I'll still be speaking statistically rambling romantically pontificating pedantically banter and bodily, drafting discerningly, giggling, giddling, giddly, equalling, effectively wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2394 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought

you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined by Ben Lindberg of the ringer.

Ben, how are you?

Well, I'm okay, although I'm upset that I missed out on seeing something from noted baseball

analyst Stephen A. Smith of ESPN, who commented prior to World Series Game 4 on Tuesday.

And all I saw was a headline on the clip at ESPN, which was Stephen A, colon, the Blue Jays, have to win game four.

Now, that's not necessarily a must win.

It's a have must win. Right.

It's a half to win.

It's a very fine distinction.

But the clip, unfortunately, will not play for me today, so I'm being deprived of day-old baseball analysis, courtesy of Stephen A.

But he was essentially saying, I believe, that it was imperative that the Blue Jays

win game four. And indeed they did. And they have now, I guess, won both of the must win

slash have to win games that they had to win in this series, according to people that we cited

on this podcast.

And it's a good thing, too, because if they had lost both of those games and also lost the two that they did lose in reality, then the series would be over.

Yeah, that would be done.

That would be that.

That'd be a bummer.

So I missed out on Stephen A's analysis, but I did want to highlight some pre-game five analysis as we record here on

...