Hello and

Hello and welcome to episode 2392 of Effectively Wild

Hello and welcome to episode 2392 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought

to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer.

Well, not as always, but again today.

Is this 2392?

It is 2392.

And you are Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, and you are back to being Prime Ben. You have regained your Prime Ben status. Other Ben? Other Ben again. Good to be back as Prime Ben and not Ben beta, beta Ben. Some might say I'm Beta Ben all the time. Who knows? So loaded.

You know, there's a lot to that term right now. So that's why I say other Ben's more neutral.

Bizarro Ben. I don't know, but I'm back. And yes, we are not always podcasting together. In fact, we didn't last time, but we are this time. I have returned from my trip, which was to Los Angeles, just for the ringer's annual in-person meetings. Sometimes we like to see each other's faces, not on a screen. And it was actually energizing to be in one of the World Series cities because you could kind of sense it. If I had not known that there was a World Series taking place this week and that it involved a Los Angeles team, I think I would have quickly become aware of that because there was just sort of World Series excitement everywhere.

And in the lobby of my hotel, there was a life-size show hay on the wall, like not the actual show hey,

but kind of like a fathead, a cut out sort of, which seemed to be about the size of the actual

show hey. I don't think that's because they knew I was coming and they put it up just for me.

I'm sure it was there. And in fact, a hotel close to my hotel has a whole

mural, the whole just, just like ground to ceiling sort of mural of Shohei. And that's not new for

the World Series. There's just sort of generally some amount of show hay mania in L.A., which I'm sure

is a fraction of how often you see

show hey if you're in Japan, for instance.

Oh, yeah.

It's just absolute inundation, it's saturation with show hey.

But it is nice to see that in an American city in 2025 that much baseball.

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