The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Joe Espada: This Is Just Baseball, Sometimes Its About Who Wants it More

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Joe Espada: This Is Just Baseball, Sometimes Its About Who Wants It More

Skip, how are things? I'm doing well, guys. Here in Detroit, raining right now. Hopefully clear is up for game time. Hey, my partner here, Ross, is going to do the post-game calling show. Let's pray for a three-hour rain delay. What do you say?

Oh, come on, man. No, no, no, no, no, no. We need this game to start on time. It looks like he's going to be clear for game time. But right now, yeah, it's pretty wet outside. All right. Well, thank you for the weather update. Update on your squad.

Look, you can move the lineup around. You could move guys in and out. You've tried. You've in combination of things. Do you want to chalk this up to dog days of summer? Is this a team-wide funk? Where are you right now, as you've seen your team, unfortunately not be competitive the last couple days?

This is baseball, man. It's August. It's late. Dining through things. you know, the guys are grinding. They're preparing themselves very well now when it's time when the game starts. It's taking us. We having difficulty executing our game plan, which is part of the game.

This is what happens in a long season. Now, our job is to walk in every day with a winning attitude. You know, we're going to do whatever it takes to put ourselves in the best position to win today and not talk about yesterday. You know, today's a new day, and we got, you know, we got honey on the mound. We're going to prepare ourselves to put up height against school bowl. I want to ask this. I know that Jeremy was kind of feeling it this weekend.

I know that you had to leave Christian Hobbier off the mound early on the game on Sunday. Is there any sort of sickness going to the team right now or just a couple of remote guys? You know, just a couple of remote guys. I think, you know, we, there's been like a bug around. Some of these guys, well, you know, they're under the weather a little bit, but that's part of when you are, you know, at home with your family and your kids. And, you know, that's how I consider our clubhouse. This is a family and we're around each other all the time. So some of these stuff is going to spread around.

But right now, you know, things are, the guys are feeling better. And those guys that had the little, we're not feeling well, they're starting to feel better. You know, no one's going to ever question it. They do. They're ridiculous about the game plan, the approach going in. But when the game gets going, are there things like maybe taking a pitch, not taking a pitch, trying to go the other way, not go the other way? Are there little intricacies that maybe you're not seeing right now from this team that maybe you saw earlier in the year? Or am I just trying to get really micro on this, trying to figure out why the team is struggling offensively these days?

You know what? At the end of the day, you have a game plan and sometimes it comes down to the fundamentals of the game. Sometimes it comes down to fighting, grinding, and a bat. Doing whatever it takes, you know, when you get two strikes, hit the ball the other way. You know, it's it, you know, making the starter, you know, work. Let me take a few more pitches. You know, sometimes you've got to do things that are uncomfortable to become comfortable.

So we're trying to do those things. We do it. We've been doing it lately the last couple of games. We have not. It has not work out our way. And sometimes it's about fighting. sometimes it's about who wants it more than the other team. You know, that's the message that we always continue to preach our guys,

that sometimes when things get tough, you've got to be tougher. You have to fight. And, you know, the fights in there, it just things haven't gone our way the last two or three games. You mentioned maybe taking some more pitches as far as an approach. And we kind of talked about when ESOc Paredes went down, that that was a big piece of the lineup that was missing. But what exactly, what does that mean like in practice? You just talk to guys because you want guys to stay within themselves, but maybe be more patient. But also if the guys out there throwing strikes, you can't just sit there and take pitches.

Correct. But another thing is, you know, they're not always going to throw strikes. That's the part of the game that, yes, the guy's throwing strikes. But once they're ahead in the count, they're just not going to continue to throw the ball in the box. So it's also recognizing where they go with their misses, what pitches do they want us to chase when they're ahead. and if we are overly aggressive, now we see pitches that we normally don't swing at, pitches are on the edges that we usually take.

We're chasing because we find ourselves on our heels. And so that's the balance when it comes to having an approach. We know we have the tendencies of the pitchers. We have faces, pitchers in the past. Now it's us staying within ourselves, not trying to do too much, trust the plan, and fight through our bat. And that's what leads you to good offensive games like we saw in that series against the Yankees, against the Red Sox in Miami, where we grind it.

