Hey, everyone. Before we begin, we have an announcement. Actually, it's less an announcement than it is an appeal.

We put this off as long as possible, but to keep the show going in its current format, we need some support from, as the NPR people say, listeners like you.

To that end, we've set up a show page on Patreon, which is a website where podcasts hosts and other kinds of creators can solicit a small monthly stipend from people who enjoy what they do and want them to keep doing it.

We'll keep this less intrusive than an NPR pledge drive, but I want to take a minute to explain why we're asking for your help.

Sam and I have never been paid to do this podcast. When we started going on four years and 850 episodes ago, the show is just something we decided to do on top of our actual jobs.

And when I left baseball perspective, about 350 episodes ago, I decided to keep doing it because I enjoy talking to Sam and directing with all of you, and because I didn't want to be the bad guy who kills a podcast people like and also probably because I'm bad at business.

It takes a lot of hours to do a daily podcast. It's not just the talking, planning, and scheduling, but also the editing, uploading, and posting.

All the boring, but necessary behind the scene stuff that happens between me calling Sam and you hearing our conversation is a one man effort, and that man is me.

Over the years, our episodes have gotten a lot longer, and our audiences have gotten a lot larger, which means that our hosting costs are higher, and production takes more time.

Our play index sponsorship no longer comes close to covering those costs, and while the show sounds much better than it did before, that quality has come at cost to my sanity and sleep schedule.

Our goal in asking you to support us on Patreon is to make it feasible for us to preserve the podcast in its current form, to keep it free to download so that anyone can access it.

And ideally to do both of those things without subjecting you to the same ads for stamps and audiobooks and daily fantasy leagues that you skip past and other podcasts.

We know that not everyone has money to spare on a podcast, but we hope that those of you who do have some disposable income will consider devoting some of your entertainment dollars to us.

If you're a regular listener, you're getting a lot of hours out of effectively wild.

This month, for example, we're doing 24 episodes and producing something like 18 hours of audio.

As Sam has often observed, we all talk about baseball to avoid dwelling on our impending deaths, which means that we're giving you 18 hours this month during which you're not contemplating your mortality.

We hope that's worth something. So please go to Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

Patreon.com slash effectively wild and become a patron of the show.

You can give as little as a couple dollars a month or as much as the complete contents of your bank account.

We've also added a few rewards for higher monthly donations in case the satisfaction of having helped sustain the show isn't incentive enough.

It's easy to set up a recurring payment and it's also easy to cancel in case we get the yips and lose our ability to talk about baseball.

A percentage of the revenue generated will go to BP, which pays for hosting and gives us this platform,

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