Take me to the diamond, lead me through the turnstile, shower me with data that I never thought to compile now and freely now a scorecard with a cracker

jacket of smile.

Effectively wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2288 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer.

Ben, how are you?

Happy to be potting with you as always.

Happy to be previewing.

We've got a couple good preview segments lined up. We will be talking to Alex Spear of the Boston Globe about the Boston Red Sox, followed by Jason Burke of Inside the A's, about the athletics. And by the way, Guardians fans, don't freak out. We have not forgotten the Guardians, and I know that the

projections for the Guardians are perhaps not what you would want them to be, but they're not

worse than the A's projections. We just had to do a little rearranging here. We would rather

get you the best possible combination of guest and segment, even if it means that we have to rearrange a bit and delay

certain segments. So we will probably get to the Guardians next week. Don't read anything else

into it. It's just logistical issues, just scheduling complications. But a couple great previews

to get to today and just a bit of banter before we do.

Here are a few things that I have noted.

One of my favorite things is when a player gets hurt and says that it improved him somehow.

Now, I couldn't end that sentence after one of my favorite things is when a player gets hurt.

No, I generally don't like that. And in addition to being bad because it makes you unable to play

when you were hurt, also sometimes it has a cascading effect where you change something mechanically

to compensate for the injury and then that screws you up somehow and the proverbial bad habits.

But every now and then, there's a player who says the opposite, that getting hurt and compensating for that injury somehow actually helped them play better, at least in some way.

...