If baseball were different, how different would it be?

And if this thought haunted dreams, well stick around and see what been to make

have to say philosophically and pedantically, it's effectively wild. Effectively Wild

Effectively Wild

Hello and welcome to episode 2452 of Effectively Wild

The FanGrafts Baseball podcast brought you by our Patreon supporters

I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs and I'm joined by Ben Lemberg of the Ringer. Ben, how are you?

Doing great. We are almost at the end of this Odyssey. It's our second to last preview pod.

Yeah. We'll be talking about the Atlanta Braves with Grandma Collie and then we'll be talking about the white socks with James Fegan of Fang fan graphs and also Sox Machine.

So that'll be fun.

But just a bit of banter before we get there.

I'm quite enjoying this Braden Ward spring training story, this stolen bass thief.

Have you seen that Braden Ward has set a record with an asterisk, with a caveat, which is that spring training records go back 20 years, basically, before that.

No one knows what anyone accomplished in spring training. I guess the records haven't really been digitized reliably.

So now it's just kind of, you know, MLB has spring training stats back to 2006 and minor league

stats to around the same time. And that's very accessible. And so that just kind of gets treated

as, well, that's the limits of our knowledge. Beyond that, there be dragons. But he has the most

stolen bases in a single spring training on record.

I suppose we can say he has set the record for spring training stolen bases.

And he celebrated in style because he was encouraged by his teammates if he did this to pull a Ricky Henderson and grab the bag, rip the bag out of the earth,

and brandish it, just like Ricky did when he stole his 939th base and claimed the bag as his own

Braden Ward of the Red Sox, at least for the moment. He did the same when he set this spring training stolen bass record.

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