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Hello and welcome to episode 1797 of Effectively Wild a baseball podcast from

Fangribs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ed Minter, got the ringer joined by

Meg Ratley of Fangribs. Hello Meg. Hello. Just us today for the first time in a while.

I'm talking to a lot of guests lately. Yeah, it's so quiet in here. Yeah. So I've got some

banter. We've got some emails. I guess we should note that technically there's news by the

bearish definition of news, which is that there was a labor meeting of sorts. Yeah. And reportedly

nothing of note happened at it. But I guess it's technically of note that it happened. It sounds

like from all the tweets we've seen so far. And we're recording on Thursday afternoon. So there may be

more details by the time you hear this. But everyone who reported on it says that essentially

nothing happened, but that nothing was expected to happen. So I guess Bob Knight and Gale described

it as the first bargaining session in 42 days between MLB and the MLB PA ended Thursday and just as

expected. There was little movement. The timetable is unknown when they will meet again. Evan Drelik

said MLB's proposal today didn't encourage the players. A couple small changes. Expectations

weren't high going in. So in that regard, the proposal actually went mostly as expected. And then

Jeff Passen sounded I guess the most alarming note, perhaps in that he said, baseball labor update,

there is no deal. There was never going to be one today. MLB made a proposal. The reaction

among the players was not positive. If you want either side expected it to be the question is how

soon the MLB PA counters. And then the ominous last sentence spring training starting on time

is in peril. Emphasis mine. I mean, yeah, like it was always in peril. I guess it's been in peril

for a while. I am struggling, Ben. Here's how. Let me count the ways. I've been struggling with how

nervous to feel and how different from our prior expectations. This is versus how in line with

...