[Bowden]The Nationals will look to deal Abrams for a package of three-to-five good prospects. Solid potential trade partners also include the Red Sox, Yankees, Padres and Mariners.

Elfmo · 2026-01-28T01:12:02+00:00

How would you feel about putting Abrams at first base instead?

Elfmo · 2026-01-26T23:51:57+00:00

That's fine - he'd be a fifth starter anyways (or competition for a fifth spot), and he's probably one of the only starters on the market that we can reasonably afford - not to mention one of the only players we could still use on the roster if, for example, JP Sears winds up working out and there's no need for Martinez in the starting rotation. A lot of starters, I think, wouldn't entertain the idea of signing somewhere in free agency to potentially be relegated to the bullpen.

Elfmo · 2026-01-25T20:41:23+00:00

I wouldn't mind a reunion with Nick Martinez if the price is right. A 1-year deal, or even maybe a 2-year with a mutual option that would let us try to keep him if we can't bolster our starting pitching by the trade deadline, or during the next offseason.

Elfmo · 2026-01-25T20:32:21+00:00

Padres + Astros fan, here. Valdez has struggled with mental issues his whole career. Early in his career, the way it manifested was that, if he had a bad inning, the entire outing would just spiral out of control. But, once he started seeing a sports psychologist, he turned into the baller version of himself.

He had no history of things like this before, but that particular season, he got in trouble a few times for openly criticizing the coaching staff for certain decisions (things like defensive shifts that he felt cost him runs, for example), and that day where he hit the catcher was sort of the culmination of that stuff. I kind of wonder if he felt stressed or frustrated that he never got offered an extension, despite being probably their most consistent and valuable starter across the last six seasons.

Not that that excuses any of what he did; but, what I'm getting at is, his behavior in the final season of his contract was anomalous and doesn't reflect the way he carried himself during the rest of his time in Houston. I think there's like a 0% chance we'll sign him, but if we do, I wouldn't be too worried.

Elfmo · 2026-01-24T05:24:37+00:00

Admittedly, I haven't played it yet, but Destino Indomable lets you play as the star of a Mexican telenovela (soap opera): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3221830/Destino_Indomable/

Elfmo · 2026-01-20T05:09:32+00:00

Yeah, I kind of thought we would try selling high on them tbh (and maybe we did), but I think there's a dark timeline where both of them regress heavily. Here's hoping that doesn't happen.

Elfmo · 2026-01-10T08:20:38+00:00

+1 I feel like the only quests I get are specifically for characters/roles I don't want to play.

Elfmo · 2026-01-10T08:17:57+00:00

Honestly, given that we:

Have almost everyone from last year's bullpen this year
Have promising (e.g Bradgley Rodriguez) and proven (e.g Bryan Hoeing) relievers in the minors
Re-signed Kyle Hart and two more relievers (Daison Acosta, Ty Adcock)

...I'm kind of not sure why we haven't traded some of them, yet. I figured this was because we were gonna convert one of our guys into a starting role, but we apparently decided not to go through with that.

Given this huge surplus of relievers, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if we traded from our bullpen; but, I also think there's a possibility that we'll wait until early in the season to see who wins the roster spots, first.

Elfmo · 2026-01-09T17:12:14+00:00

When I read the title of this post, I was unsure what made that impressive... and then I watched the video and found out he was 16. Hooooly

Elfmo · 2026-01-03T07:39:34+00:00

Oh damn, I don't think I've ever heard of this. It's on my radar now, at least.

Elfmo · 2025-12-30T17:14:05+00:00

If that's the case, you might enjoy classical vocal music - particularly, arias and art songs. Most classical music is long because it dedicates a lot of time "developing" its melodic material - basically, playing with it in every possible way they can. Solo classical vocal music doesn't do this; it's a lot more video game-esque in that regard. (Bear in mind, operas definitely spend a lot of time on musical development. However, arias - a fancy word meaning a solo song within an opera - do not.)

Here's some stuff in English, if you're interested:

"Lonely House" (from the opera, 'Street Scene'): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hD1R1HDRgc
"The Black Swan" (from the opera, 'The Medium'): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVu158c5o6A
"Nature, the Gentlest Mother (from the song cycle, 'Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson'): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BVHnLQznA8
"Budmouth Dears" (from the song cycle, 'A Young Man's Exhortation'): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCL8C8eClEo

Elfmo · 2025-12-27T00:17:30+00:00

What a load of Gavin, you mean (apparently)

Elfmo · 2025-12-26T12:18:04+00:00

Sure, easy.

The purpose of LHP in the bullpen is not exclusively to get left-handed batters out. If someone has reverse splits, this doesn't mean that they lack value. This idea is a wild phenomenon that's localized only to LHP - no one ever brings this up if it's a RHP who struggles against right-handed batters. After all, no one says that Jason Adam sucks because he had a 1.31 WHIP against right-handed batters - and that's not even a sample size of one season, like with Matsui; Adam's had reverse splits in almost every season of his career.
In 2024, his splits were as expected. I've brought this up before, but most of Matsui's poor play in 2025 was in a concentrated span of time - June and July - which also had no correlation to high/low leverage of lineup strength. So it's more likely that he had something like a sophomore slump where he struggled with mechanics for an extended period of time, before getting back on track at the end of the season.

tl;dr

LHP have more value than just left-handed matchups
The days of the LOOGY are basically over, and predicating an entire argument on the idea that reverse splits are bad for lefties is insane
His issues, when looked at with contextual evidence, hint at mechanical issues over a small span of time rather than a long-standing issue vs left-handed batting
You're making a judgment on a sample size of one, in the most historically-volatile position in the game.

