00:00Ben Rice has been arguably the MVP in the American League so far,
00:05and he's been fine at first base.
00:07Not quite as good as Goldschmidt, but fine at first base.
00:10Why can't he be a catcher?
00:12Because when he has caught, he's looked okay.
00:15Yeah, he's definitely capable of the catching part of it.
00:19Part of it was in spring training, we just couldn't do it with some of the workload,
00:23and he was just getting kind of run down going back and forth.
00:27So I didn't get a chance to really catch him in games in spring training,
00:31even though he was doing catching drills and catching work and catching pens
00:36and things like that.
00:37But we also were prioritizing getting him ready for the season
00:42and being obviously a key cog in our offense.
00:45And then he had the palm where he got hit whatever that was a few, what,
00:52probably three, four weeks ago, maybe a month ago, where that cost him a few games.
00:57And since then, he hasn't done a lot of catching,
00:59a lot of physical catching that he normally would do.
01:02So not to say it's out of the realm now,
01:04but it would take a little bit of time to make that transition.
01:07There was a couple times probably early in the season where, you know,
01:11we're in a lopsided game and it's okay,
01:13maybe it's a chance to get him in for two innings to start building that,
01:16because I'm not just going to throw him out there for nine innings of catching, right?
01:19So I've had a couple of those opportunities maybe early in the season.
01:23I was like, do I really want to throw Ben Rice back there right now to catch in this mop
01:29-up game
01:30to, like, take a foul tip or whatever, you know,
01:35like just as important as he is to our offense.
01:38And the answer may be you need to live with that and you need to, you know,
01:42go ahead and do it anyway.
01:44I just have not been comfortable yet and because he got slowed down again by the palm thing
01:49as far as his physical catching, if it is to happen, it'll be a ways off.
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