"Cruising Into Labor Day" Free For All Mailbag
We roll into Labor Day weekend — the final tentpole holding up the baseball season. For MLB, this is the date that waves the flag or rings the bell or whatever mechanism you prefer for signifying the final lap in a race. In the minors, it mostly signifies that the year is concluding. Indeed, for many, many years, Labor Day weekend was the traditional end of the year for most minor leagues. Nowadays, leagues peter on for a few more days — and if you’re a player lucky or unlucky enough to be caught in the purgatory of Triple-A, it peters on for another month! (“Unlucky” because it’s not a lot of fun spending September in Triple-A, but “lucky” because the pay days keep coming!).
So, though baseball is a game of windups, here we’re in the wind down. But let’s see what’s on your minds as things more or less stagger to a halt.
What have you heard about any specific plans to upgrade Sutter Health Park to accommodate major leaguers? I would think almost everything could use improvement - clubhouses, batting cages, weight rooms, press box. I’m assuming the Athletics are paying for it all - or have the Giants agreed to fund a portion?
There was a story in the Chronicle this week (mostly having to do with the A’s season ticket sales for Sutter Health Park) that mentioned that a new home clubhouse was being constructed. Visitors will be using the current home clubhouse (which is actually out beyond the outfield walls). Other than the turf, that’s the first specific improvement I’ve seen mentioned. Presumably, this new clubhouse will come with all the major league-standard whistles and bells, including cages, indoor bullpens, weight room, dining room, etc. Also, presumably there will be separate facilities for female staff, which is one thing that virtually no minor league stadiums had prior to MLB insisting on that upgrade (many minor league facilities still have a haphazard “make do” situation for female staff).
MLB is working with the Players’ Union to make sure all agreed upon facility standards are in place for the 2025 season, so we’ll see what other upgrades are involved. Certainly, a minor league stadium that is a quarter of a century old can’t come close to providing the comfort and technological resources that major leaguers are used to at this point, so some significant work needs to happen.
As for cost, the Giants have no responsibility in this issue. It’s entirely on the A’s. Hopefully, the end result for the River Cats’ players (and Giants) is improved quality of facilities on someone else’s dime.
What do you make of Kyle Harrison's season and what do you think his future holds? The overall results this season seem relatively positive for a 23-year-old in his first full season. But we also know at this point the pitch models are not enamored by his arsenal, giving him an average fastball grade and a below average grade on his slurve and changeup. His fastball velocity is also down a full tick this season. Do you think the fastball velocity can return to where it was after his body gets more accustomed to the rigors of a full major league season? Everything I've read about Harrison is that he struggles to pronate and that his motor preference is more toward supination. Given that, I'm surprised that he's increased the usage of his changeup and reduced the usage of his slider this year. The changeup has been his worst pitch by stuff+ and run value. What changes can he work on this offseason to sharpen his existing off-speed pitches? Is there a pitch he can add to his arsenal that will make him less reliant on his fastball?
I think you’ve laid out the situation pretty well, Eric. Harrison has given the Giants a solid year, and, crucially, he gave them innings during a portion of the year where they were desperate for them. Whether he was intentionally trying to pitch to contact more this year to give the team those crucial innings, or whether working longer and harder than he ever has before has something to do with the fastball velocity, these are all hypotheticals that we will take into the off season with us.
There are good, solid building blocks for Harrison to take from this season. The fact that his walk rate has been far lower in the majors than it was in nearly every minor league stop is a significant one. But there are questions, too.
One has to do with the role we can expect from him going forward. As a prospect burning his way through the levels, Harrison featured historic strikeout rates that hinted at front of the rotation potential. His work in the major league rotation this year has been much more innings eating, back-end type. Which will he be when he matures?
That question will probably be answered by the ones you’re asking. Will Harrison rediscover his upper end velocity, and will he discover reliable secondaries that he can depend on from start to start? As a 19-year-old, Harrison featured a fastball that would almost always top out at 97, but that velocity really hasn’t been evident much the last two years. In fact, I remember talking to him about that in 2022, when he was in Richmond. At the time, Harrison was a bit bemused as to why he was sitting more 91-93, than 94-96 with his heater. It’s been higher since then at times, but lower as well, as we’ve seen in recent starts. I suspect that those higher velo ranges in his earlier years were related to the shorter outings the Giants asked of him (and other starters): in half of his starts in 2021, he went four innings or less. That year in Richmond when his velo was mostly in the lower 90s, he jacked it up to 97 for his playoff start that year — and he was out of that game in three innings.
