But if you give me just one more chance, I swear I won't ever lie to you again.

Because now I see the destructive power of a lie.

The stronger than truth, I can't believe I ever hurt you.

I swear I will never lie to you again.

Please, I'm just giving you another more chance.

I will never lie to you again.

I swear.

Hello and welcome to Episode 1809.

Technically wild, a baseball podcast from Fan Graphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer, joined by Meg Reilly of Fan Graphs.

Hello, Meg.

There's a big basketball trade consummated shortly before we started recording here.

This is not a basketball podcast, so we will not be giving you in-depth analysis of James Hardin going to the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for some sixers players, including Ben Simmons.

But it did make me think because some people were sharing the sort of tragic comic stat about the Nets when they have had their big three on the floor at the same time.

Right, they put together what was supposed to be a super team and then for various reasons, refusal to vaccinate, inability to stay healthy, etc.

They have played 16 games in total together over the course of multiple seasons and they've gone 13 and three in those games.

So in that sense, the plan of putting together Kevin Durant and James Hardin and Kyrie Irving worked out great.

The only problem is that they have almost never played together.

But that made me almost envious because we don't have a perfect equivalent for that sort of stat in baseball, kind of the plus minus, you know, when this guy is on the floor or on the ice and when he's not and how does the team perform differently.

And what are the ideal alignments of players on the floor at any particular time and in baseball, that doesn't work so well because any one baseball player doesn't make that huge an impact typically you can have a great player and still a lousy team or a lousy player and still a great team.

And so you will occasionally see the team has gone X and X when this guy is in the lineup and why and why when he's not right, but it is often not all that dramatic and it's also not that trustworthy because the samples are sort of small and a sample of a certain number of baseball games is less reflective of the team's true talent that the same number of basketball games for instance.

So I sort of wish we had that but generally in baseball you're running out the same people as often as you can and it doesn't really matter that much if this player is on the field at the same time as that player they're kind of doing their thing regardless for the most part other than I don't know maybe a picture catcher battery that happens to work well particularly together.

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