It's not that easy, baby, it's not that hard to tell

It's not that easy, baby, life is hell

What I'm doing, man, it's hard to tell

I'm doing well, it's hard to tell

It's hard to tell

Hello and welcome to episode 1715

I'm effectively wild, a fan-grapzed baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters on Mega Rally of FanGraphs

And I'm joined as always by Ben Limberg of the Ranger, Ben How are you?

I'm doing alright, and we're posting this episode on Friday, July 2nd, and if you're listening on this day,

then happy 50% of the way through the regular season day, this is the day when we cross that threshold

We'll be more than halfway through the regularly scheduled games at the end of today

Wow, is there a word that we misapply from another sport to mark the halfway point of the season?

Like we do with quarter pole, which means the opposite of what people think it does

Right, I don't know, half pole

Half pole

I don't know anything about racing, except that don't bring cardboard signs to the tour to France, or you'll get arrested

There are some other things in there that led to that, but here we are

Yeah, anyway, an important milestone

Yeah, we're past that point, so it's a time to take stock of some things, perhaps take a look at the standings

They're meaningful, we're more meaningful than they used to be, although I think based on the collected works of Jeff Sullivan

Well, then we are still probably not at the point where in season results are a better predictor of team performance at least than the preseason projections

The preseason projections, they really hold sway for some time

...