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The Brewers don't want a two week homestand at the end of March/early April and neither does any other team, including the warm weather ones.

Agree that they are the easiest over in baseball. My main fear is that the Counsell effect was real and they are going to suffer without him around while the Cubs thrive. My second fear is that the Reds reach their potential. Opening week is a time for optimism, not fear. 88 wins and a division title is my prediction. Chourio has a huge second half to win ROY.

Say what you will about the Ned Yost era, but that guy always had his team motivated to win on Opening Day. Russell Branyan's two bombs in 2005 was probably my favorite one. Then there was a Ben Sheets complete game 2-hitter in 2007. And two bombs by Bill Hall in a blowout win in 2008 (home opener).

The norm is 2-3% each from the buy and sell side. Popular agents in hot markets make serious bank. I think a really good agent can be worth it but in my experience most of them are mediocre and more interested in closing a sale than looking out for their clients. If you don’t know what you are doing you certainly need their advice and one with a solid list of contractors, stagers, inspectors, etc can save time. But you can do most of that yourself. We’re actually in the process of buying an investment property off-market, we’re using a real estate attorney. It’s costing a few thousand bucks which is like 0.4% of the sell price. The seller is probably going to use their agent at a reduced rate like you did. It helps that my wife previously worked in the real estate space and knows what she is doing. Although this purchase was largely circumstantial, my view is that it’s a good time to pull liquid savings out of the stock market and real estate is a good place to park it for now.

I agree as well, but the key distinction is that Ippei isn't any regular employee -- Ohtani and him were literally attached at the hip to the extent that Ohtani had that clause in his contract that he could opt out if the Dodgers ever fired Ippei. Although people hide major stuff from their best friends all of the time so it's still possible that Ohtani didn't know anything until Ippei was in deep trouble. This is also only a small preview of what the proliferation of sports gambling is going to bring to major sports. It seems like the NBA is going to be the first to reach the "find out" phase based on recent news stories.

Between this and Yamamoto getting lit up in his debut, it’s a pretty rough start for the new era of Dodgers baseball. Fans of the other 29 teams will be enjoying every second of this before they right the ship and still win 105 games.

This is a pretty juicy one. The story being given right now is that Ohtani paid $4.5 million to cover Ippei's gambling debts. It's already a bad look if that's all there is to it, but there will likely be more to come.

I do think that is part of the picture but the inability of housing supply to keep up with demand means that lowered interest rates won’t completely fix this either. I agree that a recession could be triggered by housing costs, people have no choice but to pay more for housing and eventually they will cut spending elsewhere which we are starting to see.

The Fed can only do so much. The inflation report showed that shelter (housing) costs are still increasing too fast. Many sources have shown that the number of new housing units has not kept up with population growth since the Great Recession. Raising rates will not reduce housing costs and may do the opposite, since rent prices tend to increase with higher rates and new construction is hampered by higher borrowing costs. Legislators need to step in to help get more housing built, which we're starting to see at the local and state levels. But it's a slow process and can't be fixed overnight. Plus, there is a lot of resistance to the types of policy changes that could make it easier to build housing.

I'm gonna keep riding the S&P 500 for now. Feeling pretty good about this being a strong year for stocks. I expect rates to stay about the same. It feels like we really dropped the ball on housing as a country and we're only beginning to pay the price for that. The bears will be right at some point but it doesn't feel like we are at the top quite yet.

Aaand they crushed earnings. Jumped from $680 back to $740 after hours. All aboard the hype train!

We'll see how earnings goes...if NVIDIA gets down to the $600 range it's a pretty good buy opportunity. I don't see one disappointing earnings cycle being enough to kill the hype.

This was always the most logical outcome, as most people seemed to have concluded on the earlier Woodruff thread. It just made too much sense for both sides. I wouldn't be surprised to learn he got other offers, but I'm not surprised that none of them were big enough to make it worth starting a new recovery regimen with a new team Plus the new team would have to do their own due diligence on his prognosis and come away from that confident enough to beat the Brewers' offer.

https://twitter.com/zachleft/status/1758269711295668469?s=20

This seems good, it is some serious BS when a runner can’t get to a base because there is a body part in the way.

People are extremely sensitive to enshittification right now because we see it happening everywhere and Fanatics is a crappy company with a monopoly so things will surely get worse than they already are.

