But it's better than it was

It's better than it was

It's better than it was

Better than we ever could have

Wished it to be born

It was bad the while ago

Better than you thought

Good morning and welcome to episode 618 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the Playindex at BaseballReference.com

And Ben Lindberg of Grantland joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello.

It's Astros Day on our team preview podcast series later in this episode.

So how do Sharma will be speaking to Evan Drelick, the Astros Beatwriter for the Houston Chronicle?

But we are speaking to Ted Walker, who you may remember as the founder of the excellent baseball blog, Pictures and Poets.

I should say co-founder of Pictures and Poets, so I don't completely eviscerate the true nature of that blog.

Thank you for having me.

We appreciate your accuracy.

And he is also the author of the Astros essay in the BP Annual, which makes him uniquely qualified to come on the show and talk about that team with us today.

And this is what the seventh team we have previewed and we are just now getting to the Astros, whereas a year ago, the Astros will lead off our team preview podcast series, which we order by Worse team's first, essentially, or worst projected team first.

So I don't know whether that is the rubric by which Jeff Luna is judging his success, the order in which the Astros go in our team preview podcast series.

But that seems like progress.

He probably has a spreadsheet somewhere with that order logged in it.

Probably so.

So you live in Houston. Have you seen the Astros on your television lately?

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