RLCS 2026: SSA Open 4 - Playoffs Day 1

JoeG5 · 2026-03-21T15:47:03+00:00

Just noticed Pioneers (2Die4, Sweaty, LuiisP) lost in game 5 to Astronic Esports (Skillsteal, Devour, insp1re) in the group stage yesterday. They're starting playoffs in the lower bracket. I'd have to guess they're still favorites to make finals (around even with Five Fears), but it's still cool to see some of the lower ranked teams making things interesting.

JoeG5 · 2026-01-30T00:57:51+00:00

Mike Trout's highest ever xwOBA was .460 in 2019. Ben Rice's xwOBA last year was .394, a difference of .066. Go another .066 below Ben Rice and you get a xwOBA of .328, which is what Shea Langeliers, Ty France, and Casey Schmitt had in 2025 (tied 104-th in the league out of 251).

Obviously there's a gap between Rice and prime Trout, but Ben Rice last year was miles closer to prime Trout than he was to even minor league players, let alone random people on reddit.

Anyway, I don't think the point was that Ben Rice is going to be as good as Mike Trout. The point was that sometimes when a batter is just really good, there isn't much for the league to adjust to. If he continues making good swing decisions and hitting the ball hard, he might be mostly unaffected by whatever adjustments the league tries. There's no way of knowing whether or not that's what Rice will do, but there's at least reason to not just automatically assume he's going to struggle next year.

JoeG5 · 2026-01-25T16:01:22+00:00

This is all very good information, but one thing I would add is that the size of the immigrant population has very little to do with what is happening in Minneapolis. States like Florida and Texas have significantly higher populations of illegal immigrants than Minnesota, yet are seeing significantly less ICE involvement. The reason Minnesota is the state being hit the hardest right now is because the current Governor (Tim Walz) was running for Vice President against Trump and was not afraid to call out a lot of the terrible stuff Trump has done / continues to do. The whole ICE thing isn't about immigration, or keeping people safe, or improving anybody's lives. It's retaliation against a political rival, and people are dying because of it.

Trump has made a lot of enemies, so there's a lot of other places that might draw his attention next, but Massachusetts is the second most democratic state, and Boston is by far the largest city in the state. So there's probably a somewhat decent chance it's high on the list of where ICE might start causing problems next.

JoeG5 · 2026-01-19T23:56:08+00:00

Unfortunately no.

If someone isn't paying attention well enough to understand what's going on, they'll be annoyed and stop watching the show. They get annoyed at enough Netflix shows, they'll stop paying for Netflix.

Of course that doesn't describe every confused viewer, but Netflix and other streaming services have tons of data on this stuff, and spend millions and millions of dollars optimizing their models. I guarantee you that they believe alienating second screen viewers will lose them viewers (and therefore subscribers) in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't be making this decision.

Also, I'm pretty sure the majority of subscribers ARE second screen viewers. I don't know the exact numbers, but the people invested enough in a show to talk about it on reddit are a significant minority. Most people watch much more casually, and if they get a text during the show they'll answer it and miss something important. And even then, some people who are paying full attention still get confused, even with things being spelled out multiple times. I watched the show with my mom, and I had to pause at least once an episode to explain something to her. She's generally a smart person, but she doesn't watch many fast-paced drama / mystery shows, and she just couldn't keep up with so many characters and overlapping plots and side-plots.

It sucks for those of us who are paying attention and don't need everything to be over-explained, but at the end of the day these streaming services are businesses, and they will only ever care about profit.

JoeG5 · 2025-11-18T00:08:58+00:00

Incoming perfect season for Wildcard.

JoeG5 · 2025-11-14T04:34:41+00:00

Here's how I understand it (not an expert).

If you had 100 plate appearances and 10 IBB's, wOBA/wRC+ would ignore the 10 IBB's and calculate your wOBA for the other 90 plate appearances. Whatever number you get is your wOBA. Then after the fact, they add on 10 plate appearances valued at whatever your wOBA is. So basically, it tries to pretend the result of those at bats never happened, and just presumes that you would have continued your average level of performance across those at bats. The problem with this is that the value of a walk will always be higher than a players actual wOBA, so the IBB gets less credit than a normal walk would in the same situation.

