Ben Cherington will appear on his team-produced radio show today with Greg Brown and I'll have updates here:

• Despite normally having assistant general managers appear on the show when the team is on the road, Cherington called in today.

• Cherington highlights both Konnor Griffin and Esmerlyn Valdez being selected for the All-Star Futures Game and spoke about their individual paths to their current point. 

• Cherington didn't put any ceiling on Griffin possibly getting promoted to Class AA Altoona this season. However, he said they like to see players go through adversity at each level and how they work out of that adversity before considering a promotion. 

"Typically, what we like to see is for players to actually go through a little bit of adversity at each level first and find their way out of that adversity before we consider any further promotion. So we probably have a little ways, I would guess, in high A for Konnor. Who knows, maybe he's there for the rest of the year. We won't put any ceiling on it, whether it's Konnor or any other player. If they are really checking every box, from a performance standpoint, from a process standpoint, work ethic, teammate, all those things, and there's enough playing time to feel good about the sample then we'll certainly consider a promotion. But there's nothing on the horizon right now." 

• With Paul Skenes more than likely being selected to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, Cherington said they worked some things around to make sure that he'd be ready to pitch in the All-Star game.

• Cherington got to see Bubba Chandler pitch during his two-day trip to Indianapolis and Chandler got back to "dominating counts." Cherington said when Chandler struggled recently, that's where a lot of his problems stemmed from.

• Cherington said they've seen an "improvement" in the quality of at-bats over the last month but it just hasn't happened in the last two games. He mentioned both Bryan Woo and Luis Castillo being on the mound: "None of that is excuses, just a matter of explanation. Bottom line is we need to have those quality at-bats and fight for every pitch."

• When speaking on the trade deadline, Cherington said: "I know what we're gonna be focused on. We have to deliver more to our fans. We have to deliver more wins and we have to be urgent about that, we want to get to that as fast as we can. In the next four weeks there will be opportunities that either help us do that or don't and we have to do our jobs to find the ones that will and execute on those." 

• On doing something big at the deadline: "You have to be honest about where you are right now and recognize, we're not like a win or two away, we're more than that. If you're more than that, then you have to be pretty open minded about the things that have to happen to get to where we want to be and get there as fast as we can, at least put ourself in a position to have a chance to do that. I don't know what that's going to lead to, but I know we have to be really open minded about at least the possibilities and then obviously smart and disciplined to, so we're not just doing stuff to do stuff." 

He went on to mention that stuff will have to happen internally and touched on the draft will be important in that aspect too.