Why live in a valedict? Let me be the one until you're once a year.

Then who knows you may come to see that princess me?

Hello and welcome to episode 98 of Effectively Wild,

Daily Podcasts from Baseball Prospectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the play index at Baseball Reference.

I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer joined as always by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello.

Heyo, we're gonna do some emails before we get to that. You have a bit of enter.

Yeah, since we recorded yesterday, I have started to do some basic fact checking when I come across details in VEC as in REC

and are easily checked with the historical records, so basically anything that is describing statistics or play by people who would be in the baseball reference registry.

And I would say that in general, even when he's talking about sort of fantastical sounding anecdotes about minor league ball players, in general, they check out.

You look and you go, yeah, that's right, like he talks about how satchel page was so infuriating because he was so dominant against Joe D'Amaggio that he would actually walk people to get to Joe D'Amaggio.

I have not confirmed whether he walked anybody. That's the next step to get to Joe D'Amaggio.

But D'Amaggio went over eight with three strikeouts against him.

And he talks about how he picked some guy up because it seemed like the guy sort of fell into his lap in a way that seemed so serendipitous that even if he couldn't play, he thought that he must be a good luck charm.

And the guy made a name for himself by hitting a series of extremely big hits for the team, even though he couldn't play baseball.

Like these would be like tapers or he popped a ball up behind the pitcher's mound and there was a miscommunication and it landed in three runs scored.

And so on and I looked that guy up and sure enough he had 27 at bats, seven hits, all of them were singles, everything else about him screams terrible and he never played again.

So there's a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting these stories.

But every once in a while I will get one that just is not true. And so I think that's probably a good way of reading.

Vec is in wreck 90% I was like 90% of what you read is 95% true and 5% exaggeration.

And then the other 10% is 5% true and 95% exaggeration.

Uh huh. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty good ratio by baseball book standards.

Yeah, that's true. It's true. I mean, yeah, at least Vec, you get the sense is

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