00:00During this series in St. Louis, it became clear that like, wow, most of the guys on the team have
00:05been sick the last couple weeks. One staff member estimated it's like been 90% of the roster has
00:11been dealing with this thing that was going around. And while nobody wants to use it as an
00:16excuse, every team goes through stretches in a season where there's some sort of bug that goes
00:21around because it's a baseball team and they're around each other every day and flying across
00:25country and whatever. You know, you don't usually see teams have that happen and also are struggling
00:33at the plate. And what Max Muncy pointed out is that the problem beyond just everybody feeling bad
00:39is that when everybody feels bad, there's no joy, right? Like behind the scenes, there's no shenanigans
00:47in the clubhouse. Guys aren't having fun. You're trying to sneak in an extra nap. You're trying to
00:51conserve energy. And then if you're not hitting on top of that, it just creates a bad vibe. And
00:58baseball, even for teams as talented as the Dodgers, can be kind of like a vibe driven thing during
01:04different parts of the year. And if the vibes aren't up, it can be tough to like have success
01:10and snap out of a stretch where, you know, you have, you know, team wide, you're struggling at the
01:14plate. So this is what was really interesting to me about when on Sunday, they brought
01:21broke out this new dropkick celebration, hit celebration thing every time they get on base,
01:27which I'm sure a lot of people will find stupid, but some fans love it, which means when I see
01:32a new
01:33one, I go down to the clubhouse and I put on my reporter's hat and I try to figure out
01:37where it
01:38came from. So in this instance, I'd had seen a clip from the night before when Dalton Rushing,
01:45God love him. He's been great for business this year, strikes out to end the game and is coming
01:53back into the dugout and kind of, I haven't seen exactly what he did. The camera shot doesn't show
01:59like what exactly he did, but somehow his foot ends up, at least it seemed concerningly close to
02:08Yoshidobu Yamamoto's face as Yamamoto's walking the one way through the dugout to go down the
02:14tunnel and rushing is coming back down the stairs. The dropkick celebration may or may not have been
02:21inspired by that moment. The couple of players I asked about it were all very coy. They all had
02:29suspiciously similar responses about how they are just trying to kick away the negativity. But what I
02:35will say is, as I talked to guys in the clubhouse about this the other night, it was laughter in
02:42every conversation where this came up.
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