Hello, I waste my time tracking all these statelines,

but it's here I found my kind, they're all effectively wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2382 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, not joined today by Meg Rally of FanGraphs who has fallen ill or has gotten more ill since the last time we talked.

You heard how she sounded then, since she has lost her voice

and found a fever. Terrible timing, not that there's ever good timing to be sick, but this

week is among the worst ones to be a baseball editor and also be ill, but we will have her back

as soon as she's able, and maybe next time she will rejoin us and we'll do some division series preview.

But we have two able fill-ins for Meg today, which I am also excited about.

Zach Kreiser and Hannah Kaiser of the bandwagon substack.

Hello, Hannah and Zach.

Hello.

Hello, hello.

Great to have you both.

I feel fine, and I hope I sound fine. It takes two of us to make up for Meg, though, so we need our full strength. Big shoes, it's true. And, yeah, I hope that I did not drive her deeper into the throes of illness. To be clear, I did not force her to podcast the other day. She podcasted of her own free will,

but hopefully having to talk to me for all that time didn't make things worse. She hasn't blamed

me yet, at least. But I'm happy to talk to both of you. And I think this is the first time that

you've been on effectively wild together since one of the year-end podcasts in 2023, episode 2105. And that was when you were

former colleagues and future colleagues, but not present colleagues, I believe, because that was

before you launched your substack. So how has the bandwacken been going? It's been going good for me as a satisfied subscriber, but for you two.

That's funny because I don't remember there being a sort of in-between time of us working together

because I think we continued.

...