Good morning and welcome to episode 44 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Baseball Prospectus presented by the baseballreference.com play index. I'm Ben Lindbergh, joined by Sam Miller and his keyboard.

Howdy. Hi. How are you?

Uh, okay.

Any banter?

Uh, no banter. Just doing some last minute, uh, last minute play indexing.

Very good, very good.

Yeah. This is listener email show, so we'll be answering some emails, getting to the play index segment.

I did see, do you remember when I read maybe a week or so ago a quote from an anonymous executive who said something about talent getting worse in baseball?

Uh, I don't remember that exactly.

Well, that happened.

And Peter, Peter Damon's wrote an article about changes that he would recommend to speed up the game.

And there was another quote from an anonymous executive who said much the same thing.

He said a club executive said we are also dealing with a lack of impact players coming into our game.

The talent pool is shrinking.

We focus on Mike, Trout and Bryce Harper and some of our great young players, but after that it becomes problematical.

Look no further than this year's draft, Cameron says no impact position players, especially at the infield and outfield corners.

I, uh, I had a conversation not that long ago with a former player development guy who was very, very strongly believed this is the case too.

And he blames it all.

He blames it all on showcase culture.

He thinks that nobody learns how to play baseball there.

It's basically like he thinks that showcases for high schoolers and younger, I think maybe even.

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