Good morning and welcome to episode 289 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Baseball Prospectus.

I am Ben Lindbergh, joined by Sam Miller, it's Wednesday, so it's listener email show.

Do you want to start with emails, you picked up some emails, I have a couple of emails.

Yeah, let me lead with one and then we can go in whatever direction we want, but I want

to lead with one just because it's more of an update.

Zach emailed us about a week ago or three days ago and he said that he just discovered

us a few months ago, which explains his question why he's asking this question, long time listeners

will think it sounds familiar.

Maybe emails, someone asked you about extreme shifts and that got me thinking about what

a team could do, are there any rules about what protective gear defenders can use, how

close can a field or stand to the batter's box, are there any rules against purposefully

distracting the batter?

This is of course almost identical to the question that led to us discussing over

the course of multiple episodes, the Defender Wall, which was probably one of our, I don't

know, most distinguished moments, distinguished being kind of a value neutral term in the sense.

And so of course, Zach, I replied that Zach could listen to our conversation in episodes,

well, I don't know what episodes they were, but he reminded me that I actually have had

an update to this that I've been planning to do and I've forgotten to do it now.

As you recall, our compromise was that the wall would probably be quickly shut down because

it would be a threat to the umpire, but we also discussed the possibility of a defender

to say the shortstop standing directly behind the, you know, the pitcher's release point

...