Effectively Wild Episode 1533: It’s Baseball O’Clock Somewhere

April 25, 2020

EWFI
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about beverage consumption, foreign baseball leagues’ potential for popularity in the U.S., and the life and death of legendary flamethrower Steve Dalkowski, who passed away this week. Then they talk to Rob Liu of CPBLStats.com (25:48) and Dan Kurtz of MyKBO.net (58:22) about two leagues that have beaten MLB back to action, Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) and South Korea’s Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), touching on how their seasons have started, the best ways for American baseball fans to follow them, the players and teams to know, the aesthetic and stylistic differences between them and MLB, the histories and evolutions of the leagues, their fluctuating home run rates, their foreign-player presences, their embraces of sabermetrics, their engaging ballpark atmospheres, the CPBL’s playoff format, and the KBO’s bat flips.

Audio intro: Alec Benjamin, "Steve"
Audio interstitial 1: Sturgill Simpson, "Fastest Horse in Town"
Audio interstitial 2: James Chen, "Summer in Taiwan"
Audio outro: Nadan, "Play Ball"