Oh, baseball, what have you done?

Something's never been seen, something factually fun.

Oh, there's so much of you, but there's so much of you but there's so little time so thank god for effectively wild hello and welcome to episode 2470 of effectively wild a vans baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, Ben. How are you? I'm doing well because we've got a great guest today. Great guest. I guess we have been very excited to talk to. None other than Brad Lidge, the great Brad Lidge, is on the program.

We'll talk a little bit of baseball with Brad.

We'll talk about Mason Miller and how he is succeeding with a somewhat Ligian approach to pitching.

But mostly, we're going to talk to Brad Lidge about being an archaeologist.

Yep.

Because that's what Brad Lidge is nowidge about being an archaeologist. Yep. Because that's what Brad Lidge is now.

He is an archaeologist for real.

And you know me, usually I like to wait until a player is an octogenarian, a non-aginarian, before we call them up.

Brad Lidge is still a quadrigenarian.

That's what we almost are.

He's not seasoned enough to be an

effectively wild guest, but I can't wait another 40 years to do my own excavation of living

baseball history, because as the only rule readers out there, remember, the closer's the closer

because he's the closer. But what if the closer is an archaeologist? I need to know what that

means.

So at a time of closer upheaval in Major League Baseball, we are calling in and calling up a closer.

And I've wanted to talk to him about this for a while because he's been in the process of becoming an archaeologist for some time now.

And so every now and then there will be an article and there will be a check-in and someone

will do an interview with him or write a piece about Bradledge becoming an archaeologist.

And then I see a new wave of people discover that Bradledge is in his archaeology era.

...