Upsters, that's infantry, they both mean a lot to me.

That's why I love baseball.

Special dances, previous series pitching and pure poetry.

That's how the baseball.

Effectively wild. Effectively Wild Effectively Wild

Effectively Wild

Baseball podcast

Hello and welcome to episode 2366 of Effectively Wild

A Fangraphs baseball podcast brought you by our Patreon supporters I'm Meg Rowley Fan Fangraphs and I'm joined by Ben Limerg of the Ringer. Ben, how are you? Well, I'm excited because it's a Tuesday, which means that we're going around, around, around. The majors, the majors, the majors. I didn't do the echo on the, I guess I didn't do that echo that well. Maybe Shane could add an actual echo effect. We have a podcast producer. Around. Around. The majors. The majors. The majors. The majors. Point is, it's Tuesday when we're recording this. Yeah. We have not spoken since Thursday. Oh, my God. Ah, an eternity. An age. So much has transpired, so much banter to get to,

beginning with breaking news, which is that we got the regular season schedule for 2026.

Yeah. And the season starts so early, earlier than ever, really. There's an opening night game it's what yankees

giants on march 25th and then opening day real opening day is the next day March 26th that sounds

it's so early it is the earliest domestic opening day in a non-delayed season. It is a new high score, a new early date on the calendar. And it just, it feels wrong. I'm not against it necessarily because, hey, MLB will be back even sooner. But still, like, it just seems unnatural somehow.

Because when we started watching baseball, the season would start first week of April at some

point, probably. But for years and years before that, it would start mid-April, even verging on

late April sometimes.

And now we're creeping into late March and earlier in late March, less late March,

there are no international games.

There's no international opening series, I guess because there's a world baseball classic, which is exciting.

But I got to think that with opening day that

early combined with the World Baseball Classic, this is going to be a super compressed ramp up to

the season, right? Like, spring training will be short. It will be abrupt, which is maybe okay.

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