“I’m not sure when it began—maybe the picture I saw was the very first—but I saw visual evidence of cement being poured in the Chicago Cubs’ off-season bleacher reconstruction project on Monday. After weeks of striking pictures of the stadium’s long-time horizon line being demolished, and a fair few pictures where nothing seemed to be happening, and nothing was left, Monday was the first concrete reminder that there will be bleachers there again, and soon, at least for me.”

“Welcome to EW Rewind. This is going to be a regular feature here. Our intention is to go back through the full catalogue of old episodes of Effectively Wild, and recap them for you. We’ll run through the episode a little bit, highlight any of the show’s meta elements that hit a high note or appear for the first time in a given episode, and (there will be some content here) refresh the topic or topics to some extent.”

“I don’t have an overarching deep-dive in me tonight. A bunch of small moves with very low potential impact happened on Tuesday, driven by the deadline at which teams had to decide whether they would tender contracts to their pre-arbitration and arbitration-eligible players or release them into free agency. Nothing big happened. It would be a disservice for me to write two or three thousand words for you about anything that happened. I’ll just run through the three moves that stood out, offering up the analysis I think each move deserves.”

“Monday was an interesting day in Major League Baseball, with a handful of very small moves and one big one that stood apart. Beyond the actual moves, though, there was an unusual abundance of interesting speculation, tidbits and non-transactions. A couple of those stood out to me, as well, so I’ll quickly run through my thoughts on them here.”