You can pull the judge and sing the theme.

You can judge me by the color of the skin.

You can live a life till you die.

One thing you have hide is when you clip it inside.

Hello and welcome to episode 11-E3 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast.

I'm Fangrass presented by our Hitchhannis Porters.

I'm Ben Lemberg of The Ringer, flying solo today actually for a bonus episode of Effectively Wild.

So during our team preview podcast series it becomes very difficult to schedule non-preview guests.

But there were a couple people I really wanted to talk to today.

So we're doing an additional episode this week.

Jeff was occupied and couldn't join me, but he'll be back tomorrow for the regularly scheduled team preview podcast.

Later in this episode I'll be talking to Tom Sheber, a long time baseball researcher who just won Saber's Henry Chadwick Award,

which is given out annually to a few of the most accomplished baseball researchers out there.

Tom is the senior curator at the Hall of Fame.

He's also a long time Saber member.

He blogs at the baseball researcher site and he does a lot of investigative deep dives into baseball history that have fascinated me for years.

So I'm happy that he won this award and wanted to have him on to talk to him about it and about his work and his origin story and some of the tidbits about baseball he's turned up over the years.

So that will come a little later in this episode.

But first we have an update on the baseball and on the rapid record rise in home run rate.

The last week Rob Arthur was writing for Vice News about the fact that the Justice Department is not enforcing civil rights anymore.

Yes, that's as scary as it sounds, but this week he is back to doing a hard-hitting investigative journalism about other important questions.

Okay, maybe not quite as important.

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