Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2485: Let’s Enhance?

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, please visit our Patreon. Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Enhanced Games and whether they would watch a baseball league where PEDS were explicitly permitted, Abner Uribe’s crotch-chop suspension, and (34:40) the most disappointing and surprising (in a positive way) teams of 2026, then (55:37) answer emails about raising a girl who likes baseball, how a salary cap would affect prices for fans, home runs on the first pitch of the game, the Hall of Fame prospects of Kenley Jansen, Craig Kimbrel, and Aroldis Chapman, the most players appearing in a game against their former team, and how to evaluate whether a team’s player development was responsible for a player’s success or failure. Audio intro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to “Let’s enhance” meme Link to “Let’s enhance” montage Link to Enhanced Games wiki Link to Defector on the Enhanced Games Link to The Conversation on the Enhanced Games Link to NPR on the Enhanced Games Link to nostalgia study Link to Ben on the PED era Link to McGwire Simpsons clip Link to dinger distribution article 1 Link to dinger distribution article 2 Link to dinger distribution article 3 Link to Hill homer Link to Uribe post Link to MLB.com on Uribe Link to AP on Uribe Link to MLBTR on Uribe Link to Uribe/Marmol video Link to D-Generation X wiki Link to DX chop compilation Link to player names on Uribe Link to playoff odds changes Link to team wRC+ Link to SI on Rays hitting Link to Posnanski on Rays hitting Link to Garp quote Link to Owen Meany quote Link to Tatis HR website Link to MLBTR on Pérez injury Link to dynamic vs. static stretching Link to Goodnight Baseball Link to @dril tweet Link to BP on payrolls and prices 1 Link to BP on payrolls and prices 1 Link to BP on payrolls and prices 3 Link to first-pitch homers Link to Sam on first-pitch homers 1 Link to Sam on first-pitch homers 2 Link to Sam on first-pitch homers 3 Link to RP JAWS Link to player development study 1 Link to player development study 2 Link to players vs. former teams data Link to listener emails database  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Give a Gift Subscription  Email Us: [e-mail]  Effectively Wild Subreddit  Effectively Wild Wiki  Apple Podcasts Feed   Spotify Feed  YouTube Playlist  Facebook Group  Bluesky Account  Twitter Account  Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

Hello and welcome to episode 2485 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Mac. Hello. I suspect I know the answer to this, but did you follow the enhanced games at all? No. Have you heard of the enhanced games? I've seen mention made of it on social media.

media. These are sporting events between people on steroids? That's right. Or mostly, yes. If they called it the on-gear games, you would have known and you would have watched maybe, probably not. But

this was an event that was held this week in Las Vegas for the first time. The inaugural enhanced games. And given how it went, perhaps the final enhanced games too. I was going to see there's an optimism to that designation. Yeah, I'm sort of surprised this happened at all.

I talked about it way back on Hang Up and Listen when it was just still perspective, but it did happen after a fashion. And yes, the idea is it's a multi-sport event and people have kind of dubbed it the steroid Olympics. It's basically just anything goes as far as substances, performance enhancing drug use is encouraged, if anything. And the idea is that we'll just juice everyone up And we will see some sort of superhuman performance here

And we will test the limits of human athletic achievement And everyone will understand what they're getting into And what they're signing up for And everyone watching will know what the deal is And we will just see how strong and fast everyone can be Well, it was kind of a dud because nothing, all that superhuman happened. So there was one world record that was technically broken barely in a swim race,

but hardly because it was not just someone who was enhanced, but also someone whose suit was enhanced. He was wearing this buoyant kind of outfit that would not have been legal anywhere else. So it was a doubly enhanced performer. And then it was also a guy who had in an exhibition basically done this already. So nothing new happened in particular. And meanwhile, a few athletes who were clean, who had tested clean and were competing against the enhanced athletes won their events, which was not a great proof of concept for the if we just juice everyone up. They will be amazing.

So given that. And also the backers of this event, it's extremely maga-coded. So it's Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. They have money in this thing. And it's also, in large part, done to advertise these substances and sell these substances. So even though they kind of couch it in terms of like, this is just to remove all the shackles that are holding down humanity and all these things. This is humanity 2.0 or whatever. It's really just we will sell you some peptides and stuff if you're interested.

