philosophical music effectively wild.

effectively wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2133 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from

Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer joined by Meg Rally of fan graphs.

Hello Meg.

Hello.

We will be joined a little later on today by a top tier Patreon supporter, Jay Wade Edwards

who will accompany us for some emails and some

stat blasting which he will perform. So just a bit of banter before we bring him

on because there have been a couple notable signings one of which we on a this week. So I don't know how much there is to say about either, but when we had

Matt Gelb on for the Phillies preview last week we talked about the potential for a

Zach Wheeler extension and that has since come to pass.

Yup.

Zach Wheeler who was slated to become a free agent at the end of this season will not now because

he has signed a three-year 126 million dollar

contract, no options or opt-outs or anything, just simple. He stays with the Phillies for a few more years at quite a lucrative

rate. That's a 42 million dollar annual rate which is the largest for any

contract extension as an average annual value and the fourth largest for any

contract ever behind Otani I guess technically Scherzer Verlander now Zach Wheeler and you know what I guess he deserves it because

he's arguably been the best pitcher in baseball which I don't know that we give him enough

credit for that.

Yeah.

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