I'm ready to be known, I'm ready to be known

Cause it feels like I'm watching Zip and I

Hello and welcome to episode 1046 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer joined by Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs. Hello.

Alrighty. Later in this episode we are going to talk to your colleague Dave Cameron about baseball economics and extensions and the death of certain types of extensions.

A little bit of banter before we get to that you wanted to discuss a couple struggling teams briefly.

Yeah, I just I felt like we should talk about the Blue J's acknowledged effect that they are terrible.

You know, they were expected to be pretty good, not unlike the Mariners and I know when I look at the standings,

I see the Mariners are down there, they're only five and eight, although they just swept the Rangers.

So the Rangers are also struggling, although Ben you could also just rephrase that as Sam Dyson is struggling and the Rangers are around him.

Cardinals are three and nine, but all those teams, whatever you sort of can overlook them because the Blue J's are two in ten.

Josh Donetson is on the disabled list. I don't have anything specifically insightful to say about the Blue J's except that for whatever extent people talk about how it is

early, when you're two in ten, it's really not that early anymore and your best players on the disabled list and there are already questions about your team coming in.

Like the Blue J's are trying real hard to just murder their season in the first month.

And I know there's the the old cliche about how you can't win a season in April, but you can lose it.

And the Blue J's are trying to really hard when I did a little study last week when I was focusing on the Mariners,

who at that point were two and eight and the Blue J's were two and eight, I think, or one and one and seven at that point.

I like that study, which you're probably about to describe because often we talk about the early playoff odds movers and we say that someone's playoff odds went down a drastic amount in a very short span of time, but playoff odds, we don't really have enough of a historical record, right?

To point to playoff odds, changes and say this is what happened to teams that lost X percentage points of playoff odds in the beginning of the season.

They ended up here or there. We don't really have that long database going back that we can use. So often you'll see teams, you know, their playoff odds will go down to 20% or something and then they'll make the playoffs and we don't necessarily know whether the odds were right.

And they really did have a one and five shot at that time or maybe the odds were wrong and they actually had a better shot than that.

So it's kind of hard to say I still look at those numbers and I still trust them for the most part, but I could understand why people might be a little bit wary about taking them as gospel, but you just use actual records and kind of showed in a more concrete way that getting off to a slow start really does hurt you.

...