I can see you, you're lying next to me.

I can't wake you up in trying.

I'll throw a projection. Can you get me out of here?

Hello and welcome to episode 1806 of Effectively Wild, a fan graph space full podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm McGrawley of Fan Graphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Limberger of the Ringer. Ben Harrio.

We are also joined today by Dan Zimborski of Fan Graphs. Hello Dan.

Hello. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm enjoying currently. I'm enjoying the snowfall that's outside my house.

Oh gosh.

It's been a few days for me since snowfall. I miss it. Enjoy it. Well, less.

Well, I wanted to ask you about some cautious optimism of yours that you described in some pieces published this week of Fan Graphs.

You said you're more cautiously optimistic than most of your colleagues about the future of the 2022 season.

I could use some cautious optimism.

I'm afraid of that now. It might be damning with faint praise because I don't know if anyone's actually optimistic.

It's always cautiously and and lots of controlling words before that term.

I don't know. They're they feel far apart, but on a fundamental level of you compare this labor negotiation to say the one in

1994 that differences the Gulf is not as large and maybe I'm grasping onto that.

But nobody's trying to blow up the structure of of baseball right now.

So I still think that in the end with the pressure of the season and the relative plausibility of an agreement, I think that they will be able to, but I could be wrong.

Well, we hope you're not wrong, but at least for today, we're just kind of going to put our fingers in our ears and go la la la la la and pretend that there is no lockout or at least that the lockout will be resolved in time for the season to start punctually

because this was Zip's week at Fan Graphs. This is the big projections week and you published multiple posts about the state of the projected standings.

I guess you cannot project labor negotiation. So your cautious optimism is not springing from Zips. It is springing from Densom Borsky, although Zips also spring from Densom Borsky, but they're different as a complicated relationship.

But you sort of just took a look around the league, both leagues and summed up where all of the teams are. And then we asked you to do some extra work to look up some of the biggest holes that teams still have to fill and just the progress of this winter compared to the typical winter in baseball or at least recent winters, which have been a typical in other ways at times.

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