Tell me how we're going to do our trip.

And you get once upon a time away.

Oh yeah, once upon a time away.

Oh yeah, once upon a time away.

Oh yeah, once upon a time away.

Good morning and welcome to episode 916 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from baseball

Perspectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the play index at baseballreference.com.

I'm Ben Lindbergh of 538. My regular co-hosts and Miller is off in the wilderness somewhere this week.

So I have been helped out by a combination of Jo-sheen and Rene Gisarri.

We are at the midpoint of the regular season and so we are running through each division,

talking about what has happened and what we expect to happen over the next few months.

Today I'll be talking about the AL West with Jo-sheen, who writes the Jo-sheen newsletter at Jo-sheen.com

and also contributes to SI and the Athletic Chicago.

We talked a few days ago and I've been parceling out that content episode by episode.

Just so you know the recording quality on Jo-zen varies a bit throughout the episode.

He was traveling this week and we had to use a couple different methods to capture his words,

but it should be adequate throughout.

So we will pick up where we left off with the AL West.

Moving on to the AL West and as we speak, the Texas Rangers have the largest division lead of any team in baseball.

That is not something I foresaw and if you had told me that you know,

you'd Arvish had only made a couple starts at this point in the season and you know, Prince Fielder seems to be just about done.

And you know, all the other things that have gone wrong for the Rangers in the injuries and Shinsu-chu missing a ton of time

...