effectively wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2132 of Effectively Wild, a fangrafts baseball

podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Big Rowley of

fan graphs and I am joined by Ben Lindbergh of the wringer Ben how are you?

I'm doing great because we've got a great show for you today that always makes me feel

like a late-night TV host when I say that it's just the default it always a great show. I'll tell you when it's a terrible show. I'll let you know in advance. We have two previews teed up so we'll be talking about the Toronto Blue Jays with Caitlin McGrath of the

athletic and the Cincinnati Reds with see Trent Rosecrans of the athletic but for

the intro only we are joined by another member of the fan graph staff other Ben Ben Clemens. Hello Ben.

Hey Ben how's it going? It's going well so instead of deep thoughts by Jack handy Let's do depth thoughts by Ben

Clements because you have been blogging about depth and we thought this would be a

good subject for the intro because this comes up often in our team preview pods.

We're always talking about, okay, who's next?

Who's the sixth through tenth starter?

Who's on the bench?

What happens if this guy gets hurt? And that is a thorny problem. the we have acknowledged on the podcast and fan graphs and writers have acknowledged in writing that this is maybe an aspect of baseball that the projections don't currently do a great job of modeling and taking into account. So as Brad Pitts, Billy Bean

says in Moneyball, what's the problem? Why do we want to solve this problem and why is it so tricky to solve? The reason that this is a problem

is because we've designed the fan graph projections. I mean I say we but you know

David Appleman and a lot of people a long time ago have designed the fan graphs projections to be very simple, very hard to break, which I think is good.

It makes them work really consistently.

And what we do is we just figure out how much each player is going to play,

take some projections for how good they are, and figure out how much each player is going to play, take some projections for

how good they are and figure out how good teams are based off of that.

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