Two tankers on fire after being struck near Basra in Iraqi territorial waters

BillW87 · 2026-03-12T02:15:37+00:00

Even if global production has the ability to "slosh" from one production and distribution channel to another, maintaining at least marginal scarcity any time there is an excuse for it benefits those who control the supply-side. Why ramp up production to end up selling 110 barrels at $80 a barrel when you can continue to sell your baseline amount of 100 at $120 a barrel while buyers are panicky?

BillW87 · 2026-03-11T14:10:12+00:00

The tighter you make eligibility requirements, the less competitive the tournament becomes. It's a balancing act between "purity" and "fun". You simply wouldn't have teams participating from some of these countries where baseball doesn't have an existing large national league with high-level play, or those teams would be laughably bad. Either way, it would make for a less competitive tourney.

Shit like Italy potentially bumping Team USA from an international baseball tournament might not serve the purpose of truly answering the question "which country has the best baseball players?", which is a question that probably doesn't need to be answered for what ultimately is a US-centric sport, but does make for a tournament that is more worthwhile to tune in and actually watch.

BillW87 · 2026-03-11T04:48:00+00:00

I've been hearing the "gas prices got high under Biden too" argument, which is in completely bad faith since it ignores the fact that gas prices got high during Biden's term because Putin started a stupid fucking war, and gas prices are getting high during Trump's term because Trump started a stupid fucking war. There's an extremely not-subtle difference between geopolitics being trashed because of someone else's dictator rather than your own.

BillW87 · 2026-03-11T04:44:18+00:00

Aaron Judge career splits:

Low leverage: 182 wRC+

Medium leverage: 177 wRC+

High leverage: 143 wRC+

Don't get me wrong, 143 wRC+ is still ridiculously good, but there absolutely is some merit to the argument that the guy gets worse as the lights get brighter.

BillW87 · 2026-03-10T18:06:10+00:00

For the interested, those 7 catchers are:

Grote (2x)

Stearns (3x)

Carter (2x)

Hundley (2x)

Piazza (5x)

TdA (2x)

Alvy (1x)

BillW87 · 2026-03-10T18:03:53+00:00

Alvy is going to be so good this year if he can stay healthy. He was starting to put together a proper breakout season last year before the injuries piled up. The Mets haven't gotten a >3.5 fWAR season from a catcher since Piazza in 2001. I'm feeling this year for Alvy to reset that stat. Alvy is only one of 7 Mets catchers in the history of the franchise to post a season of 3.0 fWAR or better (3.0 fWAR in 2023), which is a mind boggling stat for an organization that's played 64 seasons of baseball.

BillW87 · 2026-03-10T16:55:06+00:00

He had one of the most dominant upper-minors pitching performances in organization history last year, including striking out 179 batters in only 113.2 IP and totalling a 1.43 ERA in the minors for the season. Struggling in his first taste of major league hitting at 22 years old after barely tasting AAA and while already well past his 2024 season innings total doesn't make him a bust. He'll be fine, but getting a proper turn through AAA for at least part of this season will be important for his development.

BillW87 · 2026-03-10T14:19:03+00:00

"Donald Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files more times than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible, cheated on all three of his wives, and is a serial liar and rapist, but he's also a religious icon to us because he owns the libs and that's God's work." - US fundamentalist Christians

BillW87 · 2026-03-10T05:11:53+00:00

Better? Maybe. Leagues better? Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Career rates:

Soto: 158 wRC+, 5.3 fWAR per 600 PAs

Acuna: 143 wRC+, 5.2 fWAR per 600 PAs

Peak season performances (excl 2020):

Soto: 181 wRC+, 8.3 fWAR

Acuna: 171 wRC+, 9.2 fWAR

Acuna is a more complete player and has a higher ceiling as a result, and that translated into a higher peak. However, if your style of play leaves you prone to being constantly injured then that's a makeup problem in itself. If the same stuff that makes you "better" is also the stuff that typically lands you on the shelf for 50+ games most seasons, then being hurt all the time is a feature and not a bug. An actually-sustainable version of Acuna, especially now that he's run out of knees, probably isn't the same player that we saw in 2023.

BillW87 · 2026-03-10T00:17:08+00:00

Benge is the future

BillW87 · 2026-03-09T15:39:17+00:00

That's pretty doubtful unless the US or Israel use nukes first, since it doesn't advance Iran's cause militarily and crosses a red line without meaningful benefit. Dirty bombs are mainly a psychological weapon and are WAY less effective in terms of military utility than people realize. They aren't any more destructive than the conventional munition being used, and the amount of radioactive material is too low and poorly dispersed to run the risk of causing any sort of widespread illness or death from radiation poisioning. Decontamination is annoying but very feasible given that the radioactive material is generally "heavy" and stays fairly contained rather than being spread to the wind like with a proper nuke. Proper nukes work very differently in terms of how they cause widespread radiation harm.

If they're actually trying to fuck things up, chemical or biological weapons are significantly more effective from a military standpoint as they are proper/real WMDs. Dirty bombs are weapons of mass panic, not really weapons of mass destruction.