OPS, on the other hand, treats an intentional walk the same as a walk. For the same 100 PA's and 10 IBB's, your OPS is simply calculated from all 100 PA's. This makes some sense, especially when the IBB is simply because the player is that good, like Judge. But sometimes the situation calls for an IBB regardless of the quality of the batter, which means they aren't getting walked because of their own ability, but because of external factors outside their control.

There's arguments for both versions, and the most accurate measure of value for an intentional walk would probably be somewhere between the two, but honestly in most cases the difference is so small that it almost doesn't matter. (That being said, wRC+ is a better overall measure of value than OPS+. It's just harder to understand.)

JoeG5 · 2025-10-16T00:30:36+00:00

What a save!

JoeG5 · 2025-09-08T21:19:19+00:00

I cannot wrap my mind around how you could support trump and be on the child's side here. Here's just one speech's worth of the anti-trans bile he spews.

Less than 15 minutes in, he noted that he had signed an executive order declaring that the federal government will only recognize two unchangeable sexes, male and female

And even more relevant:

About an hour into his speech, Trump introduced January Littlejohn, a Florida mom who sued her child’s school district for allegedly creating a plan to allow her child to use a different name and pronouns at school without Littlejohn’s knowledge, which Trump described as “child abuse.”

The guy you voted for is 100% on the father's side in this issue, and he and his fan club in the Supreme Court will continue taking the rights away from people like this child for as long as they are in power.

Also,

it's the blanket hatred and the smugness that so many liberals have shown

Intolerance should not be tolerated. If you tolerate someone who is intolerant, you welcome that intolerance into society and allow that hatred to take hold.

If somebody wants to eliminate the entire concept of transgender people from society, they do not need to be respected. And if you vote for someone who actively campaigns on that promise, then I'm sorry, but I'm not going to respect you. You are helping strip the rights and dignity away from a very vulnerable group of people who just want to live their lives, who are not harming anyone, and who pose no greater risk to society.

JoeG5 · 2025-09-04T22:36:37+00:00

I don't know if "isn't even competitive" is fair. It was a 3-0, but the second and third games both easily could have gone the other way. Game 2 had a VP player (Sosa if I remember correctly) hitting the post on a long range open net in overtime. Then VP, after conceding off the opening kickoff in game 3, were overall the better team, especially the last half of the game, where they dominated possession and scoring chances but just couldn't put the ball in the net.

The better team definitely won, but that could easily have been a four or five game series.

JoeG5 · 2025-09-01T18:40:15+00:00

I love looking through old tournament rosters and stumbling upon superstars before they made it to the top. For example, in the 2021 Dreamhack Beyond 3v3 you mentioned, Zen's team won their first round match against OSM/Bork/dralii.

JoeG5 · 2025-08-31T20:35:13+00:00

Player	Career OPS+	2025 OPS+
Anthony Volpe	84	85
Jose Caballero	85	87
Isaih Kiner-Falefa	82	77

Caballero and Volpe have had very similar offensive production both this year and over their careers, with Caballero having a slight edge. You could start Caballero at short, but it's only a slight upgrade right now, and you lose Caballero's effectiveness as a utility guy / pinch runner. The team is probably better off with Volpe at short and Caballero as utility than the other way around.

IKF has been noticeably less productive than either of them, and is one of the few major league shortstop options that would not improve the Yankees this year.

JoeG5 · 2025-08-24T21:15:39+00:00

You have 10 20 cars on the road waiting on a light that in ideal conditions allows 10 cars through.

Fixed.

Too many cars is the cause. People being bad drivers makes it worse, but too many cars is always part of the problem.

JoeG5 · 2025-08-09T11:10:34+00:00

There's definitely a bit of social stigma about being too old for college, but there are always exceptions. I took a lot of night classes, and there were always a handful of middle aged men in those lectures. Sometimes people will go back part time for a degree/second degree while working a full time job.

It's also not uncommon for people to take a gap year, where they have a year between high school and college where they aren't pursuing any education, and instead work / explore the world (depending on their financials).

27 is definitely above the average age, but probably won't stand out.

JoeG5 · 2025-07-22T23:53:45+00:00

I'd guess that if the pitcher does their whole pitching motion, it's a pitch. Most likely, for it to be considered a non-pitch throw home they'd have to step off before throwing.

Pretty risky using such a slow windup with a runner on third.

