 Hello again, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Yes, We're Here. I'm Jack Curry, and today I'm delighted to be joined by friend, colleague, but most importantly in this scenario, co-author of Full Count, David Cohn, and, David, we're celebrating an anniversary. It's been a year since this book came out, so happy Full Count anniversary. Yeah, same to you, Jack. I gave you a lot more credit. Co-authors is being very generous in my mind. You did Yeoman's work trying to bring all this together over the years, and a lot of great stuff in this book, and I think it's weathered pretty well over the year. Jack felt pretty proud of the efforts that we both put into it. I did want to ask you a couple of questions before we get to some fan questions. We did 42 interviews, and I'm not lying when I say to you that every time we finished an interview, whether it was face-to-face, over the phone, even an email or a text, I would say to my wife, Pamela, man, I just learned so much about pitching. This is going to be so good. I can't wait to get this in the book. This was a personal journey for you. You were kind of opening up some veins and telling me all those stories. When those interviews were done, what were you thinking in that immediate moment? Yeah, it's almost as if when you relive those moments, a lot of times you can fill in the blanks and things that you forgot about, and then the stories become much more clear, and certainly the circumstances and the events that lead up to a certain chapter in the book really kind of jogged my memory. I'm sure that's the case with a lot of people that go back over their careers and try to remember certain stories. So yeah, I was really surprised. One thing would lead to the other, as you know, Jack, and then I'd go off into a different rabbit hole, and well, if we're going to go down this rabbit hole, then we've got to explain things a little bit. Just one thing led to another, and it really felt like it was kind of raw at times and came from the heart in directions that I didn't think either one of us anticipated happening. You did an interview, actually we did it together, where you said it started out as a pitching journey and it became a personal journey, and I totally agree with that. Two quick anecdotes I wanted to share with you. I gave a copy of this book to Garrett Cole in Spring Training, and we know how intelligent a pitcher he is, and he made my year, and I told him this, when the next day he came up to me and said, I've read four chapters, I can't put it down. You guys did such a great job. That's the first anecdote. And then the second one was, when you had your 20 year anniversary of the perfect game event in Manhattan last summer, your dad came up to me and said, I just want to let you know, I know every step of my son's career. I know everything that he endured. And within this book, you captured his voice. I felt as if David wrote every word. And that was the other stamp of approval. I said, Mr. Cohn, please don't say anything more than that. You've just made my night. Yeah, I know, and of all people, that would be Eddie Cohn. Eddie Cohn would definitely know every step of the way. Ed and Joan Cohn, I talk about him a lot to you, Jack. I talk a lot about them on the air whenever I get a chance. Joan Cohn, the sabre nutrition and the scorekeeper. And of course, Eddie Cohn's style of coaching. So yeah, he would know. And he said that to me as well. I think some of those stories helped him relive some of those events of the past. So I threw this out on social media, and I was happy I got a lot of feedback. So I picked some of the best questions. And I said to folks, ask David a question about pitching about the book. And Fred Feb said, you guys mentioned fans in the stands in the book, like David's family and the Cohn heads. When David was in the moment, could you feel the fans rooting for you or against you, and what kind of edge or disadvantage did that give you? Yeah, I definitely felt it, Jack. And I learned early on in my Met's career. And a lot of it had to do with Andrew Levy, who I didn't know at the time, who now runs my foundation. But he was up in Shea Stadium with Cohn heads on. And it became kind of a national phenomenon, at least it was shown on the news highlights. And the next thing you know, you started to look for them. And you know, you felt it. And then the crowd got into it. So from an early point in my career, I realized how much foresight that the New York baseball fans had. You know, they anticipated the flow of the game. When you got two strikes on a hitter and you got on a run, you know, they started to chant for strikeouts. So I fed on that really my whole career. And it's really a lesson I learned from my early Met's days. Julian G, I met this young man at the Winter Meetings and aspiring sports journalist. He wants to know what was the most difficult part of maintaining your perfect game? You know, managing the anxiety, you know, in between innings, the anticipation, the dead times that allow your mind to kind of wander. And that's when that's when doubt kind of sets in. That's when you start, you know, I described as the good angel and the bad angel, you have positive and negative thoughts. And the more dead time you have, and the less people you have to actually talk