Wow, Tyler Skaggs, long time, no see! How have you been? It's been, what? Three years? I know you were only an intern back then, but we all saw the potential in you back then. There was definitely more than a few people around here who thought we made a big mistake in letting you go. I never would've thought we'd be able to lure you back so soon though. Jerry must really like you, huh?
Well, now that you are back, let me give you the lay of the land. As you no doubt noticed, some things have changed since you were last here. There has been a bit of a management shake up at the top of the company. As I alluded to earlier, Jerry Dipoto is in charge now. Or at least that is what we are supposed to believe, Uncle Arte is still pulling some strings, if you know what I mean. Oh, and Eddie, the guy that originally brought you on board, well, he's gone too. I'm not going too get into it, but there was a bit of messy political thing that went down and he lost. Not our proudest moment as an organization, but what are you gonna do, right?
Anyway, let's not rehash history, let's talk about your future. Sound good?
So the one thing I want you to keep in mind is that we view you as a long-term asset for the organization. We all want you to succeed, but we realize it may not happen right away. Don't get me wrong, we'd love for you to come in here and hit the ground running, but we are fully prepared to send you out to our training facility until that happens. That doesn't mean we have lost faith in you, we just know that you might have to work on some things.
For example, there is some talk that maybe your velocity has dropped off a touch. That has us a little concerned. We've had some of the guys in the mechanics department take a look at your problem and they seem to think that it can be fixed with a few minor adjustments, so nobody is freaking out, but we are going to want to see how those tweaks work out before we promise you anything. You're still just 22, so we aren't going to rush you.
There has also been some grumbling about your numbers last year too. Now, I called in some favors with the nerds in accounting and I've got some good news on that front. Your 4.59 ERA is the thing that has people's panties in a bunch, but the number crunchers tell me that your FIP was much, much lower and that maybe you were just the victim of having an unsustainably high BABIP and low LOB%. Now, I don't have any idea what any of that means, but the nerds assured me that any concerns over your numbers were probably a false alarm, especially since you did that while working in the PCL division and nobody in your job ever succeeds out there.
Alright, that's all I've got for you today. We'll see you in February. Remember, that's just a probationary period. If you can impress upper management, you'll get to stick around, so just keep your nose to the grindstone and we'll see what happens.
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