Have a catch and a slog with me in a virtual rise.

From small sample size, these fun facts must lie.

It's effectively wild, a strange book could hang, Effectively Wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2459 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by by Meg Rally of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg.

Hello. It was a recurring bit for the first several years of this podcast history that stats

stabilized became real when Mike Trout was atop, the war leaderboard. And so I find myself wondering what to do now because as of Saturday through Saturday,

Mike Trout was atop the war leaderboard at Fangraphs.

And even now, he is tied unless you export.

And if you export and you go out to several decimal places.

Yes.

Then, of course, Joey Weimer, as everyone expected, is leading the major leagues in war.

He's ahead of Mike Trout by 0.006-174 war, which is certainly significant.

So I guess we could say Trout is leading the American

League in war at the moment, at least. He was leading the majors in war very quickly.

What are we to make of this? Are we to bring back our bit about, well, stats are real because

Mike Trout has stopped the leaderboard? Or in these latter days of Trout's career,

is Trout being atop the leaderboard? And this is sort of a sad thought. It's self-evidence

of the fact that stats are not real yet, that we've kind of come full circle. And now it's

small sample because Trout is leading the majors in war. Do you mean to tell me that you don't think

he's going to have a 500 habit the rest of the way? I don't. I mean, maybe he doesn't need the luck.

Maybe his performance will improve. He's been great. He's looked good. Yeah. I do believe somewhat

...