Today’s Angelo Cataldi and Gabe Kapler discussion was straightforward, no nonsense radio, just really good back and forth about a variety of Phillies topics dating back to last Friday.

I thought there might be some lingering resentment after the contentious argument over Jean Segura’s lack of hustle and the Andrew McCutchen injury, but nope, nothing. Cataldi did not bring up the Rhys Hoskins and Bryce Harper pop-up play from earlier this week, and instead just did a basic Q/A type of interview touching on these topics:

  • Jay Bruce playing left field
  • Scott Kingery in 2019 vs 2018, plus his viability as an everyday center fielder
  • Nick Pivetta’s improvement
  • Jerad Eickhoff to the bullpen
  • using relievers as starters (Gabe doesn’t ‘love’ doing it)
  • Bryce Harper trying to steal home and what the analytics say about it
  • did Kapler ever try to steal home in his playing days?
  • 13 home runs on Monday night, how do you fix it?
  • David Ortiz being shot in the Dominican Republic

The most interesting answer I think was in regard to bullet point six. Kapler said this about stealing home, after the jump:

“The first thing we do to measure that is we take a time of the pitcher out of the wind up. If you have a runner on third base, the pitcher elects to pitch out of a wind up instead of out of the stretch, we have a stopwatch on him. And we get a good sense of how long it takes for him to deliver a ball. So if a pitcher gives us three and a half seconds, we know there’s a chance we can take that plate, if we get a really good jump, if the third baseman is playing off the bag a little bit and we can get that lead.

I think the most important thing to consider is how many strikes are on the hitter. So the hitter has to be able to take the pitch comfortably and see the runner out of the corner of his eye. I think the reason we were concerned with Bryce is with two strikes on Rhys Hoskins, if he had tried to stay in and foul a pitch off, perhaps that ball goes down the third base line and hurts Bryce, so we thought it was a bit overaggressive. But the way he’s played the game since he’s been with is nothing short of all out hustle, aggressive, grit, and we love it. Almost always the aggressiveness has played well.”

Here’s the play in question, for reference:

And here’s the full audio of a very good, straightforward interview! –