So that's kind of the gimmick here. However, you know how we were talking about Glenn Allen Hill recently? And the home run, he hits onto the roof and out of Wrigley. And how there is a sentiment, I don't know if it's a widespread sentiment, but it's not a niche sentiment either, that there's sort of a nostalgia for the steroid era in some quarters. And it's kind of, it's in conflict because you have people like us who grew up watching baseball in that era. And that was a formative period for us. And all the surveys always say that people's favorite version of whatever sport they follow or their favorite music.

It's just whatever it was when they were 12 or whatever. You know, and so that's the commonality. It's not as if any one era is objectively better. It's just generation after generation says, oh, yep, I pinpointed exactly when this was the best. And it just so happens that we all agree that it was when we were 12, even though those were entirely different times. So it's kind of tough when you grew up in that era. and I was 12 in 1998, or I guess at the tail end of 1998, but you were 12 for that home run race.

I was 11 maybe, but we were in that era when you're inclined to say, yep, that was the best of times. It's never been better than that. And yet that era is understandably tainted, and we do recognize that that was bad for Major League Baseball and baseball in general in a lot of respects. So it's tough to hold those two thoughts where it was like, well, that was fun. This was what made me fall in love with baseball.

Also, it wasn't great that a lot of people were cheating and there was no enforcement mechanism or testing or any of those things. But because I do see some people say, okay, it is better that this seems to be under control now and that there's testing and that there are penalties and everything, I do still sort of miss when you had these big, bulky sluggers shaped like Glen Allen Hill. And we didn't want to know the terrible truth. We just wanted to see them hit some dingers. And wouldn't it be kind of cool if there were an environment where they could do that? And everybody knew what it was. And it wasn't going to sour us on the actual clean competition.

It would just be like, can we see some guys crank some dingers juice to the gills? And so I don't think that this event, the enhanced games, was at all evident. that this would work or would be compelling. But can you imagine any scenario where you have some enhanced baseball that would actually be attractive to people that you would want to watch or that some significant number of people would want to watch? I'm off two minds about it because, I mean, well, first of all, it's sort of hard for me to have gotten really animated by that era of baseball because I got to watch Edgar, the clean slugger.

Of course, yes. I'm not being weird. I'm just, you know, make my little jokes. I'm up to you minds about it because I think that it was undeniably very, very fun to see that stretch of baseball. I have a hard time parsing how suspect people felt of it at the time.

You know what I mean? And the reason I bring that up as something that matters is because think about, say the way that we all reacted. And in some ways, maybe this is the only version of this that would really work because it allows you to maintain some distance from it, turnishing your guise. But like, think about how we have reacted to the juiced ball in the past, right? I don't think that people looked back at 29 years. and we're like, wow, this is the pinnacle of baseball.

I think people were like, who's in home runs? How many? Yeah. Something weird's going on here. Now, maybe if you go in clear-eyed about it and maybe if the way that the- The cream or the clear. Right, exactly. And maybe if the way that, you know, the commissioner talks about it is in a way that

makes you feel like an adult rather than someone who's being gaslit. maybe the reaction to it is different, but that year, people's reaction was something's wrong with the ball, you know, something weird's going on with the baseball. Why can't you control the baseball? Why can't you guarantee some semblance of sort of consistency in the bounciness of the ball season to season? It was viewed in negative terms. And I think that it would need to be something like that where you can sit there and say, well, it's not that, and I'm only going to pick him because of the way he hits home runs and his propensity to do so, not because I am implying in any way that I think Aaron Judge is using steroids to be clear. But like you, you want to be able

to say, look at him. He's amazing. And what could he do with, you know, a super bouncy ball? Now, the answer is he hit a couple more home runs than he probably would have, but he's so stinking strong and he hits the ball so far anyway. He didn't really need the help, but like stick with me for an imperfect example here. We want to be able to look at the guy and feel like he is the embodiment of skill and practice and strength. And having the ball be a little bit different allows us to maintain that impression of the player. or while still enjoying, like, oh, ball go far, right? Like, special bouncy ball, go distance. And so I think that would need to be the version of it

because I think if you hear, oh, everyone you like in baseball is just using steroids again, well, we have a negative association with that. It feels like cheating. We've spent so much time. We lived through not only the fun of that home run race and that era of baseball, but also the fallout of it, right? Like, they were going up in front of Congress, you know. When Congress gets involved with sport, it generally is a bad sign.

