Good evening. Good morning. Welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from baseballperspectus.com.

This is episode 79. I'm Sam Miller, and I'm with Ben Linberg. Ben, hello. Hello. How are you?

It's snowing. I guess that didn't really answer the question, but it is snowing, and I like snow,

so I'm happy. Great. We're doing one topic today. It was my assignment to bring a topic.

And so my topic is about untouchables. And before I start, we'll just acknowledge we both

agree that there is no such thing as a truly untouchable player. The phrase itself is sort of a

kind of a, I don't know, colloquial usage of something that isn't literally true. Okay,

so we acknowledge that everybody is technically touchable. But there are, you know, there are

a couple of players in every organization who are sort of considered untouchable. And yet,

right now, as we speak, there are rumors that the Arizona Diamondbacks are listening

if anybody wants to make an offer on Trevor Bauer. And the rays are, according to some reports,

sort of at least willing to consider trading, Alexan, and perhaps even more. And it seems to me

that these are the sorts of trades that would not be thinkable a few years ago. That there was a

long period of time where perhaps all of baseball history, certainly I think though in the last

20 years, where elite talent like this, who players who have made the majors who are not simply

prospects, but are elite sort of top 10 prospects who also have made the majors. And so

sort of cleared that final hurdle a little bit would never be traded. And that the value placed on

pre-arb talent has really since the days of John Hart been such a huge part of a competitive

advantage that no team would really ever think about trading a guy like Matt Moore or even Trevor

Bauer. And yet, here we are talking about it. And it's just less than one year since Jesus

Montero was traded for Michael Pineda, which might be sort of the, I don't know, the greatest one

of these sorts of challenge trades in major league history. And if not the greatest, then the greatest

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