Royals 1B Vinnie Pasquantino: Why the Rays Excel Despite Their Meager Payroll

Vinnie Pasquantino called into The Rich Eisen Show from the passenger seat of a parked car, fresh off a workout, and still managed to deliver one of the sharpest postseason breakdowns of the week. The Royals first baseman, whom Rich has dubbed the show's playoff baseball correspondent, covered the Dodgers, the Brewers, the Rays and the Yankees' latest early exit, and he did it without a steering wheel in the shot.

"It's a little unprofessional, but sometimes you just got to get things done," he said.

The workout was a Solidcore class in Tennessee, which he does on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He normally goes with his wife, but she is sitting it out for now with five weeks to go until the baby is due. People know it is a boy, Pasquantino said, just not the name, and he wanted to be clear that he has not named him. That did not stop the show from floating a few suggestions. Pasquantino admitted he is usually the only guy in the class, so he heads to the end of the room, gets his work in and gets out.

Once the full audience returned, Rich opened the baseball portion with the obvious question. The Dodgers did it again, and when you think you have them, you don't. So who left in the field has the best chance to beat them?

"I think it's the Brewers," Pasquantino said, pointing to how Milwaukee's pitching lines up against that lineup. He is curious to see whether Los Angeles goes with Freddie Freeman second, Shohei Ohtani fifth and Tucker eighth again, because the Dodgers are "going to get lefties like crazy out of the bullpen." He liked seeing Dave Roberts move the lineup around, since the Dodgers do not do it all that much.

He also gave credit to what Los Angeles did against Atlanta. "They are a wagon," he said. Chris Sale pitched well, but the Dodgers still got runs off of him, and Pasquantino called that "really impressive."

His other reason for picking Milwaukee was refreshingly honest. Picking the team the Dodgers are about to play means he does not have to call any other series. He learned that lesson at the World Baseball Classic, when he accidentally said Venezuela was not making it through while it still had to play Japan. Venezuela went on to win the whole thing. "So I'm not trying to give any fuel to anybody," he said.

Rich noted that only one left-handed hitter homered off Sale during the regular season, and it was the same guy who homered off him in Game 3 of this division series. So he asked a left-handed-hitting first baseman what makes Freeman great.

"Just his ability to spin the ball," Pasquantino said. Where some hitters have a very flat bat plane, Freeman has the opposite, an extremely vertical one that lets him "backspin the ball almost better than anybody else in the big leagues." Getting to a sinker in off the plate from Sale and hitting it out, he said, is why Freeman is "one of the best hitters that's really ever played."

Rich wanted to know if that was something a hitter could do on purpose, like shaping a golf shot. Pasquantino said it is the natural plane of Freeman's swing, almost a U shape. That is why Freeman talks about hitting ground balls to the shortstop in his work. He practices the reverse of what his swing does naturally to lock in the ball flight he wants. "Ground ball to the shortstop in BP is a homer for him in the game," Pasquantino said.

He called it the law of exaggeration. A flatter-swing hitter should do the opposite and try to get the ball in the air in batting practice. "Whatever my swing does naturally, kind of do the opposite when you're working, so then you can get it into a good spot in the game."

With the Brewers having just dispatched the Padres, Rich asked what makes them so good. "Pitching and game plan at the plate," Pasquantino said. "Their approach is pretty much dialed."

He pointed out that the lineup is not full of superstars. Jackson Chourio is "a certified superstar," Christian Yelich has been one before and William Contreras "is awesome," but the identity is a lineup of guys "that provide really quality at-bats all the time." They platoon a little, but mostly, "you know what you're going to get with them," and they wear pitchers down.

Then there was what Milwaukee did to Mason Miller. Pasquantino called it "debatable" whether the Brewers had something on him, and said nobody will ever know because nobody will say. The Padres came out and said Miller was not tipping. "It's one of those things you assume because it's baseball," he said, since when a pitcher that nasty gives up at-bats like that, "typically something's going on." Either way, he gave Milwaukee credit. "If they didn't, even more credit to them for putting together those at-bats."

Rich also brought up Pat Murphy's in-game interview, in which Murphy was cursing center fielder Jackson Merrill. Rich called Murphy "definitely one to root for" and "a blast."

With the NLCS set as Brewers vs. Dodgers, Rich turned to the American League, where the Rays were waiting on the White Sox and Guardians after Cleveland extended its series on Wednesday. What makes Tampa Bay so good?

"They're another example of pitching," Pasquantino said, and the notable part is where those arms came from. Closer Bryan Baker came from Baltimore. Tyler Wells, who sets up games, also came from Baltimore. Kevin Kelly, another setup man, came from Cleveland. And Cam Booser, who Pasquantino said has "one of the best stories in the game," has been all around, including stops with the White Sox and Red Sox. "They're just really good at identifying talent and making those guys better," he said.