So I think that it would be tricky given the culture of the game and all of this work that was done after the steroid error to try to rein it in. And, like, we would be naive to assume that we know, one, everyone who use steroids in that era, I'm certain we don't. and two, that we have a complete understanding of the universe of players who have ever juiced now. I bet we don't. We get, you know, a couple guys who get caught every year. But, like, I'm sure there are more of them who are masking more successfully. I don't say that knowing who they are in particular, but it just seems reasonable that, like, there's a profound incentive to be the best possible baseball player you can be.

And that incentive is going to inspire innovation in a space that is probably going to outstrip our ability to test for it. So, you know, I don't mean to imply like a sullied fallen time and then a pristine current moment. But I think that the general consensus among baseball fans is steroids bad. And so you'd need to have an equipment-based reason for it. And even then, I think people would find it a little unsatisfying if only because, like, in that year, it seemed so weird that, like, D. Strange Gordon was hitting home runs and like, what? You know? Like that, that little wisp of a guy?

That seems wrong. It doesn't, it doesn't feel like it's in, it feels in Congress to what we expect a slugger to look like. And so then you just, you get back into this, this tricky thing where it's like the body is not what you expect. And sometimes that's lovely, but sometimes you're like, somewhere's going on here. So, I don't know. I just struggled to think it would ring.

quite the way they wanted to. It is also deeply funny that the entire thing was just like an excuse to sell questionable supplements. Pretty much, yes. Like, wow. There's always some sort of grift. But I think they'd have to rebrand it as, no, it's cool now because it's not cheating, because everyone's on a level playing field. It's just an enhanced playing field.

And I think. And not everyone's going to want to do it. Well, yeah, that's an issue. So I think there are a lot of drawbacks here. One, there's still some ethical issues. There's not the cheating ethical issue, but there is still the, hey, this could very well be bad for these guys. And they may understand the risks and they may accept them and they may get compensated accordingly. But you still feel a little skeezy about that, as many people do if they're, say, watching football, watching boxing, whatever it is.

Okay, even if everyone involved understands and accepts the risk. it's still people kind of punishing themselves physically for entertainment. And so you might feel kind of complicit or bad about enabling that system potentially, especially if it's this where everyone's just on testosterone or growth hormone or whatever it is. Right. And then also I think there's the question of would it even make them better, which certainly was not conclusively answered by these enhanced games in a way that made it clear that they would be better. And this was kind of a limited trial because they just did a few events and variations of those events.

And it was swimming and it was track and it was weightlifting. And I think if you're just doing clean and jerk or something like that, not that there's no technique to some of these things. But I think they didn't have sports that were, I don't want to say skill sports because they all involve some skill. But I think the less correlated the outcome is to just pure input, output, strength, force-applied. It just sounds like they were doing sports that happen within the construct of a game. Is that a fair way to put it, right? Yeah. They were doing feats of strength and races and speed-based skills rather than a sport that is game-based.

Yeah, I think you could say that's a sort of. sort of a maybe it's arbitrary distinction to save games. I'm not saying they're not sports. I'm just saying that the form of sport they are taking as opposed to like NASCAR, which is not a sport. I won't get into that. But yes, this was about directly measuring speed and strength as opposed to measuring something where speed and strength are certainly components. Right. But that's not the ultimate thing that you're judged on.

So I think that in this case it wasn't even clear that the enhanced athletes were better at these games. But then if you take that to baseball, there continues to be skepticism about what the effect of PEDs was across the board. And certainly in some guys' cases it appeared to make a difference. But in others, tough to tell. And it's not purely just strength-based. And sure, if you hit the ball harder, all else being equal, we know that that's. better and there's some suggestion that maybe it could help enhance your eyesight and then maybe your bat speed is better and you can wait a little longer to swing and you can evaluate the pitch

and all these things but a lot of it does still come down to say pitch recognition and repeating your delivery or your swing or all of these things that do steroids is that sort of a magic bullet in those areas not necessarily so between that and the fact that you're probably not going to get the best athletes in the world to compete here. Right. And they had some quality athletes in the enhanced games. They had ex-Olympians and everything. But are you going to get the best of the best?

You have to have a huge prize pool in order to do that. And they did have a big prize pool for this thing. It was $25 million for all the events, I think. 25 million? Yeah. And the individual events had your purses of half a million, quarter of a million, that sort of thing for the winner, quarter of a million. But I think you would really have to ramp that up because there's going to be a stigma associated with this.

