Balta1701

He has a may 15 opt out date though.

Probably more like mid June for Lynn.

He’s going to be released on May 15, they’re trying to middle through without paying him.

Would anyone mind noting who in the bullpen is actually hurt? After Lopez went out with back spasms last night I had to admit I wasn’t up on who was left alive.

Yes he said that. https://www.mlb.com/news/white-sox-allow-six-run-rally-in-extra-innings-loss Whats extra ironic though is that they specifically lost this game because of one play on defense - Ramirez making a game saving play for the Guardians. I appreciated the irony.

Naylor is the first player in MLB history with two 3+ run home runs in the 9th inning or later.

So from 8-2 to 9-12?

Jesus Christ Gameday is just making shit up right?

For a while Baseball Prospectus had a version so they got called bWAR and Baseball-Reference got called rWAR.

rWAR is baseball reference, which I used literally because I had it open. Anyway, Fangraphs is not particularly different. Something notable here. Frank turned 25 in May of 1993. Luis turns 25 this August 3. The “age” line on Fg/BR both show this as Luis’s age 24 season, but they show 1993 as Frank’s age 25 season, because of some rule on where their birthdays fall in the year. Luis has put up 5 WAR in his career so far. If I assume he stays on an MVP pace and has no further injuries he might be at 9 on his birthday. On his 25th birthday Frank had put up just under 19 fWAR. If 60 WAR is the minimum for a HOF player, Frank was 1/3 of the way there when he turned 25. This is a big gap. Again I write this not to bury Robert but merely to praise Frank. Robert is doing excellent work right now, but saying he has a good chance of being a Hall of Famer is literally projecting more than 90% of his future performance, and there is a long way to go first. Just to pick one more comp, Tatis is 23 this year, he has already put up 13.6 WAR, but I don’t consider him a sure fire Hall of Famer yet as I genuinely am worried about the toll on his body early in his career. There are lots of guys who are excellent players who do not put up 80 WAR careers.

Their birthdays don’t exactly match up, but if I go to the start of the season where he turned 25, Frank already had generated 16.3 rWAR. Yes some of it is injury and COVID, but Luis has a ton of catching up to do if you want to compare those two on WAR.

I know this isn’t Luis’s fault, but it’s useful context. Luis is 24 right now and turns 25 in August. Frank debuted when he was 22, and turned 23 at the end of May the next year. So Frank did that s*** as a 22 year old turning 23, right out of Auburn. If you group together Frank’s age 25-26 seasons, comparable to Robert this year and next, that MF was a Jerry Reinsdorf labor dispute away from a nearly 200 OPS+ over 2 years. For comparison, Vlad Jr was at 167 last year. As is he narrowly outperforms Pujols’s best 2 seasons and Frank lost 2 months from his best year. That's ludicrous for a guy steroid free. I can’t believe we actually watched a guy put up those numbers.

Anyone know if that ball has landed yet?

I’m going to use the example of Indiana basketball because let’s just be honest, what college team do I know better? Theres some real interesting stuff happening with them. Their best player, Trayce Jackson-Davis, is in that realm where he will probably be a late 2nd round pick, so he is exploring the draft without an agent so he can decide after workouts whether to come back for one year (a really good rule allows that). If he comes back, IU is probably the B1G favorite on paper to start the year. But also for him, there’s literally hundreds of thousands of dollars he can make as IU’s best player this year doing events and endorsements. He will only make a little more if he’s drafted. I think most expect him to come back because of this, and keeping guys like him around for their senior years is a great thing for the sport as those were the experienced guys you hated losing. They make the quality of the whole league go up. Also coming back for his super senioR year is Race Thompson. He’s a classic glue guy, plays defense and gets rebounds, no future in the NBA. Might do something else with his life, might wind up playing overseas, who knows. He isn’t TJD, but he is also making decent money on his name by being at IU. I submit that is a good thing, this might be the most money he ever makes playing basketball, and he gets something out of his skills beyond a degree. I mention those two because they also are involved in a group NIL for charity effort in southern Indiana, along with people from other sports and schools. Apps they also expect to raise a couple million for charity with this group this season, which is extra cool. Guys at the back of the roster might still be able to do an event or two. They won’t make the same kind of money, but those guys aren’t there for the sport to be their career, they are still guys who do get something out of playing - a degree. There will always be room for rules to make things more fair and to protect students from unscrupulous salespeople, and it will take time to flesh those out. But so far, this is a lot more legal than bags of cash under the table and trips to the strip club or whatever else schools have been doing, and a lot more fair than Brian Kelly and Lincoln Riley chasing huge contracts while leaving behind their recruits.

I have no idea what it will be this year.

I don't know what it will be this year or whenever things move to Amazon or whatever that mess was, but I always got the impression that the NFL was trying to bring me their content. Almost all the Thursday night games here got simulcast on one of the main networks, so even if you didn't have NFL network you didn't lose the game, you just had to find which network had it.

I think now that places are hitting "subscriber growth limits", we're likely to see some consolidation of streaming services over time that will help iron this out. The market is too fragmented right now, no one wants to have to subscribe to 6 different services to find the content they want. That will take time, but it should also help issues like this clear up. That said, the blackout rules still suck.

Outs Above Average currently has Andrew Vaughn as the worst qualified outfielder in baseball.

Well for starters, Texas A&M had what, 7 five-star recruits to their football team this year or something ridiculous like that? So it definitely is changing the landscape. But, "there's no parity in college football" has been a mantra pretty much all my life hasn't it? You swap in one school or another every now and then, but Meyer in Florida, Saban wherever, Clemson, USC - there's always a handful of schools where they make a top coach very wealthy and that place becomes an NFL pipeline for a few years. Worth noting in addition, the NCAA basketball tournament finals this year had one program where the school famously made up non-existent classes so that the players could pass competing against a team where Adidas was funneling money to players and the feds are involved there. So maybe it hasn't been particularly innocent in the past, and having this out in the open is a lot better than having a bunch of college kids committing fraud. There's apparently some actual need for improvement in this system as well as some NIL providers are doing things like asking guys to sign away their marketing for their entire career in their initial contracts and hoping the kids don't read them. (https://slate.com/culture/2022/05/jordan-addison-pitt-usc-transfer-portal-nil-ncaa-pay.html)

Right now there's actual competition between these streaming services as they somehow try to work out how a business plan of only offering a select group of programming can possibly become a full-fledged business. That means several of them are dumping money into trying to get quasi-exclusive content. MLB is making a bet that a few games per year given up to a few of these services that are desperate for eyes will mean more revenue than what they'll lose by having some fans get annoyed and some people like me cut back on their purchases. Frankly, until someone has a solid and working business plan for all these streaming services, they're probably right. Let the services dump funds from their startup pools/shareholders into MLB for a few years at a vastly higher rate than what the content deserves.

Neither of them exactly planned on sucking in April. If the white Sox want to stop sucking then winning a series like this would be a positive step.

Once again I am content that I saved $100 this year and bought the radio package rather than the tv package. Will be busy during sundays game but I get to listen to Len and DJ in the others and the dog gets an extra long hike through some park.

The only really odd part about this one is that the White Sox continued their pattern of underestimating injury recovery times. “It’s a bruise he will be fine tomorrow” then 5 days later “he’s on the IL”. Shouldn’t someone be able to say “oh that’s a pretty bad bruise this might take a week” faster than this?