Good morning and welcome to episode 435 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Baseball Perspectives brought to you by the play index at baseballreference.com.

I'm Sam Miller and you're Ben Lindbergh Heiben.

Hi.

How are you?

Pretty well.

I have a couple quick banters if I may.

Sure, me too.

Oh, really?

Might have a whole banter episode.

Could be.

Because of my topic, we could talk about the topic longer or if we want, but we could very easily talk about the topic in about 45 seconds as well.

So maybe the banter will take up the book of our day.

So, a couple things.

First off, did you read the piece on VJ Uptin that Jorge Ongré wrote four sports on Earth today?

I have not.

It's an interesting piece and it's sort of, if I had to give it a thesis statement, it would basically be that VJ Uptin doesn't have the dread of fear necessary to pull himself out of this state that he's in.

I don't know.

Or I don't know the Jorge would say that.

So conclusively, but that's kind of like the central thesis statement.

And there's an interesting part in it because we talked to, when we were talking about how much things, how much we should think about the state of baseball kind of resetting itself in the off season, whether we should have been excited or kind of optimistic at all the VJ Uptin would get like a fresh start in 2014.

And you noted that one of the ideas behind that is you have a whole off season to fix things and to really work on things and change the things that are too hard to fix during the season when you're playing every day.

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