There's the health risk that you're possibly incurring. There's the fact that whatever you achieve is just not going to have the same cachet as if you're doing it clean. Because the whole idea of, well, we will remove these limitations and we will see what humans can truly accomplish. but then are they accomplishing it? Because if it's not natural and it's just sort of artificially boosted, I think it's more compelling than just, we'll make the ball bouncier, or we'll lower the seams and now the ball will travel farther, I think that's probably less compelling than we will make the guys stronger and faster

because at least then it is the athletes who are making the difference as opposed to the equipment. I guess technically it's what they are injecting into. themselves that's making the difference, maybe, but they are still the ones who are doing it. And it's not just that they're doing all the same stuff and they are the same as they were. But now the ball just travels farther. That's, I think, even more sort of capricious or arbitrary or artificial. So I think there would still be something to just everybody's Glenn Allen Hill now and they're hitting the ball to the moon.

And that would be kind of cool to watch. but I think that the charm or whatever intrigue that generated would wear off because ultimately it's much cooler if it's plausibly legitimate because if back then you didn't know any better and you were thinking, wow, maybe Glenn Allen Hill is just working hard in the wait room and he is just able to hit the ball that hard. Well, that's incredible. But then if we find out, well, it wasn't really that or only that. And he had help that other people didn't have. And then also if the enhanced athletes are competing against other enhanced athletes, maybe you wouldn't even necessarily notice the difference because it's just like, well, maybe the pitchers are throwing harder and the hitters are swinging harder.

And maybe it kind of cancels out and doesn't even make that much of a difference. So I don't think, yes, like would I be interested? and just watching guys just hit Titanic Taters in batting practice the way Mark McGuire used to. Yeah, for a little while, I think. But then I probably it would start to seem hollow because if you're not doing it naturally, then how interesting is that really when you remove the constraints? The whole conceit of sports is like we're pushing the natural limits, really. And if you're going beyond the natural limits, and I know that that's always a slugly,

slippery slope. It's like, well, this surgery is okay and LASIC is okay, but not this and you can't make someone into a cyborg. And also you can't inject this substance and just where do we draw the line? And this is all sort of, yeah, it's slippery to define what is clean and what is not clean. But I think that ultimately it's really a battle against your inherent limitations. And if you just inject something that enables you to transcend those limitations, well, is that really entertaining? It's a tricky thing. I'm surprised that they were able to attract, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but like formerly clean high-level athletes to compete in this because it's really hard to wipe away the taint of steroid use. And I think that a willingness to indulge in it, even after,

after your sort of athletic career is presumably over, would inspire some amount of eyebrow raising about whether the feats that you had previously achieved were won cleanly or not. That's not a thought specific to baseball, but I'm surprised they had takers there. And maybe I'm not familiar with the exact composition of the athletes who competed,

so maybe these folks were already tainted by steroids, and they were just like, eh, may as well try to make a buckball I'm at it. In for a penny. In for a pound. Right. But I think you're right that it's a more complicated question of like what constitutes enhancement than simply saying, well, we know no steroids. Like I do think that you have to kind of grapple with these things. And, you know, I think the distinction that often gets drawn is performance versus recovery. But we know that one of the beneficial side effects of steroids is in the recovery space. So it's like that's not even a clean distinction.

necessarily, right? Like, we wouldn't expect if you tear your ACL, well, tough luck. We have the, we have a surgery that could fix that, but it would be considered an enhancement. So you're simply either going to have to play on it torn or be done playing at all. Like, we wouldn't say that. That would be an unreasonable thing to say. But you do have to kind of think about, like, what does what does playing it clean mean? I don't know. I just, I think that, I don't know that it would be all that compelling, even if you could get over the, like, moral hangups of it. Because I think the idea that they're trying to make you think is like, well, they're X-Men now. You know, like that the gap in their potential performance pre-and-post juicing is, you know,

worthy of like a Patrick Stewart narration or like, evolution takes a leap forward. That's a terrible Patrick Stewart. It wasn't even, I didn't even sound British. I'm not going to take it again. I don't deserve to. But that's not what we would see. And even if we did, it's like, you know, our monsters impressed by other monsters. You know what I mean?

