Good morning and welcome to episode 420 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from

Baseball Prospectus presented by the baseballreference.com Playindex. I am Ben Lindbergh, joined us always by Sam Miller.

Hello. Hi Ben. I'm about to do a flurry of typing, so ignore that. What's up?

Well the Red Sucks salvage their season. I don't know if you saw that. Wow, that typing is very loud.

After the Red Sucks opening day lost, Dan Channasey declared Game 2 a must win.

They did with it. They beat Baltimore 6-2, so the season can go on.

Well that means that tomorrow is a must win too.

Not necessarily. I mean if they lose Game 3, maybe Game 4 is a must win.

Well no, if you can't afford to lose a second game, then you can't afford to lose a second game.

They're all must win from here on out. Yeah, but maybe it's sort of 161.

It's the psychological effects of starting the season 02. It's tough to come back from that.

Okay, so I don't really have a single topic. I have a few different topics today, so we can just

work our way through them, I suppose. First one wanted to talk about this net-yost tactical decision

that is getting some criticism. Well the royals have now lost two one run games to the Tigers

and in both of those games a reliever other than Greg Holland lost the game in Game 1. Holland

after the game was lost and in Game 2 he didn't come in at all because it was a tie game on the

road, but that's typical standard manager stuff. In this second game, there was a situation in the

eighth inning where the royals had been facing mexures or who had been doing mexures or things,

and there was a lead-off double by Salvador Perez, Yost replaced him with Dyson pinch running,

M蓟us and Lorenzo Kane struck out, so it was two outs, and that brought up Elcides Escobar,

and Yost did not pinch hit for him. So our friend Andy McCullough spoke to him after the game,

and Yost's explanation was basically that this early in the season you don't want to pinch hit

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