Good morning and welcome to episode 183 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from

Baseball Prospectus.

I am Ben Lindbergh, joining me is Sam Miller, it is Wednesday so it's the listener email

show. Sam is looking at emails as we speak and we're just going to kind of pick some

as we go, haven't talked about them yet, but we're going to talk about them now. So what's

up first?

Actually, I want to start with a question that we didn't get to last week and so that

might.

There were a lot last week that we didn't get to.

Yeah, it might seem slightly dated, but it might not because I might take it in a slightly

different direction, but this was from a fellow named Allen who says pertaining to the

Rangers and Nationals, opening day was on the road versus the two worst teams in Baseball.

Considering they played on the road but had a huge series following, why didn't each

respective team start their rotations out with their number three?

Today we would have had Darvish versus the Angels and Strasberg versus Cincinnati instead.

Okay, so the idea being don't burn your ace against a lousy team, save your ace for

a good team when you really need an ace.

And the reason that I want to talk about this is because while reading about Hector Sanchez

and the Giants rotation, Andrew Baggerly of Comcast, I think, said that his theory is that Sanchez

caught Zido last year, primarily, because Bochi figured Zido is the worst pitcher already.

And if you're already unlikely to win the game, you might as well choose that day to give

Posey a rest.

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