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Good morning and welcome to episode 572 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Baseball Prospectus, brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm

Sam Miller with Ben Lindbergh, hi Ben. Hi! How are you? Great, thank you. Great. Anything to talk about?

Well, we could talk about the rasters for the MLB All-Star Tour of the Post

season, which we speculated about a few months ago. We wondered who would be on

these teams, whether they would be able to get any good pitching on these teams,

given all the concerns about arm injuries. And those rasters were announced that

series starts this week. I think it starts Wednesday. There's a five-game series

against Japan's national team. And there is a lot of good position player talent.

There's Jose Altuve and Robinson Kenoe and Evan Longoria and Carlos Santana and

Justin Morno. And on and on, many very talented position players, not a ton of pitching.

As we as we speculated, it was probably pretty tough to get good pitching to

persuade pitchers to continue pitching after the season, particularly after most

of them have been off for a month to have to stretch out for this short series.

So they did get Hisashi Wakuma, who's good. He is a good pitcher. And presumably

he didn't mind taking the trip home or he was already in Japan.

Literally just doing it for the ride.

Yeah, right. He just waited for a month after the

Mariner season ended so he could hit your ride on the All-Star Tour plane. So yeah,

there is a pitcher named Jeff Belivov on this team. Were you aware of Jeff

Belivov? No. Neither was I. Jeff Belivov actually pitched 24 innings for the

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