Does baseball look the same to you as it does to me?

When we look at baseball, how much do we see?

Well, the curve balls bend and the home runs fly.

More to the game that meets the eye to get the stats compiled and the stories filed.

Fans on the internet might get riled, but we can break it down on Effectively Wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2266 of Effectively Wild, aGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon

supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer. Ben, how are you?

I'm doing okay, although it is the slowest baseball news period of the year. We are deep in the

doldrums, which is a challenge when you make a year-round three times a week baseball podcast, which,

you know, maybe that was a bad idea to begin with, but we've stuck with it for a really long time.

So if we can get through this, we can get through anything.

We've done it in previous off-seasons.

I'm sure we can do it again.

But this time of year always reminds me of the Merv Griffin Show episode of Seinfeld when Kramer finds the old

Murg Griffin show set in a dumpster and sets it up in his apartment to host a fake talk

show. And eventually they run out of guests and topics to talk about and are reduced to Newman

discussing how lately he's been buying the generic brand of wax beans. And if he rips off the label, he can hardly tell the difference, which for us would probably be equivalent to, I don't know,

talking about the nationals resigning Trevor Williams and bringing back Josh Bell.

No offense to those guys or the nationals.

But Kramer says we need a new format.

We should shut down and retool. And after pulling the plug, he returns with a revamped show based on scandals and animals. And for us, it's emails, which is not new. Although, Meg, it's been more than a month since we have done a full-fledged email show, which seems like a very long time.

But I guess there's been a lot of news and transactions to talk about and winter meetings and then

...