Have a catch and a slog with me in a virtual rise.

From small sample size, these fun facts must lie.

It's effectively wild, a strange book could hang, Effectively Wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2303 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Rally of

Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello, you sound sick. I do. Yeah. Don't you mean I sound

deeply resonant and sonorous? Maybe that's the way you meant to phrase it. Yeah. Yeah,

that's exactly what I meant to say. Yeah. Yeah. I feel fine, but I sound like this.

So get used to it, folks, because that's what it's going to be like for the rest of this episode,

hopefully for not too much longer.

But if you don't enjoy how I sound, I hope you will enjoy what we talk about because we've

got some good stuff to discuss. Sometimes I think 13 years into this thing almost and 2,300-plus episodes,

what else could there possibly be to talk about that we haven't talked about already?

What could keep us coming back?

What could keep all the listeners coming back?

And when we wrapped last week's recording on

Friday, little did we suspect that the very next day, baseball would be consumed by talk about

bulbous bats and that we would all be obsessed with bulbous bats and discussing meaty, girthy wood that the Yankees

debuted on Saturday or didn't debut on Saturday.

We just realized that they'd been using it for months, which we definitely have to discuss,

because that makes me question everything.

But here we are.

...