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Hello and welcome to episode 2354 of Effectively Wild, a Fangrass Baseball brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Megrelli of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg at the ringer. Ben, how are you? Well, our plan for this week was to front load our podcasting to avoid big news later in the week. We thought, oh, we'll get ahead of the trade deadline and then we won't be overwhelmed with news.

And then we've just stumbled into quite a big baseball newsday.

Yeah.

The stay has it all. Do we talk about Hall of Fame inductions? Do we talk about the guy who hit four homers?

Do we talk about the Aaron Judge injury?

Do we talk about Bryce Harper getting in Rob Bannford's face?

Yeah.

Do we talk about the latest wrinkle in the possible pitch fixing scandal?

I guess the answer is yes, probably we talk about all of those things.

I don't even know where to begin.

But you were just watching the Ichro induction ceremony.

So should we start there while you're just off the good vibes of watching one of your baseball heroes having his big moment in the sun?

I just think that it is a really kind of remarkable thing, all told, that the Seattle Mariners, a franchise that has largely been marked by failure, right?

Failure to reach the postseason for long stretches, failure to reach the World Series ever, has these

guys in its history who are important not only to the franchise, right, who are not only

franchise icons, but are just baseball icons.

They're guys, everyone knows.

Like, you know, you say one of my favorite players.

...