Now bring it on back, take it down, now switch.

Hello and welcome to episode 800 of Effectively Wild, the Daily podcast from baseball

perspective presented by the play index at baseballreference.com. I am Ben Lindbergh of 538,

joined by Sam Miller of baseball perspective, hello Sam. Yep. We have a guest today,

occasionally there is overlap between cricket and baseball, both in the real world and on this

podcast. And today is one of those times we're talking to Karen Powell, who is a former international

cricket player for the West Indies. And he's now trying to transition to baseball, hey Karen.

Hi guys, how are you? Good. So the obvious question that everyone asks you, that friends and family

and teammates must ask you is why. So I know in 2014 you were playing for the West Indies and then

there's some sort of dispute and you took some time off for cricket from cricket, but instead of

trying to play somewhere else, you decided to switch to baseball. So how come? As you said,

the dispute along with an opportunity where some of the Dodgers got some potential and he sent me

out to arrange for me to go to California, do some workout there. And then we decided to come to Florida

to go to the IMG Academy where we could have a more structured environment and get all the work

then leading up to this crunch term that it is now. Did these scouts reach out to you first or did

you reach out to baseball teams first? We reached out to them, we just sent out some footage to see

what they thought. And this was not a lifelong dream, right? It wasn't like you grew up wanting to

be a baseball player and you were trapped in a cricket player's body or something. You decided to

make this change, but why? I mean, had you been a fan? Had you always thought it looked like

something you wanted to do? Well, the similarities between the two. Obviously you said, I used to

watch baseball when I was growing up being a professional cricket. I didn't have time to

explore baseball, but with the timing of everything that's happened that it was the right time and

...