Good morning and welcome to episode three of Effectively Wild, the Daily Baseball

Perspectives podcast at the Western Edge of Manhattan where I'm keeping close eye on New Jersey.

I am Ben Lindbergh in his Honda Fit in a garage in Long Beach, California. He is Sam Miller.

Sam, it is time for that age-old question. What is your topic today?

I was going to propose the Texas Rangers.

All right, and I was going to propose how the nationals have handled and are continuing to handle

the Stephen Strasberg innings limit debacle.

Well, I was thinking earlier today that if we choose your topic again,

yeah, fine, but I think then we would officially be in the zone where we have to continue

choosing your topic forever as a joke, like a Teddy Roof map about race kind of a situation.

So I guess the real decision we have to make today is are we going to commit to a Teddy Roosevelt

in the mascot race situation or are we going to have some equity in this podcast?

I think we should not have a Teddy Roosevelt situation because sometimes you're going to have

better ideas. In fact, I think you already have had a better idea in the first episode that we

just didn't talk about. I just miss you as the word equity didn't I? Possibly.

We'll move on from that. Okay, so we are talking about the Texas Rangers then in the interest

of fairness. So the reason that I'm interested in the Texas Rangers today is I edit the daily

hit list on the baseball perspective website. And as far as I can remember, the Texas Rangers

have been in the number one spot every day that we've done a hit list from the beginning of the

year. And they have essentially been the major leagues run differential leader every day. And for

a long time, it was sort of absurd. They were dozens and dozens of runs ahead of the next best

team. And they were at one point the owners of a Pythagorean winning percentage that would have

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