Only quoting this part here since it's probably the most relevant to today and also it's a pain in the ass to copy transcripts from YT.
We hear a lot that player development is nonlinear. How do you determine when a young player's development is ready to
occur at the big league level versus continuing in the farm system?
Yeah, you want to talk about something where there's art and science, that's definitely one of them. Um, I mean, geez, I've had uh I've had mentors that have trained me that say, "You know what? You should always before you call a player up, ask all your staff if they're ready, and once they all tellyou yes, then wait more." Um, because the big leagues are hard. That's not always the case, right? And sometimes necessity forces your hand. I do think in general, the temptation to undercook is usually what you have to resist because we all want to see these results in the big leagues now.
And you know, you have to train yourself sometimes in seats like mine that look during a game you'll see things. Trust me, we sometimes have the same reactions that. I'm sure our fans do seeing some things on the field. But then you have to train yourself to okay, what does that mean in terms of a decision? If we believed in something yesterday, we probably should still believe it today. Or, you know, samples that are not that large can seem large because you're in it and you're in it emotionally and you care so much about the results that it's really important to make sure you're tackling things with an enormous amount of urgency, but also recognizing that if you take shortcuts, like this game's just too hard for that. Like the game will bring you to your knees even when you're doing everything right. So, if you know that you have left something uncovered and you choose to look past it for a quick fix, like you're usually going to pay a price at some point.
Now, there are some things we cannot prepare players for in the big leagues that they have to live and they have to experience themselves. And it is not necessarily the worst thing if they do experience some failure in the big leagues. To me, it's more just separating when you have that choice, right? When necessity is not forcing your hand, it's separating, okay, there might be some failure we can't anticipate. The highest level of baseball in the world is going to expose people in a way that let's say triple AAA could not. But do we feel like we covered our bases? If we know we are skipping steps when we probably shouldn't and to try to feel as much as we can like we have covered all these areas, we've given the player foundation in these areas, they are going to need to continue growing when they get to the big leagues.
That's something that we're investing an enormous amount of energy in right now is player development doesn't stop just because we push a button and bring you to the big leagues like we need to we need to be among the best at that too is getting at getting players better in the big leagues and the industry's gotten so much better at that and so much better at not viewing these guys as finished products just because they got to the big leagues. So it's not like we think that we have to have them as perfect players before we send them up there, but we just have to look ourselves in the mirror and say, you know, are did we skip steps? Are there things we need to cover at this level? And that's going to be a little bit different for everybody, but the more we can do that, the more confident we can feel in how they are going to be able to handle whatever is going to come at them when we do send them up up top.