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 2374 of Effectively Wild, a Fangrass baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rally Fangrass, and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the ringer. Ben, how are you?

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.

Okay.

Now, do you remember the last time we talked about Mike Trout?

It was a little more than a month ago.

Yeah.

It was episode 2359, and the topic was basically, Mike Trout is

boring now. And that's sad because he wasn't hurt. He was actually playing. He just wasn't playing

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,

able to be in the lineup, if not the field, and yet just not playing particularly well,

not terribly, but just meh.

And that was a change from the previous stages of Mike Trout is the best player ever.

Mike Trout is still great, but he's just

unavailable a lot of the time. But if he could only stay healthy, then maybe he could still be

great again. And then this felt like the final phase of, huh, maybe it's not just the injuries

anymore. Or maybe it's the cumulative effect of the injuries, having taken their toll

on top of aging, and this is just who he is. I mentioned on that episode, well, he is about to

...