Speaker 1: All right, let's spend ten minutes with Brian bogus Sevic. Brian,
I'm gonna be brutally honest with you. I did not
watch the pre or postgame shows last night. Were you
on them?
Speaker 2: I was not?
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't feel nearly as bad. Then maybe that's it.
Maybe a game. What is your winning win loss record
when you're doing the pre and postgame shows, because at
this point three singles ain't gonna cut it in Northern California.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we're at the point to where we
just start searching for anything. If it's me working late,
I guess I have to do my part. But I
if that might be as good of an answer as anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just really exasperated is in the term, because look,
this has been a team that has really struggled offensively
for much of the season, much of the because of
the inconsistents in the lineup. But how do you balance?
Don't change who you are, be the same type of
player you are. But at the same time, Bogie, you're
down to a week, you're trying to hold on to
some sort of postseason aspirations, and you mustard not much
of an offense yesterday against a very mid Oakland lineup.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's kind of been the story of the
second half or second two thirds or whatever it comes
out to be. Is just I mean, the offense looking
not it's the least dangerous that the offense has felt
in some time. And you know, we've seen very short
spurts where it looks like they're putting it together, but
on the whole, it just seems like opposing pitchers, regardless
of who we're facing, you know, in the division, out
of the division, it just seems like the league had
generally accepted a plan where you know, they know how
they want to go out and attack this lineup, and
there aren't, you know, adjustments being made, and it's just,
you know, it's you're getting beat by what looks like
an inferior matchup on paper.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you this, This is a tough one.
Is there any defeatist mode up and down that lineup?
Is that this season wasn't meant to be? I mean,
you still largely control your own destiny. I know you're
now down a game in the WALLD card, but has
that started the sink in a little bit? Can you
see it? Or is that is it still for you
and I and Ross here, we're eighteen or miles away
from that team. We can't make that kind of decision
our assessment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I don't think so. I mean, I think
you've got you've got guys in the clubhouse. You know,
as long as as long as they're mathematically still in it,
that they have a chance and nobody's gonna you know,
go and kind of you know, give up before it's over.
But I also think that they they you know, you
have to have a little bit of realist in you
and realize just you know, for an extended period of time,
it's been a struggle. Certainly offensively, there's been fige with
the number I saw the other day as like one
hundred and forty eight or one hundred and forty nine
different lineup combination, So that just speaks to how how
many guys have been in and out of the lineup,
whether it be injury or performance wise. So yeah, it's
definitely probably set in that you know, this is not
nothing's going to click and all of a sudden we're
going to be an offensive juggernaut. I think everybody certainly
realizes that. But you also have enough guys in that
lineup who you know we're looking at looking at what
is now a five day season. There you can get
a couple guys hot in five days and then they
can carry a lineup and you can score enough runs
to get yourself in. It's certainly not out of the
realm of possibility.
Speaker 1: Brian bogasvok with us here on seven to ninety and
hopefully this is not our last appearance of the season.
But Bogey, we're going to look at a macro view
of this team in Christian Walker. Obviously a lot of
folks were excited about the replacement at first base. This
team has been looking for that solid offensive production, maybe
since the last few years of Yearly Guriel. Obviously the
Jose Brave situation did not work out. He never was
going to be a two ity five hittery here, But
it just feels like there have been two or three
games where like, oh, he's going to turn the corner
and then it's a one for eleven or it's a
two for nineteen. When you look at a macro stance
of him. What went wrong for Christian Walker this season?
Speaker 2: Well, I think first and foremost, he got into a situation,
you know when you're when you're a hitter and you
start off slow, you're always kind of doing the math
in your head of Okay, you know, I started off
and I'm hitting two hundred after fifty at bats, so
I need to do whatever over my next one hundred
and fifty to get it leveled out. And he got
to a point to where he was so far underwater
it was never going to get back to where he
wanted it to be or where he expected it to be.
And that can be a really frustrating thing because you know,
you're sitting all of a sudden, you know, three hundred
at bats in, four hundred bats in, and you've got
a lot of season left, and it's already kind of
feel like, all right, this is this is a season
that's a failure, and it's just never gotten to the
point to where it looks like he's been comfortable with himself.
You know, there's been times and the backs have gotten
more consistent, and you think, all right, this is the
guy that we expected to see, and then it goes away.
