Effectively Wild Episode 2383: How to Call a Collapse

by
October 4, 2025

EWFI
Ben Lindbergh brings on Michael Baumann, who immediately makes Ben regret it by subjecting him to a lyrical ode to Effectively Wild inspired by the Taylor Swift song “Wood.” Then they play “College Baseball Player or Make and Model of Car?” before recapping the three decisive Game 3s of the wild card round (with an emphasis on the absurdity of the Guardians’ immediate elimination after their historic AL Central comeback, a bad call on Xander Bogaerts, the heroics of Cam Schlittler and Ryan McMahon, and converting from Red Sox fandom to Yankees fandom) and ranking the four division series matchups. Then (1:15:44) Ben talks to Tigers TV broadcaster Jason Benetti about calling the team’s 2024 comeback and 2025 collapse, how to process their reprieve from elimination after a historic blown lead, players to pay attention to in the ALDS, and naturally, John Brebbia.

Audio intro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Horny)”
Audio interstitial: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to “Wood” lyrics
Link to reliever familiarity effect
Link to call on Bogaerts
Link to Padres postgame video
Link to Padres frustration
Link to ump scoreboard
Link to Schlittler fun facts
Link to Schlittler pitches piece
Link to Jeter catch
Link to McMahon catch
Link to Schlittler’s mom’s account 1
Link to Schlittler’s mom’s account 2
Link to article about Schlittler’s family
Link to Ben on first-year pitchers
Link to Ben on the Brewers and Jays
Link to 2024 Benetti appearance
Link to Brebbia EW episode
Link to Benetti’s podcast
Link to Cal award

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Give a Gift Subscription
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com
 Effectively Wild Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Apple Podcasts Feed 
 Spotify Feed
 YouTube Playlist
 Facebook Group
 Bluesky Account
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.




 

Comments are closed.