I see the sun, I paint a picture of the days gone

Hello and welcome to episode 1755 of Effectively Wild, a fangrass baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rallye, a fangrass, and I'm joined with this episode by Craig Goldstein, a baseball prospector, Craig. How are you?

I'm, oh I'm tired, I'm gonna be honest. I was gonna say I'm good, but also tired. I'm really just tired. How are you?

I'm similarly tired. I don't know if you have this experience, but I often when the end of the regular season is as chaotic and is, you know, potentially setting up further chaos into either the playoffs or the need for a typewriter games. I get caught up in that, you know, I have a lot of excitement, feeling, and then that all ends, and I have to grapple with not sleeping very well for a month and working a lot.

So I have moved through that to excitement about the postseason because who on this podcast wants to listen to me complain about my cool job, but I'm preemptively tired. I am anticipatorially tired.

What do you think is worse than being actually tired?

Honestly.

Yeah, I mean, to be fair, you'd be complaining about both of our cool jobs, but I identify, and I think not to actually complain about the very cool thing that we get to do.

But I think to just explain, like, there's like a come down from the high of the end of the season, except for us, like, it's work. And that is also energizing, but you've also just expended,

expended, all your energy. And now it's like a month long sprint. Like, I guess I don't know, I am not an athlete in any capacity, but I imagine it's like whatever some mile of a marathon or triathlon or whatever feels like where you've just done so much.

And then also, oh, wait, you actually have to just push harder now or something. I don't know. I'm sure many of the listeners are very good athletes and have a better comparison here.

But I have to imagine that's what it's like as someone who's like exercising is just making yourself tired.

Yeah, yeah. I think that that's a pretty apt metaphor. Well, setting aside the sort of anticipation of being tired, what is your sort of philosophy on the desirability of chaos?

And that's part of why you and I are doing previews for the wild card. And we'll spend part of this episode sort of talking about these wild card matchups and what we're looking forward to in the playoffs more generally.

And part of why it's just you and I talking rather than having say B writers representing these teams talking is that we didn't know what the day would hold today until, you know, the evening yesterday.

We want to make sure to get a podcast out in anticipation of wild card games and what have you. So what is your sort of general philosophy around the potential for chaos?

Is that exciting for you? Are you team entropy or do you like to have sort of more decisive and early conclusions to playoff hunts?

Yeah, I think despite the nod towards complaining or whatever about our work. I am very much pro chaos. I don't know that the work actually gets any less tiring or whatever knowing what's going in.

I said, but there's a certain amount of preparation that you can do and it's a little more crammed now. But I think for the most part, it's not that much different. And the excitement is what it's all about. Right. The end of season.

I mean, being able to go into the last season with, you know, four teams in the mix for the a wild card and a West race, you know, still technically undecided.

That's, I don't know. That's that's what it's all about to me. Like that's that's the point of having these exciting seasons. And I think, yeah, I think look, it's the end of a, you know, being able to prepare is one thing.

But it's the end of a long season, regardless. And the beginning of a sprint. So I'm all for making it as as difficult on us as possible. If it means the most kind of drama for everyone.

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