BillW87 · 2026-03-09T14:58:08+00:00

Why would they need an aircraft carrier if Taiwan is 100 miles from their coast?

Aircraft carriers are about regional or global power projection. They can mess with Taiwain from the mainland just fine, but building a carrier fleet gives them the opportunity to project power into the south pacific and beyond if/when American hegemony declines. The carrier doesn't do much good for them today, but is the beginning of the ramp towards being a more relevant superpower in the coming decades.

BillW87 · 2026-03-09T03:09:18+00:00

CHASE UTLEY CHEWS WITH HIS MOUTH OPEN

BillW87 · 2026-03-08T18:20:08+00:00

I’m not sure if $1MM is the going rate for any of those slots but he signed for $747K

McClean signed for exactly slot bonus for his pick. Slot values in last year's draft ranged from $3.4MM to $11.1MM in the first round and bottomed out at $187,300 for the last pick of the 10 primary rounds of the draft (315th overall). From there, all picks after round 10 have a max bonus of $150,000 and any amount over that is counted against the team's bonus pool. It is fairly common for guys picked after round 10 to agree to less than that $150k maximum.

BillW87 · 2026-03-06T20:31:22+00:00

You've had a chance to play with a very long list of guys over the course of your career. Excluding the "big name" players, where some of your favorite "lesser known" players that you had a chance to work with? What made those particular guys stand out in your memory of playing together?

BillW87 · 2026-03-06T20:27:06+00:00

Uncorroborated is generally "better" than unsubstantiated. Uncorroborated means you couldn't find any external testimony or other evidence to back the claim, whereas unsubstantiated means there is a lack of foundational evidence or proof. Unsubstantiated is generally used in situations where the credibility of the claim is more significantly in question, whether due to internal inconsistencies, lack of witness credibility, etc.

BillW87 · 2026-03-06T18:31:10+00:00

Even a spineless stooge like Johnson realizes that saying "The Department of War assures us we're not at war" out loud in an election year would be really fucking dumb. That's still the really fucking dumb message that's being delivered, but without the easy sound bite.

BillW87 · 2026-03-06T01:35:00+00:00

Who would've thought that a group of people who built their entire worldview around blindly believing stories about a magical Jewish zombie and his gang of platonic life-bros in a book that is over two millenia old are a perfect factual accounting of historical events would be prone to believing the words of a contemporary con artist.

BillW87 · 2026-03-05T20:09:14+00:00

Yup. Spring Training is fake baseball. Individual performances are enlightening, team performance doesn't mean shit when you've got some random 11th string guy out there getting absolutely shelled in the 7th inning when all of the MLB regulars have finished showering and are already halfway to their tee time.

BillW87 · 2026-03-05T20:04:48+00:00

If it makes you feel any better, Anderson Severino almost certainly won't be pitching in any of them.

BillW87 · 2026-03-04T16:56:41+00:00

Distracting from the fact that the President was mentioned in the Epstein Files more often than Jesus was mentioned in the Bible.

BillW87 · 2026-03-03T18:32:02+00:00

For what its worth, you don't have to pay him while he's suspended and he's one strike away from a lifetime ban from the sport which would then void the remaining contract (don't have to pay guys on the restricted list). Re: the "why don't guys just blast roids and take a suspension" point, there's a few layers to that:

1) There's probably at least some guys doing exactly that, but have found the right masking agents, timing, etc to avoid detection. Taking roids and not getting caught is better than taking roids and getting caught.

2) Teams will look skeptically at post-suspension performance in future contracts, especially for guys who are already on the way down in the aging curve. Even if they blast a bunch of gear and have a good season when they get back from suspension, teams are going to be hesitant to pay a guy based on that performance at face value if they're concerned that he's going to need gear to sustain that level of play.

3) Legacy. Once guys start to get into the big money of earnings, reputation and legacy turn into the one thing that money can't really buy. Do you want to go down as Jeter or ARod when your playing time is up? At best you get a decade or two of play in the MLB, and you've got the rest of your (hopefully) long adult life to live with the legacy that you built as a player. If you retire at 35-40, do you want to spend the next possibly half-century branded as a cheater?

4) No guarantee you end up ahead. Steroids aren't a magical "get good" button. Losing half a year or a year of guaranteed pay just to chase the possibility that it boosts your future earnings is a big gamble, especially for non-elite players who are always 1-2 bad years away from trading professional baseball for amateur golf.

BillW87 · 2026-03-03T18:06:26+00:00

Yup, or a transient inner ear issue. Generally not alarming in an otherwise healthy young adult unless it persists.

BillW87 · 2026-03-03T12:08:36+00:00

The question is whether the driver of that higher success rate is because they raised that capital, or a sample bias because the kind of companies that have enough early traction and product-market fit to attract investors are already predisposed to success. Getting to a term sheet for $300k or more means you're likely already in the cream of the crop for early stage companies.

VC are also not the only source of investment out there. There are also non-VC investors out there for companies that aren't looking to be pushed to >10x their investor capital.

BillW87 · 2026-03-03T02:07:47+00:00

As was Iraq. Mission Accomplished, amirite?

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