So, I am hopeful that, as Harrison gets more and more used to a major league starter’s workload, we will see him gain the strength to hold and maintain his best fastball velocity more often throughout the years to come.
The question of secondaries is more troubling, I would say, because it’s one that the Giants have been working on diligently the past couple of years without any apparent answers coming forth. The snapping slider with which he bewitched so many minor league hitters — the slider I could literally hear buzzing through the air in Richmond — has proven to be much less effective against major leaguers. As Farhan Zaidi described it early in 2023 (when he first mentioned they were trying to teach him a new slider), the break was too large, and too easy for major league hitters to recognize. So it didn’t get chases as often at that level and in the zone, it tended to sit on a bat plane path and get hit. They’ve tried making a pitch with a shorter break (call it a cutter or slider as you will), but, at this point, we’re still in the experimentation phase that’s been going on for more or less two seasons. His changeup has gone through even more permutations — I remember seeing one that had arm side fade in Richmond that I thought had real potential for crazy movement, but Harrison ditched that one almost as quickly as he’d picked it up.
At some point, the pitch lab will discover the secret sauce, I’m hoping, and he’ll get a reliable second/third pitch to go with a fastball that still does play well, even without sizzling the radar gun. I guess I’d put it this way: a year ago at this time, Hayden Birdsong’s worst pitch was his slider, and his changeup was almost non-existent. A few grip experimentations later, and those are his two best pitches. Harrison has shown stamina, competitiveness, and major league competence in his rookie year. He’s stood tall when all around him were falling. That’s not an insignificant thing at 23. Whether or not he finds that outlier shape or grip or pitch that moves him from competent to triumphant, he’s likely going to have a long career in this league. Hopefully, that’s the least impressive thing we can say about him in the future, but it’s still a very impressive thing to say.
How do you approach weighing someone's stock when drafted/ signed vs. how they look at the beginning of their pro career when evaluating a younger prospect? How long into someone's pro career until you'd say your evaluation is entirely based on how they have played in pro ball? It seems like, in general, people tend to move lower initial prospects that are playing well in a pro ball up rankings faster than they drop top signed prospects that aren't performing.
Ok, I’m going to take the long way around to answering this question, but I first want to drop a couple of maybe unrelated notes on my way to a point. Last week, Joey Votto retired. There was a great interview clip with him (as nearly all interview clips with Votto tend to be) discussing his reasons for leaving the game, which I recommend watching now:
Everything in there is fantastic insight into the state of the game, but for the purposes of Ezra’s question, let me focus on something Votto says right at the end of the bit I clipped out, from around the 30 second mark. “[In this game] physical trumps everything, and [the] physical’s not there for me.”
Changing focus, my second unrelated note is a personal experience from earlier in the year. I went up to Philadelphia to watch Mason Black’s MLB debut. At that time (a miserable time for the entire offense), Matt Chapman was really scuffling, and in particular, he was being eaten up by fastballs. I remember at a critical point in that game, Zack Wheeler pitched around Michael Conforto to get to Chapman, whom he’d already K’d twice, and then showed total disrespect by shoving three straight fastballs by him. Now Wheeler is a pretty great pitcher who may someday be in Cooperstown, but, at the age of 31, I think it was reasonable that I walked out of that game thinking Chapman’s bat speed was perhaps going, and his decline might be coming soon.
Interestingly, a week later, MLB rolled out bat speed metrics, and, somewhat surprisingly, not only was Chapman not slowing down, he was actually elite — he’s been in the 98th percentile among major leaguers in bat speed this year! I remember in one of the articles related to the roll out of that metric, Chapman himself admitted to being relieved to see those numbers, because they meant that his issues were mechanical — they were about getting himself on time, and not an indication that, like Votto, the physical just wasn’t there for him anymore.
So, back to prospect ranking now, because I think those two stories underpin a lot of the way I think about prospects. First: physical trumps everything. I don’t know that there’s ever a point at which my evaluation is entirely based on performance. Physical tools are always going to be crucial for players, because it’s simply a requirement for playing the game at the top level, which is fast, powerful, and, as Votto says, “a heavyweight fight.”