And we got the starters out of the game in four or five innings. And we need to kind of go back to that. And we saw some of that yesterday, Fralerti, where he was high pitch counts to three or four innings. And we were right there. And then things just got out of, just got out of our hands. Astroo's manager Joe Espada was here on a sports talk 790. What did you see that you like from Spencer Arrogatti yesterday? And what does he need to improve on?

You know what? I think the last, you know, every start he's gotten better. He's gotten better. He's stuff's gotten better yesterday. The first two innings, it was a ton of strikes, sweeper, fastball, through some really good changes against some lefties. So you started seeing the signs of the Spencer that we've seen in the past now is once you get into the middle, middle of the game and you start building up the pitch

count, you know, the 60, 70 pitches, keeping the quality of pitches going, you know, limiting the walks, you know, they're falling behind hitters. That's when hitters kind of capitalize, the same way we do against our opponents. When we start seeing the pitch count go up, our bats get better, he's just got to be able to, you know, finish some of those hitters up. Joe, I've tried to avoid getting into a deep injury conversation with you because it's a broken record, unfortunately. And I want to talk about one player.

We've not talked about a lot. It's going to be playing today for the Corpus Christi Hooks and that Jordan Alvarez. Yeah. Can you definitively, and maybe there's not a definitive answer to it, what do you want to see? What is the game plan from an organizational standpoint to say, okay, all this time away, the rehab, going down to West Palm, it's all paid off. He's coming up here. He's going to play for you. You're going to put him in the heart of your lineup.

And hopefully he stays healthy the rest of the season. Yeah, you know what, for me, to be honest, I really not looking at the outcome of the game, like performance-wise. You know, I'm not looking for him to go there and get three or four hits today. I just want what comes after the game, how he feels post-game and how he feels tomorrow morning. If he feels good and he's able to play tomorrow Wednesday, I'm feeling great. So for me, I'm not really looking at how many at bats, the quality of a bath, your done is a great hitter. All I want to hear that Joey felt good.

I'm ready to go tomorrow. And then we can continue to move forward and building him up to get him back at some point. Do you want him in the outfield at all during this time down there? Or does that come when he comes to see you? You know, one day at a time. Right now he's going to DH. And we are focusing on just trying to get as many as a batts we can. You know, if we put him in the outfield, which we probably would during this rehab.

The problem with that will be if we, you know, he hasn't played on the field for a few months. So if he's six innings and he needs to come out of the game because of the length of the game, he could miss out on a few of bats. And I want him just to try to get as many as the best as possible. And the best way to do that is you deach and you lead him off and just let them control the volume of swings and the volume of. of the game has he goes in that DH spot. If he feels good and we could get him in the outfield, let's go for it. But right now, DH, let's try to get as many as the bats as possible. I want to make sure that he feels good post-game and tomorrow morning.

A couple more minutes here with Joe Espada from Detroit Astros and Tigers here tonight on Sports Talk 790. You lost Josh Hater for the regular season. You've got Brian Obrayu now is your closer. To me, the indirect effect of that is, I think Brian Obrayu's got closer. He could probably close for 90% of the teams around baseball. You're now going to be asking some guys that were your fifth, six inning, mid-leverage guys to be in some higher spots. And I think right now you're kind of thirsty to find that guy

that wants to take that seventh inning from anybody in this Astrosolpin. And we've had guys that have shown capabilities of doing that. But you're right. You know, they're going to be exposed to more of those big moments the next six weeks. and I know that they're capable of doing that. They have shown the toughness and the ability to do it. You know, but it's different now when we get to August, September, right?

The stage becomes much larger, and now it's us helping them manage that volume, those big innings, those big moments, because we know that they have this stuff is the toughness to do it. It's just making sure that they know how to do it. do it day and day out. Did Chaz McCormick making his bid? Is he telling you he wants to close it? Games out?

You know, I take my heart to Chas because he understand the situation that we've been the last two days. For sure. And as a professional, man, he's like, Joe, I understand. I get it. I go out there and do it. You know, he's not a pitcher, and we all know that, but he's a team,

he's a team player. As a class act, what he's doing. and I have a lot of respect for him for doing what, you know, what he's done the last few days. And hopefully we never have to see him anymore this season on the mound, I'd be honest with you, Skip. That will be great. Thanks, Joe, for the time as always. All right, guys.

You'll see you. Joe Spotted with us from Detroit.