Hello and welcome to Effectively Wild a fan grab space ball podcast brought to you

by a fan graphs and by our patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of fan graphs talking with Ben Lindbergh of the ringer. Hello Ben. Hello. You didn't mention that this is episode

one thousand thirty. Ah crap and this is episode one thousand. I have it written down right here on my laptop. This is episode one thousand and thirty. I'll be able to know

otherwise they'd be wondering which episode they were listening to. Yeah. Now they're going to know because we've beaten this into the ground one thousand and thirty one zero three zero. This is a team preview

episode we will be talking a little later with Susan slusser about the Oakland athletics and with Joshua has them about the Toronto blue jays who look like a better team than the athletics. However with our team preview series moving on. We are narrowing the gap

between teams more and more so pretty soon we're going to to get to the middle and then we're not going to say which team is projected better than the other one. Also the

productions of shifted. One thing that's happened we're recording this intro post athletics interview and since the athletics interview Sunday Gray has been shut down. I've seen the

Atlanta and saying Sunday Gray shut down for a few weeks and one most recently saw Sunday Gray shut down indefinitely which sounds much worse. He has a a streamed

to lat I think the understanding is that he's going to be back around the end of April however I know that just from Mariners experience three and

the last can cost near full seasons so we have Sunday Gray developments which are bad for Oakland athletics developments. Yeah what Susan is going to say about Sunday Gray was not

particularly positive as it is but now the news is even more negative. Yeah so you know we'll get into talking about the upside of the rotation

and how they do have more than five seeming big lead caliber starters however Sunday Gray was supposed to be the big one either for the team being competitive or for the team being not

competitive but gray being competitive so that then you can be traded and so this is just a bummer of a way to start not I guess the cardinals losing Alex Reyes but

spring training is a disaster across the board and the best you can ever hope for is that spring training is the most boring six weeks they've ever

experienced because the alternative is that something bad happens right by the way and even bigger bummer billhands came up recently on this podcast during one of your stat segments and I mentioned that he had been the subject of a cold call on

effectively wild episode nine 64 and sadly he died this week so soon after net Garver the first cold call in this podcast history billhands was 76 so

sad timing for these to come so close together and it makes me either want to call more retired players who are still around before it's too late or never call a retired player again because maybe bad things happen yeah we do that so yeah I

certainly don't want to make light of this situation but I think that maybe stop answering your calls yeah so episode nine 64 if you want to go back and listen to billhands we called him about the fact that he

had allowed the most home runs ever by a picture two pictures in 1968 no less and he was a very good sport about two strangers calling him to discuss an embarrassing stat so I will link to that

episode so you can go back and listen to that and without any further banter we will get to the previews now you're just a share of your former

stranger and me

right we are back now to talk about the blue jays with the co-editor in chief of baseball

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