I'm welcome to episode 1377 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast brought to you by

Fangrass and our Patreon supporters. I am Meg Rally of Angrass and I'm joined as always by Ben Lemberg of The Ringer. How are you Ben?

Hello, I'm doing well. One take Meg! Yeah, that was good. Did you practice in the inter-pre-seeing week or did you not think about it at all and just go and cold?

I think that sometimes you just get in your own head a little bit too much about this.

This is probably not an experience that you have had as a person with short hair, but sometimes if I am braiding my hair and I start thinking about the movement of doing that for even one

second, I mess it up even though I can just stand there and talk to someone and do that at the same time because I've done it so many times and you have the muscle memory in your fingers.

But if you think about it for even a second, you end up with a knot of hair. So I think it's like that.

Yep, I think it's very much like that. Well, it went well this time. So your troubles are behind you.

Yes. Intro, yips are done.

We're going to talk for much of this episode to Eric Langenhagen of fan graphs, prospect analyst because it's prospect season.

Suddenly all the prospects have arrived just about everyone who will talk about this, but almost all of the

prospects who were expected to come up and make some sort of impact this season have already come up and some of them have come up very recently.

So we'll talk to Eric about why that is, why we have this cluster of prospect promotions and then we'll get into individual guys and what we should expect from them.

And the difficulty of projecting prospects with the new ball in AAA, increasing home run rates and then we'll do a little draft preview.

So it's a little bit of everything. Prospect segment. Gotta please the prospect people from time to time.

Yeah. Yeah. And people should and we'll say this during our segment with Eric. I'm sure. But I will say it again here.

People should go and read all the prospect coverage at fan graphs. It goes really good.

We are recording this on a Thursday and so tomorrow, Friday, fans of the San Francisco Giants will be able to read a list about the San Francisco Giants.

And all there, all there guys. So people should check that out and check out our other lists and all of the good draft coverage that's coming out now.

The guys released their second mock draft going all the way through the first round on Monday, Tuesday, Tuesday.

It's still the most popular thing on fan graphs. So it's good that we're talking prospect stuff because people are into it. It is the season.

Yeah. What is that? Is that a demoralizing thing or an encouraging thing to you that mock drafts are such a traffic force even though even mock drafters will acknowledge that there's probably a little predictive power in the actual mock draft order, especially when we're weeks away from the draft?

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