Back in an early March edition of the 'Refuse to Lose' podcast, we spoke with ESPN MLB Insider Buster Olney (as we do each week).

We were talking about the ABS challenge system, which we had only seen in spring training for two weeks until that point.

As part of the conversation, Olney said something very interesting about George Kirby and Luis Castillo, but I'm wondering if it's actually applicable to Logan Gilbert, who will take the ball on Tuesday for the Mariners against the Minnesota Twins.

"...Yeah, I am going to be really curious about if George Kirby's perspective changes. I can remember being in Toronto last year after a playoff game and hearing him talk about, 'Well, you know what? This is the way that I pitch. This is, this is how I do things' and sort of resisting the idea that he needs to shift from being a nibbler.

I do think that kind of perspective is going to be pushed by the ABS challenge system, because you're not going be able to trick hitters as much as you did in the past. And hitters, I think, are going to protect the strike zone more versus feeling like on a two-strike pitch that they necessarily have to chase outside the strike zone.

Luis Castillo is definitely among the pitchers that I think could be affected by it, because that's his style at this stage in his career. He's got to try to get hitters to follow him out of the strike zone, and that's not going to be as successful as it has been in the past."

We chronicled his struggles earlier on Tuesday, so you can read more on them here, but Castillo's last five starts have seen him post an ERA of more than eight. His metrics on Baseball Savant are almost universally poor.

Through six starts, Gilbert is 1-3 with a 4.36 ERA. He's still got solid strikeout stuff, fanning 35 hitters in 33.0 innings, but he's been rather inefficient at times. He needed 89 pitches to get through four labored innings against the Athletics last Wednesday and needed 99 to get through 5.1 in the start before that. He also had a 95-pitch, 5.1 inning start against the Yankees on March 31.

He's throwing more pitches, and more pitches are getting hit hard. He's in the 20th percentile of hard-hit rate and the 50th percentage of barrel rate. He still gets a lot of swing-and-miss and a lot of strikeouts, but when he's in the zone, he's gotten hit.

It just leads to me wonder if somehow ABS is impacting him. And I'm not sure that it is, but it's a theory. Are, like Olney said, hitters more protecting the actual strike zone, therefore ambushing pitches in the zone? Are they less likely to chase pitches outside the strike zone, particularly in early-count situations? Is this causing Gilbert to get behind in counts, which leads to even less chase while a hitter is ahead, forcing him to come into the zone? Is he getting less "gifted" strike calls early, leading to him being behind more often? Given the high whiff rate and the good K rate, he clearly does still get people expanding the zone and missing pitches, just not as often as he would like them to.

I don't know that any of that is valid, but it's something to think about, and it's something we're going to ask Olney about when we talk on this Thursday's episode.

The Mariners play the Twins at 4:40 p.m. PT on Tuesday. Joe Ryan pitches for Minnesota.

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