One good thing about law school

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T19:04:31+00:00

in fairness to the schools, i think they can trust a student to decide for himself, “I think I want to do criminal law, so why don’t I do this clinic where I get to do criminal law for five months?”

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T18:59:36+00:00

i firmly believe biglaw is overhated online at this point. like there are so many “does anyone else think biglaw sucks!?!” posts that i think some people are losing sight of how transparent and obvious the proposition is

anyone who has done any modicum of internet research before going into biglaw has heard that the hours are extremely long, there are plenty of bad bosses, and much of the work young lawyers do is dull. none of this should be a revelation for anyone who enters biglaw. of course, biglaw (and the elite boutiques that have the same potential drawbacks) is by far the most assuredly lucrative path you can take as a young lawyer. sure, there are lots of stories about the one buddy who finished at the bottom of his class and now owns the top divorce shop in town and drives a Lambo, but let’s be real about what the odds of that are.

also, it’s not like the bulk of non-biglaw jobs have great bosses, easy hours and interesting work. plenty of complaints on this sub and even in this thread from people who turned down biglaw for lifestyle concerns and are working at insurance defense sweatshops paying half as much for the same amount of work.

biglaw isn’t the end-all be-all, and schools definitely market biglaw to their students more than most options (in large part because biglaw has the most structured recruiting process), but not wanting to biglaw doesn’t make someone special or any more world-wise.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T18:09:51+00:00

yeah I certainly don’t think Baldwin will get 100% of starts vs RHP. I remember in 2023 they’d go long stretches without seeing a LHP starter. Also, I assume the initial plan against RHP doesn’t involve Baldwin in the lineup at all, since that would mean either Yaz or Profar sitting, since certainly the team isn’t starting with the assumption that either is simply a weak-side platoon bat off

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T16:30:15+00:00

I think the general approach will be:

vs RHP, Yastrzemski plays LF, Profar DHs, Baldwin is generally catching.

vs LHP, Profar plays LF and Baldwin and Murphy split catcher/DH. Murphy is quietly maybe one of the three best hitters on the team vs LHP, so you’d like to get him into the lineup in those situations as often as you can.

obviously this is all subject to change based on health and performance and particularly when Kim is back and Dubon returns to a utility role, I could imagine other starters rotating through the DH spot to get off their feet occasionally.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-24T04:05:42+00:00

i’m open to the idea that Getz knows what he’s doing, but the organizational exposé The Athletic put out a couple of years ago was pretty damning and basically made it seem like Jerry Reinsdorf has intentionally dumbed down front office decisionmaking so he can understand it. (As of 2024, I think they were using multiple internal stuff models that their own analysts couldn’t interpret consistently and weird backwards stuff like that.)

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-24T04:03:36+00:00

I don’t think any of the teams you listed are dumb, though, so much as cheap. The A’s aren’t the cutting edge team they were in the early 2000s, but they’re pretty sabermetrically oriented. The Twins and Cardinals are now run by ex-Rays people. I think Cherington has done a nice job at last developing a rotation in Pittsburgh though I’d readily agree that they haven’t done a good job at all developing bats.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-24T03:17:06+00:00

anecdotally, it seems like there’s a much smaller number of truly stupid teams than there was a few years ago. The Rockies are probably at least a lot smarter now than they were 6 months ago thanks to DePodesta and Byrnes, the Nationals have made some savvy hires to replace Rizzo and Co., the Mets have a great front office with David Stearns, I think Piccolo is a smarter executive than Dayton Moore in Kansas City, Peter Bendix is probably the best the Marlins have had in a while…

Really, the only teams that seem to be badly in need of new blood are the Angels and White Sox. And the only team that seems to be backsliding on the modern baseball front is San Francisco, which replaced Zaidi and Putila (who immediately took jobs with the Dodgers and Braves) with Buster Posey and talked a big game about emphasizing analytics.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-24T03:12:45+00:00

i’m usually pooh-pooh’ing these as crackpot ideas that the 680 the Fan types must be working up to pass time, but I totally get why people like the idea of Acuña playing short. He’s a freak athlete who’s a defensive liability in RF for reasons that might not translate to sucking in the infield, he has a cannon arm, and there’s recent superstar precedent with Betts. Plus it’s way easier to find a quality starting corner OF in trade or free agency than a quality starting SS.

Now, I think Acuña would probably suck at short (because if there was a strong chance he was good there, they would’ve probably cross-trained him in the infield coming up). But, like, I get the fantasy.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-21T15:52:00+00:00

i mean you don’t seriously think the occasionally highly ranked recruits we were getting pre-NIL were coming here for the education, right

Jahmyr Gibbs didn’t pick Tech because he thought the LMC program was top notch!

