igor67

I love the mix coming out of the offense between hits, walks, power and speed.

Do you have Freddy try to go 1 more, or hand someone a 3 inning save chance?

Sweep the leg

I could get use to this offense.

Free agents represent!

Regression seems likely because of the Babip, but I'm also in the camp that there is enough improvement in some of the other important peripherals to believe his numbers will continue to be much improved over last year.

Frelick up to a .303 Ba average and 395 OBP that works for me.

There are a lot of alternate universes where we are actually ahead in this game...

I'll just chime in that Cool Hand that there were a lot of enablers to the NCAA current problems, lot's of simplistic arguments about how the athletes should just be able to do whatever with the added irony now that in many ways Pro athletes have more restrictions (since they actually have multiple year commitments). But I would agree that volleyball is definitely an under promoted product.

I love Turang's Vince Colemanesque 140SB pace

Sal!

I wonder if Santana and Canha deserve a tiny sliver of credit for the offense. Obviously getting better hitters was the most important, but all the young guys last year saw what a difference it made to just have a couple of guys who took professional ABs all the time. Still things to iron out, but I do enjoy the pressure feeling of being able to get someone on and feeling like most of them can steal.

W

More leather from Jackson!

I was hoping Yelich would try to steal 2nd earlier in the count for exactly that reason.

Glad to see Chourio didn't swing at garbage due to nerves.

Haase really seems straight forward at this point. If he suddenly stops hitting then all the other options are still there, and then you can see if you ride it out until Mitchell is ready or maybe Joey has rounded into form by then or some other event makes you look at the options differently, but offensive potential upside and preserving talent seems like a winning combination.

I don't do much for mobile computing, but this maybe the year I finally break down and get a VPN for the baseball season to take full advantage. Any recommendations for an easy to use low cost option?

If you view an off day as a likely pinch hit day. Then each OFer gets 1 day off per week, but it is only costing them about 3 ABs. Throw in playing another position (DH or 3B for Yelich and Frelick) and I think it's pretty easy to get Mitchell 4 starts per week plus some pinch hitting and I think that is a solid mix of regular playing time for everyone plus some breather for the long season. I get that equaling about 480 PAs for Mitchel and only 3 Brewers last year had more than 500 so that seems pretty close to full time in the modern game. It's also flexible enough of an arrangement that you can get to that number a bunch of ways for how those off days are lined-up to play match-ups.

Yes cash is tricky to track, but that is why we have a plethora of anti-money laundering laws that to regulate the currency. As I have said the crypto hype has progressively moved the arguments about why it should exist. Fiats are different because an investment in a fiat is ultimately a bet on that countries economy and policies, so even if abstract it is still tied to real things. Generally if crypto was properly taxed for it's energy consumption and clearly regulated I would guess it would disappear, but I recognize that if people trade something long enough that belief can sustain some value.

My point on crypto is that it only has value because people believe it has value and it continues to spin around purely based on that with an extensive track record of various scams. My analysis is based very little on standard media sources and is instead driven by my own analysis of years of patterns, an inability to provide compelling proof of an actual product, and various more in depth academic looks at the product including the grad student who first cracked who to track the originally billed as untrackable world of crypto which led to the first big wave of busts. The pattern since then has just been a continual moving of goalposts about what the product will accomplish, like the infamous it's the new gold argument, except that instead of performing opposite from the market it seems to go up everytime the market in general rises. I didn't go back and track down the long form older article I had read that did a good job laying out the issues, but it was basically pointing out that responding to inflation driven by the run-up in housing prices by raising interest rates only keeps making the problem worse in the long run because it hits builders first and continues to drive supply lower than demand so I'm not remotely viewing this as applicable only to the moment it is a long run issue. In the abstract as long as the economy keeps being managed in this crude interest rate way it's pretty rational to be heavily invested in real estate because the payoff is going to be too good. Regardless of whether it's a private entity or public pensions I don't think large scale corporate ownership of property is good. I prefer to broaden the thought process on how to manage the economy because it is a disturbing cliche to point out that the Fed is a hammer and so all problems must be nails with the present way most people talk about the issue.

Because crypto was unregulated and designed to be difficult to track various forms of theft and exposure of being used to stash illegal cash were the subject of numerous investigations long before the dramatic take downs of the last 2 years. I do think considering that lowering the transaction fees might well have an unintended consequence in terms of how market distortions have percolated, but those distortions are also highly traced to trying to rely only on interest rates to control inflation and economic activity.

In a thread that actively advocates trading in a purely speculative 'product' that has been rife with funding illegal activity for over a decade (aka crypto) specifically targeting public pensions is a weird move. It's not like the Wisconsin retirement system has only had 4 negative return years since 1967 with a 5 year return of 8.29% and 10 year return of 7.27% for it's more conservative fund with a minimal fee structure. Along with all the other benefits of pensions over private investments.

I will concur it was great reporting and a huge bonus for the site.

From my perspective the somewhat different thing about Bellinger is that while he clearly lost out compared to signing an extension a few years go he has still earned a nice chunk of money. So it is a little different comparison to the Chourio's of the world who are so early in their careers that they have not earned a serious nest egg yet and could easily flame out before making more than a few million in total (which is still pretty good but not a ton of money unless you are very careful at a young age).