Performance obviously matters, because this is also an intensely skills-based game in which players have to perform. So, the players who bring top level physicality to the game AND show high level performance along the way — those are going to be the guys who race to the top of prospect rankings, because they are marrying the two necessary ingredients of success. For everybody else — and we’re talking about 99+% of all players here, it’s not going to be that clear. Most players lack top level tools, many players lack performance, everybody has something lacking.
For me, I tend to lean towards the players who have some carrying physical tool — power, speed, velocity, quick-twitch defensive instincts in the middle infield — because those players have a clearer path to the majors if they can get the skills part to click — if, like Chapman, they can figure out the timing mechanism that allows them to use their bat speed productively, or if, like Birdsong, they can find the grip that turns their raw arm strength into crazy performing pitch movement.
There are always high performers who don’t necessarily climb up the prospect rankings, and the primary reason is that, like old man Votto, they don’t have the physical.
So my preferences, when looking at players who weren’t drafted/signed highly — the pop up guys — is to tend towards players like Tyler Fitzgerald or Grant McCray, or Vaun Brown, or hey, Charlie Szykowny (who very definitely has a major league body), who start with some element of physicality that will allow them to play at the top level, and then begin to show skills improvements. A lot of times, that doesn’t look great five years down the line (because failure is always the default outcome in this game), but I like the athletes and I’ll bet on their ability to figure things out over the ability of someone lacking size, strength, speed, or arm-strength to compete physically against the monsters who rule the midway.
The same goes for dropping guys down. If the tools are still in place, I’m try not to be overly reactive to poor performance, at least for the first year or so. But, of course, the longer those issues persist, the more you’re forced to view players in a different light. Still, the guys who are going to be hardest for me to rank this winter are the ones who show major league physical tools, but lack a performance track record for whatever reason (e.g., Reggie Crawford, Walker Martin, Hunter Bishop, or Brown). Like Chapman’s performance against fastballs, it’s possible that mechanical tweaks hold the key to their success, but obviously finding the balance balance between potential and the risk that it won’t work out is the challenge in trying to predict the future.
But the bottom line for me is always: bet on tools and athletes.
Roger, do you feel the Giants are making the right decisions regarding Walker Martin’s development late in his first year? Is it beneficial for him to struggle this much against Low-A pitching or would he be better served to work with the development guys at Papago? And on defense, if shortstop was challenging for Martin in the ACL, it must be even tougher in the Cal League. I get why they wouldn’t add another position to the mix at this point in the season, but maybe semi-regular DH days for Martin would help enable improvements on offense.
Oh hey, speaking of physical athletes without a great performance record, look what we have here! A Martin question!
You know, the easiest thing in the world is arm-chair quarterbacking. It’s a lot harder to be in the daily process of trying to help guys. I try very hard not to follow every sudden impulse I might have to criticize what is a tremendously difficult and complex process from my very amateur, outsider perspective.
And certainly in this particular case, I don’t see any great reason to second guess this. They’ve been very patient and conservative with Martin’s progress, leaving him down in the ACL all year. I believe he was one of only two or three high school picks taken in the first 100 picks last year who hadn’t made it to full season ball yet a month ago. You can’t keep him in the complex forever.
He’s 20. He seems to have a pretty strong mental outlook. At some point he has to face this test. Giving him a few weeks taste at the end of the year to see what he’s going to need to face next spring doesn’t seem like the end of the world. It’s been ugly, but it might be important to help him craft a productive off-season work plan.
Penny for your thoughts on John Michael Bertrand's ceiling? I love the innings pitched, the limited walks, and you've mentioned his defense is gold glove worthy. At the same time, he's 26 and his stuff isn't going to pop off the page. He seems like a pitcher that would have been valued a lot more in a bygone era.
Yes, there was a time when an observer of baseball might have found a Bertrandesque figure on virtually every staff in the big leagues. Maybe more than one. Now? Well, here’s an interesting graphic that Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper put out in a story last week on why it’s so hard to hit major league pitching these days that does a great job of illustrating how the game has changed:
That big tall line on the left-hand side in Miguel Cabrera’s chart that becomes a tiny little stubby one on Aaron Judge’s chart? That’s where the Bertrands of the world live, and there’s simply no way around the harsh fact that those pitchers have mostly disappeared from the major league landscape over the last decade. If you look at Bertrand’s line this year, you’ll notice that he has the occasional clunker where he allows 5-6-7-8 or so runs in a start — the natural result of living on contact as much as he does. Presumably in the majors, where hitters who do face fastballs below 90 mph these days tend to produce Bondsian levels of mashing against them, those clunker days would come much more frequently at the top level for a Bertrand, and finding a way to fight against them is a very challenging assignment in the current environment.
