Good morning and welcome to episode 518 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Baseball Prospectus presented by the baseballreference.com play index. I am Ben Lindbergh of Grantland.com joined as always,

almost always, by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello, how are you? Good, how are you?

Okay, good. Listen to your email show. Yes, sir. Can I begin? Please. Okay. All right, so this question

comes from Maximilian, who is referring to a topic that I discussed with Russell and Michael

Bauman last Friday, I guess it was when you were at the area code games. He says the only thing I would

miss if mound visits were eliminated. So this is something we discussed as a potential time saver.

Yeah. The only thing I would miss. I wondered, I wondered about that. I thought that came,

this just started in the middle of a conversation. I wondered about that. Good. Yes. Yes.

You're right. Okay, so this will save you the time that you would have had to spend catching up

with that episode, which I know, I know you're planning to do. The only thing I would miss if mound

visits were eliminated or drastically reduced is the late game drama when the manager goes out for

the first visit and it's not clear if he's going to pull the pitcher or not and he leaves him in.

You don't see it much anymore, but the aspect of I asked him how he was feeling. He looked me in the

eye and said he could get the next guy and I told him it was his game to win is priceless.

And then he sends us a link to a game this June when he says Bob Melvin left Jim Johnson in an

extras in this game and after a troubled season, it was a powerful moment, signifying confidence in

his guy, though Johnson didn't end up getting the next guy. I do wish that there were some way to

know, to have the mound visits when this interaction happened flagged so that we could see

whether the pitcher is any more likely to get the guy, any more or less likely to get the guy

after he has vowed to his manager that he's going to get the guy. Right. And after the manager has

looked into his eyes and seen some hidden strength there because we can't really, we could look up

...