Effectively Wild Episode 2129: Season Preview Series: Twins and Tigers

EWFI
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Boras Four behind the scenes, Hyun Jin Ryu’s salary-cap-skirting KBO contract, and a study on the effectiveness of complaining about umps, plus a Stat Blast (22:51) about an inaccurate, unkillable Greg Maddux fun fact and more musings (34:52) on transparent pants. Then they preview the 2024 Minnesota Twins (41:02) with The Athletic’s Aaron Gleeman, and the 2024 Detroit Tigers (1:12:50) with The Athletic’s Cody Stavenhagen.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme
Audio interstitial 1: Davy Andrews, “Edouard Julien, Are You Gonna Rule Again?
Audio interstitial 2: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme
Audio outro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme

Link to MLBTR on the Boras Four
Link to article about Boras
Link to Boras facilities
Link to Ryu tweet
Link to Ryu article
Link to MLBTR on Judge offer
Link to Harper offer report
Link to Kovalchuk veto
Link to Yoo’s EW appearance
Link to umpire study
Link to EW on ump decision fatigue
Link to Boone EW hypothetical
Link to Ryan’s Maddux fact thread
Link to Maddux’s count splits
Link to Maddux Stat Blast data
Link to Maddux scouting reports
Link to Maddux 93 mph claim
Link to MLB pants statement
Link to Twins offseason tracker
Link to Diamondbacks depth chart
Link to Pohlad comments
Link to Aaron’s Athletic archive
Link to Gleeman and the Geek
Link to Tigers offseason tracker
Link to Tigers depth chart
Link to Cody on engagements
Link to Cody’s Athletic archive
Link to Skubal fWAR leaderboard
Link to article on MLB exec fashion
Link to Turning the Corner

 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.com

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
martini4meMember since 2025
1 year ago

“Wallner, Julien and Lewis were, production-wise, probably the best rookie hitting trio in the history of the Minnesota Twins”. Aaron Gleeman obviously doesn’t remember the 1982 Twins with Kent Hrbek (2nd in Rookie of the Year voting, Gary Gaetti (5th) and Tom Brunansky (actually more Baseball-Reference WAR than the other two combined, thanks to very strong defensive stats).

I will have to pull out my Abstracts, I thought Bill James had written an article about the strength of that rookie Crop (Ripken and Boggs were 1st and 3rd).