Good morning. Good evening. Welcome to episode 47 of Effectively Wild. The daily podcast

from baseball perspectives. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. I'm with Ben Linberg

in New York, New York. Ben, did it trouble you at all to find out today that darn near

half our staff had never heard of Gangnam Style. It troubles me a little bit just because

every website and the internet has been linking to this video is not in stock for the last

few weeks. Otherwise, no. Yeah, I guess it shows how committed we are to baseball

prospecting that we are not distracted by such many things. Do you want to talk about

baseball? Sure. Let's do that. I want to talk about Alex and Popolis. And I would like

to talk about your piece today, yesterday in your world about playoff aces. All right.

So neither of us has caught World Cup or World Baseball Championship qualifying fever.

It's strange when you go to MLB.com and you click on news, there are a lot of news about

the pennant races, interspersed with news about countries that have baseball teams that I

didn't know have baseball teams. Well, and they're playing games. Yeah, don't spoil anything

I'm taping them. Right. Okay. So Alex and Popolis, shortly before we started recording,

I read a article that was critical of Alex and Popolis, which is not something I'm used to

seeing. He has kind of been the darling or one of the darlings of the internet for the past

couple of years based on the things he says and the moves that he makes, which have been generally

perceived as very smart and having a good process and all those fancy new GM terms.

Can I interrupt your recording? Yes, you can. I know about the moves he's made. I don't know that much

to be honest about what he said, what has he said, what is his style? Well, I mean, he obviously,

when he took over, he hired a million scouts, which is not something that you normally see from

maybe a guy who's perceived as a numbers guy, but he is, he's, you know, he's that style of new GM

...