So….my thoughts on John Michael’s ceiling? I guess I would point you in the direction of somebody like Michael Plassmeyer’s career record? Plassmeyer threw a tiny bit harder, and his change was a solid pitch, but I don’t think he actually was as good at moving around the quadrants and changing sight lines as Bertrand is. Still, there are comparable possibilities there I would say. For all of these type of pitchers, the idea that they were simply born at the wrong time is, I would imagine, cold comfort.
(Speaking of incredibly physical dudes with performance issues, that take, Spencer Jones!)
Do you think Grant McRay could develop into a big league right fielder? I love the idea of having McRay, Jung-Hoo Lee and Heliot Ramos in the same outfield from athleticism and defense standpoint. Do you think Grant McRae and his bat specifically can eventually develop into a big league corner bat?
Let me preface what I’m about to say by noting that two years ago you couldn’t have found a scout or front office R&D analyst in the world who would have suggested that Tyler Fitzgerald might turn into an above average starting shortstop in the majors. Indeed, I have had conversations with several people over the last couple of years which have made it pretty clear to me that the top of the Giants’ baseball decision-making group did not believe Fitzgerald was a major leaguer of any kind, on either side of the ball, not terribly long ago (and it’s not like the rest of baseball was clamoring for his services either).
I say that only to emphasize a point that can never be stressed enough: the future is unwritten and players can change their stars (to mash up a couple different pop movie references). Things change!
With that caveat behind us, I would say that getting to a corner outfield-level of offensive production feels a little ambitious for McCray’s likely outcome. Most scouts I’ve spoken to about McCray over the last couple of years have expressed at least some level of concern that his bat will develop to a satisfactory level for a starting CF, and many see outcomes falling more in the “4th to 5th outfielder” ranges (again, I can’t over-caveat the fact that most people said the same of Fitzgerald not that long ago).
My comp for McCray has always been Steven Duggar, and I still feel that is a good one for his size, body, and skill set. That is not to say that I think McCray is limited to the career that we have already seen from Duggar, but rather that I think his range of possible outcomes is similar to Duggar’s when he first ascended to the majors, including the ceiling for a very productive starting center fielder, who has enough complementary skills to make up for a below average hit tool. (And just let me say for the record that I’ll always believe that Duggar’s progress was materially harmed by the series of injuries he suffered early in his big league career).
Projecting that bat into a corner position would take a real leap of faith. That’s not to say that you can’t construct a club that way. If the overall strategy is: we’re going to field the greatest defense and run prevention squad in the majors and try to win by squeaking out 2-3 runs every game, then your proffered outfield would make a lot of sense. Certainly, in Oracle, McCray’s defensive ability would still make him valuable in right, and he has the arm for it. But you’d likely be giving up some potential value on the offensive side of things.
I guess I’d finish with this. For the past three or four seasons, the Giants have lived with just over league average offense and plus defense in right field from Mike Yazstrezmski. Could McCray match that going forward? Yes, I would say that is within the realm of possibilities. But I’d also say that having a starting corner outfield who annually puts up less than 2 WAR has been a bug for this team, not a feature.
If I remember right, you mentioned the Giants basically saying Vaun Brown needed to learn how to work his swing with his body. Could this be an issue of over weight training? When I saw him in A-Ball a couple years ago (haven’t seen him since) he already had a major league body from serious weight training over just a couple years. But if he stepped up the training and got too big, maybe he needs back off the weights?
I was talking with Manager Dennis Pelfrey about Brown’s travails this year, and at one point, Pelf said, essentially, if I could answer that question simply, I’d be paid a million dollars! [EDITOR’S NOTE: Double-A Managers are most definitely not paid a million dollars].
There simply are no easy answers to this situation. It is hard to fathom how a guy who was quite literally the most dominant player in the NWL two years ago could go back there this year and struggle to put a ball in play. An absolute mystery.