to because of superstition, the more those kind of thoughts are prone to creep into your head. So I had a lot of that going on. So I think that was probably the toughest part. It was just the mental battle of battling the anxiety, fighting off the negative thoughts and just trying to have tunnel vision and simplify your thoughts and narrow your focus, I think is the challenge really for any athlete. We've got an interloper here, Justin Shackle. This guy's a pro. He's been on the Yes Network. We see him at Yankee Stadium, but Justin's a very talented young man. And he said throughout the book, David always talked about different ways to get hitters out. Justin wants to know what new age approach would you like to try if you were still pitching today? You know, I would love the numbers. You know, I've talked about, you know, these pitching labs, the biomechanic labs that they put together now. I see like every pitching coach is an expert in biomechanics or at least putting together a laboratory for pitchers to be evaluated. You know, it's like a golfer getting fitted for clubs. You have a launch monitor, they measure your swing speed, your launch angle, the spin rate on your ball. I would love all that stuff with my pitching because that's how you design pitches, Jack. You could actually take spin off of a splitter and get, you know, and kind of tinker with your splitter and get immediate feedback based on the analytics that you're getting and, you know, the spin rate models that you can get on any pitch you throw. Curveball, sliders, variation between pitches. I think you can have all that measured so much more accurately nowadays that you can really design pitches off of each other now. And, you know, we used to call it tunneling, you know, now it's, you know, it's sort of just having all your pitches come in on the same plane and then breaking off in different angles, you know, having that information, I think would help you design, you know, pitches. And that's my wheelhouse, spinning a baseball, being creative, you know, developing new looks and new pitches. I think I would be enamored with that analytic ability nowadays. Kristen Alexander, David, she wants to know what coach or teammate helped you most get back in the zone after a mound meeting? No, once again, I got to go back to the early days, because I think you're more influenceable when you're a younger player or a rookie or your first couple of years in the big leagues. But for me, it was Keith Hernandez, you know, he was at first base and he would just bark at me. It could be a one or two word statement that he'd make at me or yell to me on the mound. It would just snap me right in, right into it. Or he'd actually come to the mound and say, look who's on deck, anticipate the flow, you know, and don't give it to this guy. It's okay if you walk this guy, don't let this guy beat you. He just, he made you think one step ahead, you know, constantly. And that was a great lesson to learn when you were young. Yusuke Shirakata, very active on Twitter. He wants to know, as great as you were as a pitcher, is there a particular skill you wish you had, not just increased velocity, something else you wish you had in your arsenal? You know, I really wish I had a super slow changeup, you know, and I look at some of the great changeup pitchers. Pedro Martinez had a great changeup, although it was almost a screwball the way it had action on it and had fading action. I think a true straight changeup that, you know, that you could really take a lot of speed off of your pitch, but yet spin it and he get the rotation, you know, really tight on it and work that off a fastball. That'd be the one thing I'd really wish that I could have developed. David, I'm going to close it out with Buzzsaw191 and I think I'm actually going to handle this one. He writes, I learned more about pitching in baseball than any other baseball book I've read. Awesome read. How come this book wasn't written sooner? So I'm going to say, I didn't ask David early enough. And then once we did do it, I kind of wrote slowly. We wanted to make sure it was perfect. I think we got it to a point where we were really happy with it. As we close this out, David, I absolutely want to thank David Black, Sean Desmond, family members like my wife, Pamela, anybody you want to throw a shout out to that helped make sure that this became a reality. And by the way, this is only staying up for the interview. I don't think that that's up there all the time. I don't want you to get a big act. It's pretty good right there. Send it my way. I'll put it on my wall afterwards. Now this book doesn't get, this book doesn't happen without you, Jack. You're the, you were the impetus behind it. You pushed it, you made it, you saw it through. We've known each other for so long that we had such a great working relationship right from the start. Andrew Levy obviously did some help behind the scenes and still does to this day. But yeah, all the names you mentioned, Jack, as well as you, this is really a tribute to you. And you know what, it was because of your efforts that it cracked the New York Times bestseller list the first week out. Connie, it's always great to catch up with you. I look forward to seeing you in a ballpark or a booth sometime soon. Absolutely. Good talking to you.