Exactly -- signing washed up vets is a perfect way to game the projection system, but it rarely translates to actual wins. The Cardinals underperformed projections by 20 games last season, now the projections are showing them improving 15 games from last year. It feels like insanity. There's free money to be made betting the 'under' on the Cardinals and the 'over' on the Brewers.

The universities did this to themselves by running college sports as a for-profit institution. At every inflection point they have chosen money over integrity. Non-revenue sports...as it stands right now, getting those scholarships at Big Ten schools is basically something rich families do to compete with each other. So if you get rid of those scholarships, many people will stop wasting tens of thousands of dollars (or more) training their kids to be rowers or gymnasts or whatever. The sports will survive because they are Olympic sports, but clearly there will be less investment in them. Which may be a good thing because it might open it up to more people who want to try it. As it stands right now, they are Exclusive with a capital E. I knew some rowers when I was at UW-Madison 15 years ago...they were from wealthy families in California and most of them had zero passion for rowing. They would take a taxi from the dorms to the 5 AM rowing practice that they had to do every day but hated. Obviously no average student had access to any of their fancy facilities or equipment. I don't even want to think about what it is like right now. I'm guessing most people who are parents of kids under 18 that currently play sports wouldn't have many good things to say about the state of organized sports in this country.

Any key injuries and they are toast, but if they can make it to the postseason healthy they have as good of a chance as anyone. Like @patrickgpe says, there are worse places to acclimate to a new coach than a west coast trip where they would have lost most of the games anyway.

There are some strip mall taquerias around there and my wife got a cheap mani pedi after a baseball game once. Good paletas also like I mentioned above. Some people enjoy venturing around a Spanish-speaking area like that. I probably wouldn't hang out around there after midnight but it didn't seem that bad.

I think that one is a similar distance but I haven't been there. The Rangers/Royals one is even farther away. I seem to remember that getting there is fine but it's annoying to hit rush hour traffic on the return, especially if you are trying to make a dinner reservation.

In the last decade, the Astros have dominated the AL and the Dodgers have dominated the NL. Besides those two teams, nobody has been to the LCS more than twice in the last decade. I don't really know what to say about the franchises that are either poorly managed or not really trying or both. All sports have such franchises and no system is going to help them. So the biggest issue is perhaps with the Astros and Dodgers, who have both been mowing down decent teams in the early rounds of the playoffs. In other sports, they might have found themselves in salary cap hell by now, but in baseball they have been able to build off of their success and gain even more of an advantage. But for every Astros and Dodgers team, there are a bunch of others who made two LCS appearances in a short span and then faded back to mediocrity. That's probably the ideal setup from a fan perspective. So I guess the question comes down to whether superteams are going to continue to eat up like half of the LCS spots or not...

We've been alternating years recently...not going this year. Scottsdale seems to have the most stuff going on, good dining options along with a pretty robust nightlife if you're into that kind of thing. Also lots of nice hotels in that area and some hiking options. Now that I have a kid we go to one of the hotels that has a nice pool which keeps her happy. The botanical garden and zoo are pretty good. I agree that Salt River is the nicest of the ones that I've been to -- spacious but still intimate. Nothing to do around the complex unless Medieval Times is your idea of fun haha. The Brewers are so lucky to have Maryvale which is an awesome facility and centrally located...not an area with hotels but if you're not afraid to put on your gringo tourist hat and walk into some Spanish speaking places you can have a good time after the game around there. We found a paletas place last time which was perfect for a postgame snack. Sloan was basically a giant zoo of Cubs fans, there were like 15,000 in attendance for the Brewers/Cubs game that I was at. I probably wouldn't go back there, it was too crowded and didn't feel like a spring training atmosphere. The Mariners/Padres facility is my least favorite, it's outdated and way off on the west side. However, it does have a Portillos and a Culvers nearby, which is a big plus for those of us that do not have such luxuries near our current residence. I know there are differing opinions about Phoenix...for me it ranks near the bottom of US cities that I've been to. It has sunshine and baseball in the spring and it's easy+cheap to fly to. Everything is too sprawled out and you end up spending half the trip driving around avoiding the other maniac drivers and wondering who thought it was a good idea to build such a place in the middle of the desert. But just writing this still makes me want to scratch my baseball itch and not wait until Opening Day.

So it's pretty much like any other parking lot with pay-by-phone except instead of having someone manually check the plates they have some fancy car with a license plate reading camera that drives around and automatically checks against the paid list.

I assume the Royals plan to get that investment back in taxpayer dollars for their new stadium.