I think a lot of you know, the biggest thing
from a whatever the mechanical standpoint or whatever, is just
the inconsistency, the hitting fastballs and especially elevated fastballs, and
it seems like a hole that got exposed and never
got closed up. So I think that's probably the one
thing that you can look tough and say, hey, that's
that's what needs to be fixed moving forward. But I
think just from a seasonal standpoint, it just felt like
it got so far away from him early that just
from a mental standpoint, it felt like almost a lost
season before the season was over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you mentioned the high fastballs, and I mean, it
feels like anybody who is watching these games Christian Walker
has to know what the hitting coaches know it, everybody
knows it. What and you mentioned like, so what what
can be done?
Speaker 1: Is that? How can that get fixed?
Speaker 2: Well? You can. You can look at it two different ways.
You can look at it from a mechanical standpoint, right
find find what's caused extra length in your swing or
a drop off in bat speed. Are you muscling up
swinging too hard, are you getting long in the back
and you're not getting the barrel out front and try
to close it up and then be able to attack
that pitch. Or you can look at it from an
approach standpoint and say, you know, if I can't hit it,
I got to lay off of it, and then you
just try to make that an area that you're not
going to go after pitches until you have to with
two strikes. But that also changes the fact that you
have to then be more aggressive and overly aggressive two
pitches further down in the zone or off speed pitches
in the middle of the zone earlier in you're at
bat so you can try to attack it one or
the other or a combination of both. But you know,
if you can't hit it, you got to not swing
at it.
Speaker 3: And you mentioned now, Brian Bogas have a cool this
here on Sports Talk seven nine. You mentioned just seeming
a lack of offensive adjusts because you're right, the walker
four seamer, we're seeing Yaner Diaz still swinging at everything
out of the zone, same thing for Josel two va.
I mean, what can be done, especially there's been a
lot of talk and we've been talking about it basically
add nausea in the last couple of weeks Brian about
the hitting coaches and the offense has been bad, and
Alex Intron and Troy Snicker the offensive have been successful
with him there. But is it a situation where these
guys are are not making the proper adjustments for the lineup.
Speaker 2: I don't think though. I mean, hitting coaches are very
involved in game planning, but you know, game planning has
to do yes with the pitchers that you're facing and
how you want to, you know, combat what they're throwing
at you. But you also have to make a game
plan that's tailored to hitters that you have. And the
fact of the matter is is that they have a
disproportionate amount of very aggressive hitters. And if you're going
to ask those guys to go up there and try
to be something that they're not, you're not doing anybody
any favors. And you know, use Altuve as an example.
He's always been an overly aggressive hitter. He's always swung
a pitches out of his zone at times. But when
you have him being bracketed in a lineup by Alex
Bregman and Michael Brantley, you can live with that and
it doesn't show up as well. But when you have
a lineup that as you go further down, there's a
lot of aggressive hitters. Jeremy Paine is a very aggressive hitter.
Yan Or Diaz is a very aggressive hitter, and then
you get down to the bottom of the order, and
now you're talking about young guys that are just trying
to survive or just find their footing. You can't ask
them to be the ones that go out there and
just drag out at bats and fight pitchers down to
two strikes. So it just seems like there's a little
bit of an imbalance in terms of style of hitter,
and that's something that you know, you can't really work
around what you don't have.
Speaker 1: Last question, Bogie, if you are Joe Espata and you
are down to five games left of the season, and
part of what a clubhouse has to be is it
has to be even keeled for one point sixty two.
But clearly this has been a different kind of clubhouse
the last couple of months because there's so many guys
going in and out of there. How does he treat
the pregame rituals, the film study, the pregame visits, the
talk to the guys at the hotel during the week thing.
Knowing that if you can put something together here against
two subpar teams, you got a better than fifty fifty
chance of making the playoffs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think from a pre game, before
the game, routine stuff. Everything is generally the same. Everybody
knows what that stake, everybody knows where you're at in
the season. I think where it does change is in game.
There's no longer long leashes for anything. There's no longer
you know, feelings to be accounted for when you're making moves.
If a guy looks like he doesn't have it coming
out of the bullpen, you get somebody going immediately and
it's going to be three batters and the next guy's
coming in. So I think in terms of getting ready
for the game, you know, you trust that you have
guys who know how to get ready. You have guys
who've gone deep into the posting, and you have guys
who know what it takes to win. They'll be to
get themselves ready. But when it comes to managing the game,
that's where it's different, and that's where more of a
sense of urgency and maybe a little bit of risk
taking is going to come into play.
Speaker 1: Hopefully, my friend, we are visiting next Wednesday. Thank you
for the time as always, all right, I hope so guy,
Thanks Brian Bogasvic and he's with us from our good
friends at Space City Home Network not working this series.
We need him for Anaheim Rossi