There is certainly a mental component, a confidence component, and a physical component involved here. But how those various aspects fit together or intersect, absolutely nobody can say — not Brown himself, and not those trying to help him. It’s entirely possible that no one will ever be able to say how or why it happened. Even if Brown finds the key that leads him out of this thicket at some point (which everyone sincerely hopes he will), I don’t know that he’ll ever really understand the process that led him in there to begin with. He simply, like Dante, seemed to awake from his slumbers one day to find himself in a darkling wood, where the path that led aright was lost.
But to your specific point, I think Brown and the Giants’ trainers have already done a lot of work to “de-bulk” some of his musculature over the past year or two, in the wake of his knee injury that ended 2022. He’s still explosively athletic, but looking at him nowadays, I’d say the ham hocks are a lot leaner than they were in that first year.
Thank you (and Baggs and Pavs) for speaking up in clear language that you don’t see a plan with the top young hitters on the 40-man roster and haven’t seen one for some time. Fans need to know and I appreciate the media not dancing around the issue. It’s really discouraging and frustrating for the org to be in this position. My question is WHY do you think this has happened? It sure seems like the brain trust (ownership and front office) should know how critical it is to develop home-grown hitters. So, how did they arrive at such a haphazard approach with Ramos, Luciano and others? A “win now” mentality doesn’t explain all of it.
It doesn’t explain all of it, but there is an old saying in MLB: it’s a performance league, not a development league. Still, there has been a real disconnect between messaging and action for some players, and some of this, I suspect, has to do with varying levels of who has the juice in this organization. The change from Gabe Kapler to Bob Melvin has some layers of ramification, I would imagine. By all accounts, Farhan Zaidi used a lot of his personal chips with ownership convincing them on Kapler in the first place, and when the time came to make a change there, it had to come at some expense to Zaidi’s standing internally. The Kapler/Zaidi combo was, I believe, uniformly out on Ramos, and didn’t show much interest in giving him opportunities. It took the baseball equivalent of the Black Death to give him a chance this year, and he ran with it.
This is all speculative on my part let me stress, but the Luciano situation, I think, was an indication of a difference of opinion between the PoBO suite and the manager’s office, and in this case, I suspect, Bob Melvin had the juice to win the argument. When Zaidi said last fall, that they wanted Luciano to take the shortstop position, Melvin hadn’t been hired yet. But it was clear from the beginning of camp that Melvin preferred the known defensive option in Nick Ahmed, and that’s the way things went. After Luciano’s disastrous week playing shortstop back in May, it’s been pretty clear that Luciano buried himself deeply in Melvin’s doghouse, and I suspect that his view once again ended up winning the argument. (Similarly, Melvin, the former catcher, is undoubtedly behind Blake Sabol’s disappearance this year, despite many times when the club has needed catching help).
One thing that Zaidi said in the end of season press conference last year is that it might be better if there were some intellectual friction and levels of disagreement between his office and the manager going forward. And I should say that I think that’s true — honest, intellectual disagreements, openly and freely discussed, is typically beneficial to organizational decision making. In the case of the 2024 Giants, I think that open and honest disagreement has worked in the favor of Ramos and Fitzgerald, and against Luciano and Sabol, neither of whom have done the one thing a player really needs to do to swing an argument in their favor: perform.
Building off your comment about the Dodgers' PD reputation might have outstripped their accomplishment, which MLB orgs do you think are the best in 1) drafting 2) player development? And what area are the ones that you think would be the "easiest" for the Giants to catch up (it's of course not easy exactly, so in relative terms)?
Let me soft pedal that comment about the Dodgers. I think they still do a really good job of finding talent — but one of the things they really prioritize in scouting is pitchers who throw extremely hard and spin the ball intensely fast, and those pitchers have a decided tendency to get hurt! Cleveland and Seattle have both excelled at taking guys who threw strikes, and getting them to add velocity, which has worked well for them (though Cleveland’s pitching this year is actually pretty terrible).
I think it’s hard to answer that question without recency bias playing a huge role. You can’t survey the baseball landscape in 2024 and not think that the Orioles are the best player development group out there. But if, five or six years from now we look back and the well has dried up and the era of Orioles producing impact players every year is over, then maybe we’ll be on to some other teams. There is a cyclical nature to these things, and fortune plays a tremendous role in it all.
