Hello and welcome to Effectively Wild a Fangrafts baseball podcast brought to you by

Fangrafts, but most importantly by our wonderful and numerous Patreon supporters I am Jeff

Sullivan of Fangrafts joined as always but not as always by Ben Lindbergh of the ringer in Jamaica. Hi, you made that sound almost sarcastic. They are wonderful and numerous just to just to clear that up for anyone.

I might be wondering but yeah, good call bad guy. Yes. So this is our second podcast that we've done since you've been in Jamaica. How have things changed or are things

wonderful or are things not wonderful? Things are still wonderful. I went swimming a lot in various bodies of water and enjoyed myself quite a bit. So various

doing more of that. Yeah, fresh water and salt water or I guess chlorine water and salt water. I don't know is two is two bodies of water enough for

various. Well, the pool was subdivided into a few different water. So I'm counting that. Okay, that's a fair point. So I don't know how much attention you are paying to

baseball these days, but good news. Not a whole lot. But I do want to call everyone's attention to a post I saw in Kotaku this morning called Pokemon played baseball and it was insane. So you can

Google that headline if you want or I'll link to it in the podcast post, but I have a feeling that this will save us the trouble of answering a few future listener emails because there's all kinds of craziness going on here. If you were ever on the verge of

emailing us to ask what would happen if someone hit with a bat that transformed into a fishing rod and then back into a bat again. Pokemon's got you covered if you wanted to know what would

happen if a picture through a ball of lightning instead of a actual baseball again Pokemon's got you covered if you wanted to know what would happen if the baseball were sort of putty like

substance and could be depressed by the hand and spread out and then snap back into shape again Pokemon's got you covered. So go watch these videos that Kotaku collected of this

episode and and save your emails. It's vaguely reminiscent of what was it XKCD that asked what would happen if someone yes to baseball speed a light hit a baseball speed a light. Yeah, yeah, either one of those. Do you ever stop and wonder like in 15 years what the emails are that are going to be pouring in like you know there

there's still going to be the mic trout hypotheticals because it's going to be a 15-warp player at that point, but outside of that like there's going to be so many layers like can you remember the first weird email

or like I don't know the first a typical I guess hypothetical email you got maybe what if baseball had no fences in the ball just kept rolling forever which was the case in early baseball that was I think a

formative one what would happen if if runners had to run the bases backwards was an early one I remember but I don't know what the first one was but they haven't gotten any

less crazy over time that's for sure. Like the first one you bring up is something that actually happened in the early days of baseball.

It's not even that weird and as for the running the bases backwards isn't there that what Scandinavian baseball is brand of the game where they kind of run to

third first I'm not can't really explain it but in any case. Yeah, one thing I did notice about actual baseball before we get to your topic presumably Mike Montgomery had a

four-inning save on Thursday and he's now pitched 31 and two thirds innings through the Cubs first 46 games which would put him on pace four 111 and a half innings or

something like that which is really crazy because the last time we saw even a hundred inning reliever and I'm talking about guys who pitched exclusively out of the bullpen I think was Scott

Proctor over a decade ago 2006 he pitched like 102 innings and everyone in New York was complaining about

...