I was wrong, we're friendly kids.

I was wrong, we're friendly kids.

Build the rafters, ride field, dances,

Bays for diamonds, take all chances out.

Hello and welcome to episode 1676 of Effectively Wild, a fan graph baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Raleigh, a fan graphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Limberg of the Ringer.

Ben, how are you?

I'm happy to be doing our first episode of the 2021 season.

We did it, we made it.

Yeah, it felt good.

I don't know about you, but I assume the same goes for you that you were also happy that the baseball season started.

Probably not a great leap, but it was fun.

It was maybe more fun than I had anticipated.

I just sort of, I was working, but I had baseball on all day.

I was switching from game to game and I know you were chatting all day with the staff at fan graphs and the readers.

It's just such a pleasure to go from cold turkey, total baseball withdrawal to just compartment of baseball.

It's like always such a fire hose.

I forget what it feels like to go from nothing for several months except for spring training games to almost every team in action at the same time.

Yeah, I actually did not participate in our chat, not like in a moment of protest, but just because I was editing a meds list.

It feels so nice to have baseball on in the background again.

We get that with spring training and certainly, as we've talked about a lot on this, it's not as if MLB is the only game in town when it comes to baseball globally.

But this is the baseball that we know best and are most engaged with.

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