chasfh

There's no other way to put it: Donald Trump is a graphics novel-level supervillian. Simple as that. He will stop at nothing, and he won't stop until someone stops him.

I love trivia nights. I think I might have gotten a group together to start doing trivia on a monthly or so basis. Seven of us aged 60-75. We called ourselves the “Superannuated Friends”. (My teammates are so old and/or such nerdballs that they didn’t know the cartoon the name was based on.) We finished middle of the pack among fifteen teams where a fair number of questions were about 90s movies and 2000s music. I was pretty impressed. I hope we can keep this up for a while.

And he should ask for half of someone else’s team. It shouldn’t be us desperately trying to unload Skubal for anything we can get because we’re mad at Scott Boras.

Plus it would have to be a ridiculous offer that makes us better this year, or at least the same as before. Even Sports Freak would call Scott Harris a genius if he could pull that off! 🤣

First comment:

Jordan Yost every day, and twice on Sunday.

To be clear, I am not genuflecting at the altar of the AI god here. Anyone who believes I am is free to continue doing so. That neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I am using AI here as a jumping off point for understanding what it is I have, what I might need, what my options are, a ballpark on what it might cost, and how to tailor my approach with professionals about my needs. I can also bounce what they say against what we see here and use that as a way to understand what's going on. The alternative is, I'm completely in the dark and at the mercy of the professional, who might possibly have more of a vested interest in misleading me than ChatGPT would.

Perhaps another reason they don’t publicize their work on WAR is that with at least three different versions of it out there, each proprietor might have a proprietary interest in keeping their versions secret from the other two?

It’s Revenge of the C- Students.

We’ve are at capacity with our electrical panel and I went to ChatGPT for some guidance on approach, and I mean, this really helped a guy, who knows practically nothing about it, a lot. https://chatgpt.com/share/696d29c4-59e4-8004-8d42-bc005e8e18b1

Chad? Do you mean this one? https://chadgpt.com

Solid burn!

They acquiesce because they know that if they don’t, the government will use as much time and public treasure as they want to make them pay by bleeding them out in court, mobilizing White House cabinet PR and their RWM running dogs in a unified effort against them, doxxing specific executives and talent in tweets to make them targets for motivated red hats, and probably any number of things I’m not thinking of now. Of course, the government would almost certainly eventually do all this anyway, but the media company in question would be gambling that the hammer never comes down or, failing that, at least get their beds sufficiently feathered in advance of being pressured (i.e., practically forced) to sell off to Trump comrades, as Paramount had to. I’m definitely not saying it’s right.

For a moment I thought you were advising Ed to run away from Florida! 😉

Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some dishonest pundit on Fox has pointed out that there are no rights for trans people explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

Agree. They are so loaded, they definitely don’t need Skubal this year.

The thing about WAR I don’t particularly like is how under the hood the calculation is. I have always wanted to know it so I could tinker with myself. Maybe they hide it by design to prevent that. Who knows. I do trust it to be accurate at least within reason.

I could see where, if Skubal loses the arb case and gets the $19 million the Tigers imply he’s worth, and then they turn around and bring in Chris Bassitt for something more, Tarik might be at least a little annoyed.

Make your friends' eyes roll at parties with this one.

Some will find this interesting.

Here are a bunch of maps dividing the eastern US from the western US. On that second one, I wonder whether the numbers would show if California were removed from the western US.

This poll was taken by Morning Consult among Americans in 2020.

I get how it can be difficult to understand just how much positional adjustments should matter because we can't see under the hood how they are done. I generally trust the hundreds of baseball minds who have been (and presumably continue to be) working on establishing and honing the valuation, but I do grant that it's possible there's a huge blind spot afflicting the entire informed-outsider analytical community about it. Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't let that possibility lead me to reject outright the current calculations, though.

Granting your point about first basemen positionally penalized by WAR, here is how Spencer ranks among all first basemen with 1,500 plate appearances or more since 2022: This includes no fewer than 12 first basemen ranking above him who've had fewer than 2,000 plate appearances the past four seasons, far fewer than Spencer's 2,118—including the guy above him who just retired because he can't perform to his own standard anymore. I'd be surprised to learn that the Tiger coaches and front office are unconcerned about his -42.5-run defense, let alone consider his +0.5-run offense to be good enough to disregard or even accept that.