right now. James, first and foremost, how are you? How are your family right now? We're doing good. We're healthy, luckily. Everyone's doing well. We're just hanging out, waiting patiently to get our lives back going again like everybody else. Now, Erin Boone mentioned the other day when I talked to him that you've been throwing bullpens already. How many bullpens have you thrown, and how is that back feeling? Oh, man, I think I've thrown probably 12 to 14 bullpens. It's feeling really good. Back is a non-issue. I feel totally healthy, so I'll be ready to go as soon as the season comes about. Even though you had said, even when we were in spring training, that you were feeling better day by day, when you threw that first bullpeng, was there any prepidation wondering how the back was going to feel afterwards? Oh, yeah, for sure. I was nervous going into it. I was feeling really good playing catch, so that was a really good sign. But it's always different when you get off the mound. So I was really interested to see how I was going to feel the next day, and it turned out feeling really good. I never really had too many issues with the back after I kind of got going. But it's been getting better and better. The velocity is getting better and better, breaking balls and stuff like that, getting a feel for my pitches. So everything's going really well. Do you change your approach at all, the way you go about your business, because you're coming off of a surgery like that? I have some new routines that I do pre-workout and pre-bullpeng now, just to make sure that back is nice and loose and activated. The muscles are all activated, so there's a little bit of pre-work that goes into it. But right now, it's just kind of maintenance stuff. I think I'm back to full strength. If a season was ready to start tomorrow, or spring training would be ready to start tomorrow, I'd be ready to be just like one of the other guys and do all the regular stuff. Now I'm just curious, if you're throwing bullpens, that means somebody has to be catching. So who did you enlist as your partner to help you out? Well, I'm lucky. I have a friend here that has a private facility, baseball facility, and I have some workout equipment in there that I'm able to work out with. And it's called Turn 2 Sports here. And he gets down, he plays catch with me five days a week, and we throw two bullpens a week. Now, Matt Blake spoke a lot during spring training about how they were incorporating all this new technology, the cameras for the pitchers. Have you been in correspondence with him at all? Have you been sending him any video? We have been talking, and I have been sending him video of my bullpens and stuff like that. Unfortunately, I don't have the same kind of technology that they have down in spring training or even in New York to track my pitches and spin rate and all that interesting stuff. I did, there is a ball we have here that tracks spin rate to a degree. And I have been working on a few things to increase my spin rate, and I've seen some good results there. So continuing to try and improve over this time, even though we're not playing. James, how do you change that? How do you tinker around to increase your spin rate? Well, for me, what I found was how I hold the ball, how I hold my fastball. I'm trying to hold it a little bit differently with less contact on my thumb, because I guess that's supposed to kind of like put some drag on the ball. So I've been trying not to touch my thumb as much to the ball, and I have this like, pitch hiker's thumb, you can see. So I kind of hold it with this part of my thumb instead of this part. And I've been noticing some more spin and backspin when I throw the ball. I have to imagine when you first tried that, it's a little bit awkward. Does it take a while to feel confident about changing that a little bit? Yeah, it was a little bit weird. I know, I've heard guys say that when you tuck your thumb underneath the fastball, that's when you get the most spin, but I just have no feel for the balls going when it's there. So I still have kind of that guiding thing with my thumb here, but because I still have my thumb on the ball, I have that pad of my thumb off of the ball. I still experienced some increase in spin, which has been fun to see. How anxious are you to face hitters again? Oh, I can't wait. You know, I'm really excited to get back out there, feel the adrenaline, getting some competition. It'll be great once we get going again. How much have you been keeping up with guys on the team? I've talked to a few. I've been talking to Garrett, a decent amount, and Zach Britton and some other guys. Seems like everyone's kind of in the same boat, just trying to stay as ready as possible for whenever something can get going. It seems like for you that might be even more difficult, the fact that you're coming off the injury, trying to get yourself back in shape, get yourself where you want to be. How do you gauge your workouts, not knowing when that start date is going to be? Well, I think I'm just trying to continue to progress. You know, at some point, it will be a bit of a holding pattern because you can only go so far when you're not facing, you know, getting into a live game and facing other teams and getting that adrenaline going, but I'm still trying to create more and more feel for my breaking balls. Working on a changeup is actually coming out pretty good right now. And just continuing to work on the repeatability of my delivery and my location of my pitches and everything. And as far as amount of throws, you know, I've got to the point where I'm throwing a bullpen and then I'll do like two mock innings. I've had some guys come in and stand in so I kind of can see what a hitter looks like in the box and run through some counts and stuff like that to try and get myself as ready as possible. Now we saw a video of Garrett Cole playing catch with his wife. Did you ever try to convince your wife, Katie, Joe, to stand in just so you have somebody if those guys aren't available, stand in the batter's box for you? I don't think she'd be too comfortable standing in but we did play a little bit of catch. And we played catch quite a bit actually for about a week and then her arm got sore and she was like, all right, I'm done. You can't have her get injured on top of it during this quarantine period. Exactly. It does look like you and your family are having some fun trying to make lemonade out of lemons. What have you guys been up to with social media and just gathering? You guys seem to be laughing and having a good time. Yeah. Well, Katie's kind of got into doing some TikTok videos. I know it's been a little bit since her last one but she got into doing some of those. She's been practicing in the kitchen and I've been her video guy to get some of those on camera for her. We got bikes, we bought bikes and we've been going for bike rides around town here and stuff and trying to keep ourselves busy. Would you consider yourself a TikTok master yet? Absolutely not. I barely know what I'm doing. I don't even know what I'm doing with Instagram. Katie tells me she has to teach me how to do Instagram because I did a couple podcasts and I put one out on my Instagram the other day and she was saying, oh, you need to learn how to put the link on there so people can just press it and go to it. And I'm like, I have no idea what that is. So I'm still learning and all that technology stuff. Well, keep the stories coming. I know the fans love to hear from you and they love to see what all of you guys are up to. Thank you so much for joining me. Stay safe and I hope to see you at the ballpark soon, James. You bet. Same to you.