Effectively Wild Episode 2366: The Post-Toss Toss

Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley

Sports, Baseball

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2025

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the early start to the 2026 regular season and MLB’s schedule in a warming world, tossing snacks after tossing a bat, this year’s potential trio of 50-homer hitters (including a Cal Raleigh update), the virtues of players who have high floors (with check-ins on Bobby Witt Jr. and […]

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Upsters, that's infantry, they both mean a lot to me.
0:05.0	That's why I love baseball.
0:07.0	Special dances, previous series pitching and pure poetry.
0:11.0	That's how the baseball.
0:14.0	Effectively wild. Effectively Wild Effectively Wild
0:22.9	Effectively Wild
0:25.1	Baseball podcast
0:28.7	Hello and welcome to episode 2366 of Effectively Wild
0:35.0	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,
1:15.8	beginning with breaking news, which is that we got the regular season schedule for 2026.
1:21.8	Yeah. And the season starts so early, earlier than ever, really. There's an opening night game it's what yankees
1:30.4	giants on march 25th and then opening day real opening day is the next day March 26th that sounds
1:40.2	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.
2:03.2	Because when we started watching baseball, the season would start first week of April at some
2:09.5	point, probably. But for years and years before that, it would start mid-April, even verging on
2:16.1	late April sometimes.
2:24.2	And now we're creeping into late March and earlier in late March, less late March,
2:26.9	there are no international games.
2:30.9	There's no international opening series, I guess because there's a world baseball classic, which is exciting.
2:32.7	But I got to think that with opening day that
2:35.8	early combined with the World Baseball Classic, this is going to be a super compressed ramp up to
2:42.3	the season, right? Like, spring training will be short. It will be abrupt, which is maybe okay.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 22 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.