Like, isn't that just the level you get used to? So I don't know. And I also think that, like, I, one of the things that I find most compelling about baseball is that a lot of different kinds of bodies can play the game at a very high level, that athleticism can look a lot of. lot of different ways and that like, you know, Jose Al-Tube can hit a home run. And so can Aaron Judge. And those are the gap between what their bodies look like and your expectations are such that if you hadn't seen all of Jose Al-Tuve's career and you hadn't seen all of Aaron Judge's career

and just stood those two guys next to each other getting off the bus, you'd be like, one of them can hit a home run and one of them can't. But guess what, they both can? You know, that's amazing. even if it were convincing, I don't want it to feel like a far-gone conclusion that you can do the most impressive version of a thing. I like that it can still surprise you and that it can look a lot of different ways and the result can be the same.

It feels like it just fundamentally misunderstands what's compelling about sport. If I want to see, I can just watch the X-Men, you know? And apparently the new cartoon is really good. People really like that. Yeah. People really like that. I like cartoons, so I'm going to have to check it out because there's another season coming, right? Yes. I like how I talk about the TV I will eventually watch and then very often don't do it. But I am almost done with hacks and that ends ended yesterday. So I'm like, Ben, I'm on it. I'm on top of one show. Got your finger on the pulse. And I got through the entirety of the second season of Monarch Legacy of Monsters. Nice. Well done.

There should have been more Godzilla. You know, like, there should have been more monsters. I have one note for you. More monsters. Oops, all monsters, you know? Yeah. Anyway, we could build a baseball playing robot if we just want to see a ball go far or fast, presumably.

You could just have an entirely. Yeah, sure. But that wouldn't be very entertaining because if you just build a machine to do it, yeah, we know you could just launch a baseball very far, but it's the fact that humans can do that sometimes. That's particularly impressive. So there's part of me that thinks it would actually be fun to see the enhanced guys go up against the clean guys

and just get their clocks cleaned by the clean guys because I think if you took the actual Major League Baseball players and then you had whatever dregs you could convince to juice themselves up to go up against the clean guys. I think it would probably be a good case study and a lesson and a reminder that it's not magic and it can't convert you into an incredible player all on its own and that we would find that other skills actually trumped that.

And so that would actually be sort of instructive not to completely downplay the effects of PDs in sports or in baseball even. But I think ultimately those effects. would probably be dwarfed or outweighed significantly by just skill. So that would be a little comeuppance as we sort of saw at the enhanced games. Wow, they were really just trying to hawk supplements, though, huh? That was a big part of it, yeah. I do skin care, okay?

So I'm aware of the glass house I'm living in when it comes to the potentially dubious scientific claims of the various potions I put on my face. at the end of the day. But like, why would that be, it doesn't matter. We don't have to spend time on this. Maybe we can contemplate the question for the next bonus pod. But I just find it funny that they're like, you should take this supplement, because then you can run so fast. And it's like, okay, sure. What else you got?

Like, I don't know, man. It's like it's the child's understanding of the world. Well, here is an email we got just as we started recording. Milwaukee pitcher Aribe Disciplined. after Eripe, the hammer has come down on his crotch chops. Yeah. So this is, we have graduated from the pelvic thrusts of the giants, may be discouraged but not disciplined.

Sure. To actual suspension and fine for what the MLB email says were inappropriate actions toward the St. Louis Cardinals to talk out during the top of the eighth inning of Tuesday's game at American Family Field. Okay. I am not laughing because I find what Abner Uribe did to be funny, although it is like a little bit funny. We can get into the appropriateness of it in a second. I'm laughing because I'm imagining the length of the conversation that they had at the league office as they tried to decide like how to describe what he did. And ultimately they settled on inappropriate. That'll do it.

Inappropriate actions toward the dugout. That could be anything, you know? Like, the reason it's funny is because any amount of specificity they clearly found to be itself inappropriate here. And so they were just like, we're going to, if you didn't see it, you'll have no idea what he did. This could be him. He could be flipping the bird at the dugout. He could have been spitting at them. He could have been throwing the baseball at the dugout.

He could have been screaming something rude at the dugout. This could be anything. It is so vague as to be completely useless, except we all know what it is, so that how it's just kind of funny. It is very funny. And I don't know that I knew that that was grounds for discipline, and he is appealing.