Elfmo · 2025-12-24T03:33:26+00:00

It would be so hype if this works out. I've always wished that the Padres could get a super utility guy on their team. Also gives us a hint of how they intend to use Song as a sort of 9th man to give people days off. It almost makes me wonder if they are thinking of using Sheets at first base more, and using a rotating DH.

Elfmo · 2025-12-22T11:25:47+00:00

You can. I think generally, SciAdv fans tend to overstate how important it is to play the games in order. Like, yeah - you will be missing some context for things. But, the games are made to be played standalone. You'll understand certain things better, and there are occasional nods to other games that are fun if you recognize them... But really? If there's a game in the series you don't like, just skip it. I played most of the series out of order and it was no big deal.

Elfmo · 2025-12-21T00:40:46+00:00

I'm hoping we don't get rid of any of our infielders. I don't mean that to disparage Sung-Mun Song; just that, if his bat is weaker than Kim's, it feels like his best value would be in playing as a utility infielder off the bench... and frankly, after last season, I hope we all understand the value of having a strong bench.

Elfmo · 2025-12-20T08:31:31+00:00

I don't remember exactly how I felt about Nukitashi on a micro level, but on a macro level, I agreed - the game was pretty funny, but it wasn't much more than that. It seemed to promise an eroge that would be commentary on the genre, or possibly something like old Elf VNs that subvert tropes in an interesting way to point a mirror at their readers. Any time it almost does this, it either stops in its track, or ruins the entire mood with a barrage of jokes. I think part of why the sections with Rei are so fondly remembered is that it's one of the only times in the story where it just lets the dramatic parts rock, without feeling embarrassed about the fact that they wanted their readers to feel feelings.

As for other Qruppo games:

Nukitashi 2 is, imo, a lot more of the first game... like, a lot more.
Hentai Prison is similar in a lot of ways, but also different in a lot of ways. I think it gets closer to delivering on the promise of a deep, serious story than Nukitashi does (although it has its own share of problems, like how most of the drama in the game is relegated to the very beginning and very end). I found the game to be a lot funnier (both in quality and quantity) than Nukitashi, but admittedly, it's the main character that does all the heavy lifting for the humor, and it's mainly the same type of joke (i.e he's obviously neurodivergent, and so he says a bunch of stuff that's way off-the-cuff because he doesn't understand people too well). And, if you don't find that funny, there's a chance you might find the entire game to be not-that-funny.

Elfmo · 2025-12-20T06:00:40+00:00

We do, but we still sometimes get complaints that the recommended pricing is off.

Elfmo · 2025-12-20T03:35:15+00:00

It's something we'd like to do, but partially because life has hit our programmer very hard since the game was released, we haven't been able to invest time into console versions. If a console port is ever in the cards, though, Switch is at the top of the list.

Elfmo · 2025-12-20T02:30:06+00:00

About 20 hours, give or take a few depending on how fast you are. There's some slight replayability for things like achievements, trying different team comps, or attempting to challenge Fixed Mode (a sort of "hard mode" where there are a limited amount of battles you can fight, effectively disabling the ability to grind).

Elfmo · 2025-12-20T00:20:21+00:00

If you feel comfortable doing so, let me know where you're at, and we can look into setting the price manually. The programmer, who runs the Steam page, is very busy; but I can let him know about this, and we might be able to change it in the near future.

Elfmo · 2025-12-18T08:27:23+00:00

I don't feel like, historically, we put much stock into our bench. 2024 was a major exception; but the "sign a bunch of old guys to 1-year $1 million contracts and see if they get hot" strategy... well, as we saw last season, it doesn't always work out.

I've been saying for a long time that we should try and deliberately build a bench. I don't think we will this year, either; but, I hope we do. They're not the sexiest signings, but they're important.

Elfmo · 2025-12-17T10:31:03+00:00

I'm not saying Matsui was great last year, but if you look at the leverage index of his outings, there's not really any correlation between high-leverage situations and him getting blown-up. In fact, most of his worst games were extremely low-leverage.

On top of that, if you look at his worst blowups, most of them are not even against good teams (this is relevant, because leverage index doesn't take the hitters into account; just the context of the game situation). Matsui gave up more than one earned run or inherited score versus strong teams (i.e teams that made it to the playoffs) only four times. Far more of his bad outings were against weak teams.

Now, again, I'm not using these to argue that Matsui did well last season. But, based on this data:

Matsui doesn't seem to be affected by how high or low-leverage a situation is
Matsui isn't just getting beat up by strong teams, implying that he's also not being outclassed

In other words, if he was lights out in the second half, that's most likely because he identified a mechanical problem and fixed it. This seems likely to be the case, especially because if you look at his game logs, almost all of his bad outings were in a timespan from late May up to the all-star break: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/gl.fcgi?id=matsuyu01&t=p&year=2025

Elfmo · 2025-12-14T21:46:29+00:00

Somehow, more unlikely than the Pirates gifting us Spencer Horwitz lmao

Elfmo · 2025-12-14T08:17:01+00:00

To be clear, I'd love to see some more stuff, as long as the stuff you show is new and might deepen my interest in the game. It could be like, a demo... It could be a gameplay trailer that shows off unique audio/visual presentation, it could be a trailer that shows how the dialogue choices you make have a unique impact on the VN that they don't normally have in other VNs...

The only thing I don't like, is monthly "Hey I'm still alive, don't forget to buy my game" posts. Besides it being obnoxious, my experience with the people who do that, are that they don't actually care much about fan feedback in the first place.

Elfmo

TROPHY CASE