People say no rock the ball, let things go their own way.

I'm used at what seems so right, now it's gotten hard to say.

I wish that I could talk to you, and you could talk to me.

A susparing view of us left my friend from the days that used to be.

Hello and welcome to episode 812 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from Baseball Perspectus,

presented by the Play Index at baseballreference.com.

I am Ben Lindbergh of 538, joined by not similar today, but a replacement BP Editor-in-Chief,

former BP Editor-in-Chief, Stephen Goldman, hello Steve.

Hi, it's great to be back.

Steve is in my living room, filling in for Sam, whose internet connection wasn't great today.

And it's fortuitous timing because we're doing a baseball history show.

The present day-to-day baseball stories are pretty slow right now, and Sam and I are about a week away from getting into the future and doing team preview episodes.

So today we're going to do a brief diversion into the past, and we'll be talking to Darius Austin,

who is a writer for Bench to the pen.

Hey Darius.

Hello.

And Darius is joining us from Northern England, and I will describe the circuitous path that we took to this podcast.

Darius emailed me and Sam last month, and Sam and I answered his email in an email show, and he told us that he had noticed that Warren Spahn had never started against the Dodgers for three years in the 1950s because of the Dodgers powerful right-handed lineup, and the short fence in left that Evetsfield,

and he had checked Warren Spahn's game log to confirm this, and it was true that between 1954 and 1957 Spahn had pitched only a few innings against the Dodgers, and he wondered how this had been possible,

and whether it was possible for teams to do something similar now, whether teams could start certain guys or sit certain guys against certain lineups depending on matchups.

And Sam and I talked about it a bit, and kind of concluded that it doesn't work as well today as it did in the 1950s, but maybe that's just a failure of imagination.

So Darius did some additional research on banished to the pen, which is the excellent website started by listeners to this podcast, and he dug into this more deeply and wrote it up, and I will link to his article in the podcast post at BP, and also in the Facebook group,

...