He also insisted the Rays have their own superstar in Junior Caminero, who he does not think gets talked about enough. Amid all the talk about the lack of strikeouts and flat bat planes, "they also have a guy who hits 45 homers a year on their team." He called Jonathan Aranda "a stud" and Yandy Díaz "one of the most underrated players in the game."

Pasquantino echoed something Derek Jeter said the night before: you cannot make mistakes against Tampa Bay, because "they'll pounce on you." Whoever wins between Cleveland and Chicago, he said, "has got their work cut out for them."

Rich pressed on the how. Take someone from the Orioles and suddenly he has a gajillion saves in a row and is unhittable. How does this keep happening?

"I think they just know how to identify what they're looking for," Pasquantino said, while noting the Rays are not always right. Joe Ryan got traded for Nelson Cruz a few years ago and is now one of the best pitchers in the league in Minnesota. He also cited something he saw about Freddy Peralta's extension, with the landing foot about six inches shorter with the Mets than it is with Tampa. "You can directly see the changes that they're making," he said.

The bigger lesson, in his view, is philosophical. People talk about the lack of strikeouts, the bunting and the running, but Tampa Bay is not changing the game. "They identified what their group was good at and said, 'Let's just be really good at what our players are good at,'" he said. They are not trying to fill voids with players who lack the talent for it. "This is what we have. Let's just be the best at it," he said, adding that this is what the organizations that do things best do.

His example was Taylor Walls. Pasquantino said he is hoping Bobby Witt Jr. wins another Gold Glove and Platinum Glove, but Walls is "playing absolute Gold Glove defense every single night" while hitting ninth every day. "What that guy provides defensively is second to none really," he said.

Then Rich asked the question he admitted was awkward to put to a current player: why did New York go home again with all its talent, all its pitching and its salary advantage?

Pasquantino started with a disclaimer. "I play for a team that has not beaten the Yankees in three years now," he said. "We got lucky once in the playoffs against them, according to one of their players, and that was the last time we beat them. So I suppose he was right."

His real answer: "Winning is really hard, and I think winning is especially hard when your best player isn't able to go." He expects conflicting reports on what the player says and what the team says, but "clearly somebody wasn't comfortable enough with him going." Only they really know.

He added that the Yankees made the kind of mistakes in the series that you simply cannot make against Tampa Bay. It is not as if they came in limping, either. They "beat the crap out of the Red Sox," scoring 18 runs or so in the first two games, before running into a juggernaut. "Sometimes you just run into a team that's playing better than you, that is better than you," he said. Still, everything is magnified in New York, and Aaron Boone and everyone else "will take a lot of heat."

Rich noted that Brian Cashman will take heat too, though he is used to it after all his years with the Steinbrenner family. Then Rich made his point: in a sweep, Giancarlo Stanton got one at-bat as a pinch hitter and Carlos Rodón did not throw a single pitch, and the two combined to make $56 million this year. What good is the advantage if the roster or the button-pushing does not use it?

Pasquantino called it "an interesting one." If four of your best starters are available in the playoffs, you feel good. With Gerrit Cole, Cam Schlittler and Max Fried lined up, you would think Rodón not pitching meant things went well and you had a Game 1 starter for the championship series. Maybe somebody should have moved to the bullpen, though he was not sure which of them would be comfortable doing it, because "starting pitchers are a different breed."

He also flagged something surprising about the Yankees' bullpen. It is solid with good arms, "they just don't have like the high-end velo that some teams have," like Milwaukee or San Diego. "Those guys don't just grow on trees," he said.

The bigger picture, he argued, is that other teams have caught up. This is not the '90s, when the Yankees were "buying championships, so to speak." Other clubs have invested heavily in R&D too, yet New York will always feel pressure to pay top dollar because of its market. His prescription was to keep moving forward with the good players they have and, as small-market teams would say, "win on the margins." He knows Yankees fans will not want to hear it, and with 90-some wins, "it's hard to call it a failure, but I get why it would be there."

Before letting him go, Rich asked whether the Jets fan was nervous about the Browns this weekend. "I'm never nervous going into a game ever," Pasquantino said. "The Jets are going to win by seven." He expects the Browns to come back down to earth.

Rich said he sounded like Klint Kubiak at halftime, which led Pasquantino to joke that everyone knew the Chiefs were going to win as soon as Kubiak said it. He wished he had live bet it right then.

On the fantasy front, Rich reported that he had just snagged Christian McCaffrey in Pasquantino's guillotine league because Rich's 15-year-old son Cooper got chopped. Cooper was so upset that Rich and his wife had to console him the next morning, with a roster that included Justin Jefferson, McCaffrey and Chris Olave. Pasquantino said his friends in the league love it when Cooper gets upset. His advice for Cooper was a playoff lesson in disguise: "The best teams don't always win. It's who plays the best that week."

As Rich noted, Cooper had already learned that as a Yankees fan the night before.