Many, many media professionals set about transcribing interviews from Winter Warm-Up immediately after walking out of the media room. I am not those people. I am a Cliffs Notes pamphlet to their Encyclopedia Britannica. That's fine. Some people just want to eat dessert first. I'm here for you.
Andrew Miller might be the tallest lumberjack in MLB. As I tweeted on Saturday, he's approximately 7'3" and played Wun Wun on Game of Thrones. When asked about the state of free agency in baseball, he referenced "the two big names out there" and talked about players not having jobs. No idea who the "two big names are", but I suspect that one is Greg Holland. Actually, both of them may be Greg Holland. Just sayin'.
According to John Mozeliak, it's a huge year for Alex Reyes. There is a significant focus on workload. "But we also don't want to wake up at the end of the season and find out he had 50 innings" is the kind of thing you say when talking about a pitcher who has thrown exactly 50 big league innings since the beginning of 2016. Then you follow that with the phrase "pile up some workload" just to emphasize how much you don't want to sit through another 3 years of waiting. Same, Mo. Same.
"I think my best news of Carlos Martinez this off-season is that I really haven't heard his name that much." Subtle. So subtle.
Hitting coach Jeff Albert's name was mentioned several times today. Reportedly, he's a proponent of hard contact. Apparently he uses data, but he doesn't overload players with data. He's also good with kids, enjoys classical music, recycles, and spends his free time teaching Kris Bryant fans to read. If someone wants to throw John Mabry under the bus, there would be a raffle to see who would get the first shot at parallel parking that particular bus.
Mo reported that he thinks Ozuna will "ready to go". Ozuna is also spending the rest of the off-season in the Dominican Republic which means that he's not geographically co-located with the team's medical staff. Ozuna has not begun a throwing program, and Mo does not know if Ozuna has been hitting.
So basically, Ozuna isn't really "ready to go", unless you consider lounging on a beach to be a "baseball related activity". Awesome.
No pressure here, but when asked to name two players who could make the jump to the big leagues and contribute, he mentioned Genesis Cabrera and Ryan Helsley.
Kolten Wong spent winter in Hawaii, and none of his teammates visited him there. I honestly can't think of a way to defend this collection of poor life decisions.
He's also putting pressure on himself the rest of his career to win a Gold Glove which is unfortunate, because it's plausible that the only thing that prevented him from winning one in 2018 was Mike Matheny.
Wong sees himself hitting 7th or 8th and paired with Bader switching off in those spots. Also, he spent time during the off-season doing Pilates and yoga while also focusing on baseball movements with resistance added. I really hope that by "baseball movements" he really meant "throwing sideways while flying horizontally parallel to the field of play", because players should practice that a lot more than they do.
Mike Shildt is really good at communication. He communicates a lot with players. He communicates with groups of players, and he also communicates with them individually. He and his staff put an emphasis on communicating with players during the off-season. I'm guessing Mike Matheny owned a Jitterbug phone and was secretly a mute.
Dexter Fowler skipped a close friend's wedding in Mexico to be at Winter Warm-Up. He feels like he owes the fans after the way things went last year. That's great, but I would've supported him skipping WWU in favor of Mexico. For the record, I'd support any of you for making the choice to skip WWU in favor of a trip to Mexico. Or Antarctica. Or Mars. WWU is great, but it effectively ends the off-season prematurely.
That said, Dex showed up for WWU. He also mentioned that he never attended Cubs Convention which is like Winter Warm-Up but roughly 105% more boring.