Good morning and welcome to episode 384 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from

Westball Prospectus. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindbergh. Today we're talking about the

Metz. So we've got with us Will Woods who is a contributor to baseball

prospectus and who wrote the Metz chapter for the annual this year after we

talked to Will. Nick will talk to Mark Karig from Newsday, another writer that we

like a lot. So it would highly encourage you to just skip us and just go straight

to that. In the meantime we will be keeping ourselves busy talking to Will. Will how

are you? I'm great, guys. Thanks for having me. Well I get most of my baseball

knowledge from sort of gauging the general tone with which fans bemoan their

lot and the Metz fans bemoaning their lot seem to be not so bemoan-y lately.

I feel like there's this sort of sense of optimism that they are maybe

something of an underrated team that they might be on the cusp. The Metz

themselves seemed to feel that way enough to go spend money on a bunch of

free agents this winter and yet we're talking to you on the fifth day of this

series which means that Pacota absolutely disagrees and thinks that the

Metz are terrible. Can you explain this apparent contrast? I can try. I think on

the one hand I agree with you the I'm surprised we're having this

conversation so early in the series. I do think the Metz are quite a bit

underrated and I see that Pacota has them at 73 wins currently and I think they'll

do noticeably better than that. However the optimism thing you know is it

optimism or is it just an improvement from the pessimism of before? I'm not

totally sure. I think the difference between now and say five years ago,

...