But here closer every year, so near, the feeling is coming clear.

My dear, the fear is here.

Hello and welcome to episode 2005 of Effectively Wild, the podcast from baseball

perspective and fan graphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindbergh of the ringer and my incoming co-host Jeff Sullivan will be with me tomorrow,

which means we are down to our last interim guest host and back in episode 988 I was lamenting

how teams are more and more often hiring analytically minded former players, recently retired

players to be liaisons or go-betweens between players in the front office and the coaching

staff and I was saying it was sort of a shame because we are deprived of these guys at

a sense and in the past they might have gone on to be talking heads on TV or podcast guests,

but now they're getting snapped up by teams.

And after I said that, I got a tweet from Dan Heron who was just tired as a Diamond

Bex pitching strategist and he said that he is still allowed to talk even though he

is working for the Diamond Bex now, so I made him prove it by coming onto the show.

Hey, Dan.

Hey, thanks for having me on.

Yeah, happy to.

So, tell us about the job.

I know that you can't probably divulge every detail, but can you give us the broad strokes?

Well, yeah.

I mean, I guess the job title kind of says a lot of pitching strategist.

It's kind of the job kind of happened, I would say organically you kind of.

...