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Hello and welcome to episode 2376 of Effectively Wild, the Fangraphs baseball podcast

brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer.

Ben, how are you?

I'm doing okay.

I'm trying to sort out my feelings about these pennant races such as they are.

Because we've talked a couple times about whether everything was boring.

It seemed like, okay, everything's set early.

There's no suspense.

There's nothing at stake.

The playoff field is essentially cemented,

and we've got weeks, if not months, to go.

So here we are with not quite two weeks left in the regular season.

And to some extent, that's been borne out. There hasn't been really any movement in terms of

who's in and who's out. So nobody, as of yet, has blown it. Nobody has overtaken anyone else.

So to this point, that seems to have been

prescient that, yeah, okay, it's the same 12 teams that it looked like it was going to be.

However, it has never really felt totally settled to this point, just because there are a few teams just nipping at the laggard's heels here and you can't be comfortable.

...