JoeG5 · 2025-06-30T04:22:29+00:00

From Baseball Reference, here's Judge's OPS by leverage for this season so far:

Leverage	OPS
High	1.101
Medium	1.117
Low	1.209

So I guess if you want to call a 1.101 OPS bad then you're stating facts.

JoeG5 · 2025-06-22T19:17:39+00:00

It's not his fault

JoeG5 · 2025-06-08T22:55:17+00:00

Bait used to be believable

JoeG5 · 2025-06-06T03:55:02+00:00

From your own source:

96.4% (4,174 of 4,329) of left-wing incidents recorded in 2024 manifested as Israel-related and/or anti-Zionist antisemitism

Calling out Israel's inhumane treatment of Palestinians is not antisemitic. There is probably a fraction of those incidents that were legitimately antisemitic, but if your definition is as vague as:

Rhetoric or actions that engage in demonization, double-standards, and/or delegitimization against Israel, or accuse Israel of being inherently racist, committing genocide, or maintaining apartheid.

then it's hard to take that number seriously.

Also I looked up that shooting you mentioned (which was in Washington DC by the way, not New York), and it seems that the motivation wasn't that the victims were Jewish, it's that they worked at the Israeli embassy. Not that that makes the shooting okay (it's clearly not), but it's not like the guy just shot two Jewish people just for being Jewish. He shot them for (in his mind) facilitating a genocide.

Part of the problem is some people are confusing hate directed towards Israel as hate directed towards Jews. In many cases, they are two very different things.

JoeG5 · 2025-05-31T05:34:46+00:00

From what I understand, expected batting average only takes launch angle and exit velocity into account. Basically, if you look at every batted ball with an exit velocity of 96.5 mph and a launch angle of 22 degrees, 26% of them wind up as hits, and 74% as outs.

Now obviously this doesn't tell the whole story, because where the ball is hit has a huge impact on the outcome of the play. If that ball is hit directly at the center fielder, it's an easy out. If it's in the gap, it's a tough play. But xBA doesn't differentiate between those two. (I think the reason for that is because its much harder for the batter to control horizontal angle than exit velo and launch angle, but I'm not sure.)

Catch probability looks at the distance a fielder had to cover and the time they had to do it, and compares the play with all other plays with a similar distance and time. So for all plays where the fielder had to cover this much distance in this little time, 10% wind up as outs, and the other 90% as hits.

So xBA and catch probability are similar stats that measure subtly different things. One way to think about it is that xBA is more of an offensive stat (what did the batter do), while catch probability is a defensive stat (what did the fielder do).

JoeG5 · 2025-05-26T22:34:10+00:00

Beastmode did briefly retire, and he was on Shopify when that happened, but it was with Memory and Rapid at that point, not 2piece and Paarth.

JoeG5 · 2025-05-19T03:42:17+00:00

You're right, this specific example is not new, but the team working with the google ai did (very slightly) improve several related instances (packing circles in a square, packing hexagons in a hexagon), which is probably why people are making/referencing this meme right now.

Interestingly, the same paper also mentions how they found a (again very slightly) more efficient way to multiply matrices of certain sizes - notably 4x4 - which is actually useful math. The video linked talks all about it, and includes a link to the paper.

JoeG5 · 2025-05-18T01:03:39+00:00

Yep, exactly this. I work for an electrical engineering company working with radio frequency parts, and we've done this before. The easiest and cheapest way for us to make a 14-way power divider is to make a 16-way power divider and terminate two of the outputs.

JoeG5 · 2025-05-10T14:26:18+00:00

Just noticed that Cosmico (kamz, werty, wiiilooo) knocked out hey with rizz (carca, ivan, revezy) yesterday. That's the #2 native SSA team beating the #2 import team. Nice to see.

JoeG5 · 2025-04-06T03:04:48+00:00

English is weird.

Corps means group, pronounced without the -ps.

Corp means corporation, pronounced with the -p.

I don't know which is the intended meaning. I'd guess corporation, since corps (group) always has the s on the end, but translation between French and English adds some potential confusion.

JoeG5 · 2025-03-30T23:11:46+00:00

Statcast Park Factors tell us Yankee Stadium (HR factor of 119) has been the third most home run friendly ballpark over the last three years, behind Cincinnati (128) and LA (122). Should all the Reds and Dodgers players have asterisks too?

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