But right now, the Orioles and Red Sox seem to be doing a pretty impressive job of developing their hitters. And one thing that both of those clubs are pretty famously up to in their hitting development, is bat speed training. The Orioles seem to prize guys with contact skills, and then they give them weighted bats to try to improve bat speed and impact, and they do that at every level. The Red Sox are starting to do the same thing.
Last year, Tommy Joseph, in his role as hitting coach at Eugene, had his hitters working with a weighted bat (overdrive bat, I think it was called) and also a short bat as part of his program. The weighted bat is commonly associated with bat speed training. But — and this maybe is something Scott really wanted me to get at in the question above — for whatever reason, only batters at Eugene trained with this. I remember when Wade Meckler came up to Richmond, he had his overdrive bat, and the other players were fascinated by it.
The question for me, then and now, was why were the Giants doing this at only one affiliate? Or, put differently, why were the different coaching staffs out of sync in their philosophies and methods? Joseph was hired during the winter to be Assistant Hitting Coach for Seattle (which hasn’t gone so well), and he took his methods with him. But I am starting to wonder if an organized and integrated emphasis on bat speed training might be a good change for the Giants’ hitting development. It’s my impression that the Giants’ development of pitching is very synced up, top to bottom, and it’s producing good results. But I do think there is far less synchronization on the hitting side, and it shows.
(That’s not to suggest there’s anything suspect about Bryce Eldridge’s development; I just thought it was about time we got some Eldridge highlights in here).
What would your plan be for the offseason if you were the FO. Have to imagine that Fitzy Bailey JHL Ramos and hopefully Chapman will be back next year. Need more than one bat and an arm or two. What say you?
The first thing to know about this question is that you absolutely don’t want me in charge of baseball operations, as I think my fantasy team’s performance over the years amply illustrates.
It’s a daunting task for sure. The club as currently composed doesn’t appear to be good enough, and there’s a significant chance they could be losing their best position player and, at least, most talented pitcher. And the division doesn’t appear to be getting any easier!
I’m with you that I’d like Chapman to stick around. He’s been a delight to watch play, day in and day out. He posts every day, and does something to help the club win, almost every day. That’s a valuable player to have around, and the team needs more like him in my opinion.
Beyond that, the search for impact bats continues. They’ve struck out so many times — Jorge Soler, Mitch Haniger, Michael Conforto — but the club needs more talent on the offensive side of things. Having Ramos and Fitzgerald emerge this year is a huge building block, but those kids need some help! This is a fantasy baseball type move, but I do think that Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. makes sense for this club, and I’d pay the cost for him. I wouldn’t stop there, either. A real corner outfield bat would help things, too. Of course, you have to hope that whoever they get doesn’t fall prey to the cold and the wind and the seagulls, like so many others have before them. And then figuring out how to replace maybe the most dominant arm in baseball right now is now small challenge either.
There are some good pieces on hand, and it’s certainly been a joy to see young, fast, athletic and explosive players join a club that has, for too long been old and plodding (especially up the middle of the field). But a greater quantity of quality is needed.
And I do think there is something else missing too, that may be even harder to find. I think they need somebody in the clubhouse that isn’t going to tolerate losing and will get in players faces for putting up with mediocrity. I don’t know where you find those guys — but there’s a reason why the Dodgers keep spending money to bring declining players like Chase Utley and Jacob Heyward onto the roster. There’s a reason why Freddie Freeman and Jose Ramirez and Aaron Judge (and once upon a time, Buster Posey) have the reputations among teammates and foes that they do. Somewhere along the line, the Giants are going to have to find the right mix that establishes a real winning culture in the clubhouse, and that’s not about the manager or front office. I don’t think they have that right now, and I don’t think they’ve had it since Posey left. I suspect they’re going to have to find that player before they’re ready to win again regularly. (I do think it’s possible that Eldridge is going to grow into that kind of player in time, though obviously it would be unfair to put such expectations on him at 21 or whatever age he first arrives in the majors. Give him a few years yet!)
Good luck to whoever is making the calls this winter! It isn’t going to be easy, and second guessing will be plentiful!
That’s it for the mailbag this week. I’ll put out a call for new questions a little earlier this week, as I’ll be heading out for long weekend. Hope you all have great Labor Day plans as well! Enjoy the holiday and the last days of ball for the year.
"He simply, like Dante, seemed to awake from his slumbers one day to find himself in a darkling wood..." Yeah. Vaun Brown. Great line.