So if he can argue that he should not have been suspended and fined for doing the Degeneration X crotch chop. I mean, it's funny because Pat Murphy condemned it immediately. And look, It was over the top. It was a lot. You know? It was extremely demonstrative. Right.

I'm pretty live and let live when it comes to this stuff. But like, buddy, come on. Yeah. And Rebae was apologetic and he said he shouldn't have done it. And he seemed kind of cowed by it. And he said, because it was confusing why he was so worked up because he finished. the eighth inning, the brewers were up six to nothing, and then he did a triple crotch chop.

He did the, like, it was the, it really is. I mean, that Key and Peel McRingle-McRingle-Berry excessive celebration sketch is just more relevant than ever, because was it the third chop that did it? Was MNP scrutinizing the video of two chops acceptable, three chops suspension plus fine? I wonder, but he evidently, was doing this because he thought that Ali Marmel, Cardinals manager,

was making some sort of sign that made Ribi think that it was a call to plunk Brewers' batters on purpose. So, I don't know. It is funny because it seemed like the Brewers just handled it internally. And Murphy was like, no hard feelings. I talked to him. We have policed this. I'm just watching it again.

It's so emphatic. It is sort of fundamentally ridiculous looking. It is. It is so, it is so emphatic and so silly as to, it isn't, I understand what happened here. Like, I understand why the league felt they need to be like, so, hey, buddy, come on. Like, you're at work. Yes. There are times where I think the league just has to remind these guys, hey, this is a workplace.

like we have HR, you know? Yeah, this is American family fields. We can't have American family subjected to DX crotch shops. I don't know if you said, suck it, or just did the... I'm sorry. It's so...

It is just... It is really funny. Because what rule, they don't cite a rule, I assume it's just kind of a general unsportsman-like conduct could kind of cover everything, but is there precedent for just being suspended and penalized for crotch shopping, because that's what this is.

It's the latest front in the crotch wars, the pelvic thrusts, the limits of acceptability. We have moved from, as I said last time, it was, we've gone from bat flip consternation to crotch chop consternation or pelvic thrust consternation. Josh chasternation. Part of it is just that he's like, he's such a, he's such a spindly guy and such a, like, witty athlete that like it extends into his excessive crutch job. Yeah.

I don't know why I'm. There's, like, recoil. Yeah, yeah. He looks like, you know, it's not quite like the noodle guys outside of a car wash. But it's closer to that than anything aggressive, right? Like, there's just something fundamentally non-aggressive in this to me because he's so, like, Gumby-esque in the way that his body is moving. Yeah, I just...

The arms, because it's just like the full extension above the head. Oh, boy. What were you thinking, Abner? Come on. I want to hear his defense. Well, he clearly doesn't have one. I think part of what I... The other part of this that I find funny is that, like,

There was a sort of immediate acknowledgement of like, oh, God, what did I just do? And so what he should do is he should just eat the one game. You know what I mean? Like, it would make, I think he was sincere in the moment in saying that, you know, it kind of got away from him a little bit and he overreacted. And I understand that, you know, the central is competitive. And Abner, you need Abner. You're four games up on the Cups.

Just eat your suspension. Like, eat it. especially against the aren't they playing the Astros next? Isn't that their next series? Just eat it against the Astros. Who cares? You know, you're probably going to win those games anyway.

Yeah. It is very funny, though, that all the Abner's are 19th century guys and then... And then there's Adder Uribe. I love... I really like the name Abner. I don't know why.

There's something about that name that I find very pleasing. And I think that that's great. And also this is... Look, there's a lot in the world, including in baseball that isn't, that's not funny right now, you know, there's a lot of seriousness to be had. And then there's this. And it's so funny. I just, I agree again, I think that it is right to say, hey, this is a little much, you know, it doesn't strike me as a completely

disproportionate consequence. And maybe what they'll end up doing is like removing the suspension, but finding him still. I don't know. But probably he's just going to, have to eat it for a game. So that's probably what's going to happen. I guess he was kind of telling the Cardinals to eat it, which was the problem potentially. Several times. Several times. Well, I have some emails to answer. And I also want to ask you who holds the belt today because I think the answer changes by the series by the week. Most disappointing team of 2026. Oh, boy. That'll do it for the free preview of today's Effectively Wild. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to listen on and hear whatever wisdom and wit await, we would love to have you. You can visit patreon.com slash

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