Show notes
Ben Lindbergh talks to Will Leitch about the Cardinals’ horrendous start, their baffling decision to bar big free-agent addition Willson Contreras from catching, how Yadier Molina’s legacy looms over the franchise, how Oli Marmol and John Mozeliak have handled the team’s struggles, how the rest of the season might go, and more, along with the Effectively Wild connection in Will’s new novel, The Time Has Come. Then (54:51) Ben talks to David Hrusovsky about wearing a SpongeBob costume to Guardians games and David’s ongoing effort to map every high school baseball field in the country and document the weirdest ones. After that (1:19:58), Ben brings on frequent Stat Blast consultant Ryan Nelson to deliver several Stat Blasts, followed by (1:51:35) a Past Blast from 2004 and a few follow-ups.Audio intro: Alex Ferrin, “Effectively Wild Theme”Audio interstitial: Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray, “Effectively Wild Theme”Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”Link to Katie Woo on ContrerasLink to Katie on Contreras againLink to Rosenthal on ContrerasLink to playoff odds changesLink to Marmol-Bucknor feudLink to Marmol on ContrerasLink to Marmol on booingLink to more Marmol on booingLink to Posnanski on MarmolLink to Jay Jaffe on the CardinalsLink to Will’s Cardinals podcastLink to Will’s newsletterLink to The Time Has ComeLink to EW wiki on weird fieldsLink to David/SpongeBob videoLink to David/SpongeBob articleLink to Gonzalez/SpongeBob articleLink to David’s HS fields siteLink to weird field % by stateLink to Uni Watch on DavidLink to MLB field sizesLink to ballpark homogenization infoLink to Topps NOW cardsLink to Ryan’s first EW episodeLink to EW guest dataLink to Stat Blast results/dataLink to Santander Reddit threadLink to Russell on foulsLink to 2004 Past Blast sourceLink to David Lewis’s TwitterLink to David Lewis’s SubstackLink to Royals Pasquatch adLink to Pasquatch footageLink to MLBTR on GreinerLink to tall-catchers EW episodeLink to Anton’s MLB birthday dataLink to relative age effect wikiLink to article on MLB RAELink to Shane on M’s broadcast Sponsor Us on Patreon Facebook Group Twitter Account EW Subreddit Effectively Wild Wiki iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!) Get Our Merch! Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.comvar SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {});Source