Good morning and welcome to episode 347 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from

baseballperspectus.com. I am Ben Linberg joined as always by Sam Miller. My topic for today is

things that happened today. That's my topic today being Wednesday and there were a lot of things

that happened. Some of them related to topics that we have discussed on the podcast at some point,

so I thought we could run through those quickly. First, there was the rule change news coming out

of the winter meetings. There was a meeting between managers and GMs and sort of a non-update update

on the progress of instant replay. It seems like they're still ironing out the details there.

But Craig Calcatera wrote that he spoke to someone who he asked about the neighborhood play,

which is something that we brought up as a potential sticking point when this news first surfaced.

Apparently, the plan at least currently is just to make that exempt from instant replay.

But you would still be able to challenge a transfer play, but not a neighborhood play.

So, I guess that's one solution. Not really though. It's sort of a solution, but you're still

like you're kind of acknowledging that you have a rule that you don't enforce, so why not just

make it a rule? You shouldn't have rules that are not enforced. Rules that are not enforced

are a terrible thing in any sphere, because then it becomes selectively enforced and can be used

for nefarious reasons. So, just make it not a rule. Make it a rule that you don't have to

touch second base if there's a play coming in. That's what you wanted to be. Make it a rule.

Yeah, I guess if you're saying that it can't be challenged, then you're giving

tacit approval to not stepping on the base, and at that point players would probably start to

take advantage of it anyway and get farther and farther away, I guess, if they know that it can't be

challenged, I guess empires could still call the runner safe. But yeah, I see what you're saying,

but apparently that's how they're going to handle that, or at least currently, that's the thinking,

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