I'm sure that's an entry they won't be allowed to be as well

Special guest is pretty easy, she's pretty good here, but we're dreaming as well

Effectively wild

Effectively wild

Effectively wild, baseball, water

Hello and welcome to episode 2004 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Vangrass

presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer, not joined today by my co-host Meg Rally of Vangrass

Meg is under the weather, which is I learned from David Grant's new book The Wager is an expression that comes from the practice of putting

ailing sailors below decks to shield them from the weather. Meg is neither a sailor nor below decks, but she is on the I.L. with flu-like symptoms

We hope to have her back soon, and so today I will get by with a little help from some other friends

First up, I'll be talking to Will Leach about the Cardinals owners of the worst record in the National League

Who were the talk of baseball this past weekend because of their decision to bar Wilson Contreras from catching

We will get into all of that as well as Will's new novel The Time Is Come, which has an Effectively Wild connection

Then I will talk to David Rysovsky, who is known not only for wearing a SpongeBob costume to Cleveland Guardians games, but for plotting the dimensions of every high school baseball field in the country

Some of you may remember several years ago we were briefly obsessed with weird amateur baseball fields, oddly shaped ones with unusual impediments

David has been tracking all of them and sharing some of the weirdest ones online, so he will share those with us today

And finally we'll have a Staplast or actually several Staplast delivered in person by frequent Staplast consultant Ryan Nelson

So let's get to it and you may want to dial down your podcast playback speed just a tad for our first guest

I am joined now by prolific podcaster columnist and novelist Will Leach who does indeed have a new book to promote, which we will get to

But before that we've got to talk about the Cardinals, I'm sorry to say Will, that is a big part of why you're here

And it's been a big part of why you've been here previous times, although almost always, probably always, under better circumstances for the Cardinals

I think this is your twelfth time on Effectively Wild and it's been a little while and I went back and looked at the last time you were on

...