Effectively Wild Episode 2374: The Death of Exsportise

Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley

Sports, Baseball

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2025

⏱️ 107 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the deepening twilight of Mike Trout, then (21:19) discuss why the so-called “death of expertise” sweeping society hasn’t swept sports in the same way, before answering listener emails (1:04:01) about whether the Rangers are good, how the count can be “quickly 0-2,” what makes a righty seem like […]

Transcript

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0:00.0	Have a catch and a slog with me in a virtual rise.
0:07.2	From small sample size, these fun facts must lie.
0:14.0	It's effectively wild.
0:18.0	A strange book could hang Effectively Wild.
0:25.8	Hello and welcome to episode 2374 of Effectively Wild, a Fangrass baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.
0:33.4	I'm Meg Rally Fangrass, and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the ringer. Ben, how are you?
0:38.4	I'm in a reflective mood about multiple topics that I will bring up on this podcast, but the first of them being Mike Trout.
0:46.8	Okay.
0:47.1	Now, do you remember the last time we talked about Mike Trout?
0:49.8	It was a little more than a month ago.
0:52.0	Yeah.
0:52.1	It was episode 2359, and the topic was basically, Mike Trout is
0:57.5	boring now. And that's sad because he wasn't hurt. He was actually playing. He just wasn't playing
1:04.2	very well. And this was a new phase, a new stage of the Mike Trout decline, where he was at least on the surface, healthy,
1:13.0	able to be in the lineup, if not the field, and yet just not playing particularly well,
1:18.3	not terribly, but just meh.
1:21.2	And that was a change from the previous stages of Mike Trout is the best player ever.
1:27.4	Mike Trout is still great, but he's just
1:29.8	unavailable a lot of the time. But if he could only stay healthy, then maybe he could still be
1:34.8	great again. And then this felt like the final phase of, huh, maybe it's not just the injuries
1:40.3	anymore. Or maybe it's the cumulative effect of the injuries, having taken their toll
1:45.8	on top of aging, and this is just who he is. I mentioned on that episode, well, he is about to
	...

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