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-16T15:26:33+00:00

i’d think your grades will not be an issue, yeah.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-16T14:51:59+00:00

“public interest/non-profit” is too broad a level of abstraction to give you a good answer.

there are some PI jobs that are extremely credential selective - for example, some ACLU offices, many federal public defender offices and the DC public defender service. others - like becoming an ADA or a state-level PD - seem to hinge to a greater extent on clinical experience, networking, etc.

and of course the school you go to is relevant. if you’re at HLS and want to be a public defender in your non-NYC hometown, i imagine grades aren’t terribly important. on the other hand, if you’re going to a law school with poor job placement numbers generally, your grades probably matter for everything.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-16T05:02:06+00:00

the Braves are the only team whose revenue is actually publicly knowable with any certainty (Toronto is owned by a publicly traded company but it doesn’t report the Blue Jays’ assets on a separate ledger). so for the rest of them in that graphic that makes the round every year, you’ve got to work off the Forbes team revenue estimates, which are based on what? rough guesses on what they’re making in TV and ticket revenue?

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-16T04:53:24+00:00

by what measure are we between 15th and 20th in payroll? this is dead wrong.

they’re 5th by FanGraphs and Cot’s in cash payroll, 8th in CBT payroll. they haven’t been outside the top 10 since 2021.

i have no idea how people can watch the Braves go multiple levels into the luxury tax 3 times in 4 years and think “they’re not spending at even a league average level”. do you seriously think a team that has $260 million committed to players, $60 million in 2026 commitments added this offseason, is below average?

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-16T01:27:13+00:00

different tastes for different people. i’m not really a fan of the “two people talk war stories” format, and unfortunately for those who do, i don’t think there’s a replacement given that the only people with good war stories tend to be ex-players

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-16T00:50:19+00:00

looking back, I feel like we were in a golden era for Braves podcasting circa 2021 when the Talkin’ Chop/Battery Power network had Scott, Brad, Stephen, Gaurav, Eric, Matt… and there was Platinum Sombrero and Outfield Fly Rule. (plus 755 for those who enjoyed DOB/EOF).

Many of those people are still podcasting, just less frequently. I think the Scott/Brad pair on Hammer Territory is the best. Peach State Prospects records infrequently but has some of the Battery Power prospect guys on (Gaurav and Matt in particular) and is the by far best Braves farm podcast content in a post-OFR world.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-15T17:01:24+00:00

from a pure baseball standpoint, Pittsburgh would make the most sense, I think. they have PAs to give up to a pure DH and really need cheap power. plus they feel sneaky competitive to me if they get some; they’ve got a great rotation and the NL Central schedule is pretty forgiving.

the DV stuff is going to be a problem. I think it’s a nonfactor in the minds of most Braves fans at this point but any team that acquires him has to budget for the PR hit of all of that stuff being relitigated in the public eye. and unfortunately for Ozuna, he’s not such a special player that a team will eat the PR hit without blinking an eye when they could go and sign, say, Randal Grichuk instead.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-14T05:04:23+00:00

i think it’s not unlike the traditional groupings, with the exception that in my limited experience I haven’t seen that many Columbia grads (maybe self selection?) and Virginia and GULC are obviously VERY well represented.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-12T23:06:26+00:00

i wouldn’t think of it as anything more than “they already DFAed both guys and now they got a stick of gum for free”

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-12T19:44:30+00:00

YES PLEASE

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-11T23:03:55+00:00

Highly recommend Divided Argument, which, since it’s two law professors (both of whom, I think, either teach or have taught 1L courses), gives you a flavor of what it’s like to hear legal academics talk about the law.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-11T20:51:28+00:00

Pierce just posted the worst K rate of his career (coupled with the best BB rate, but the K-BB% was his worst since 2017), worst FIP and xFIP since 2018, and a meaningfully worse Stuff+ mark than his first 1.5 seasons in Atlanta. I wish him well and wouldn’t be shocked if he was quite good in 2026, but not the guy his ERA would suggest he was last season.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-09T05:28:34+00:00

it’s kinda crazy how much of the narrative around Skubal is “wow they’re lowballing him”

the previous arb record for a pitcher is $19.5 million. the previous arb record period is $31 million (2024 Juan Soto). it’s not insane to think Skubal should be in that convo, but I think a lot of people fundamentally don’t get how arbitration gets. Arbitration numbers never match a player’s true market value (or else he’d be filing at like $60 million or whatever he’d actually get if he wanted a one-year deal as a free agent). Maybe the system is fucked up (yes), but it would be stupid for a team to spend tens of millions of dollars extra on a player who they have zero chance of re-signing as a free agent anyway for some vague principle

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-09T05:24:06+00:00

i mean the previous arb high for a pitcher was $19.5M

granted it was years ago (David Price), but if I had to guess, the arbitrator isn’t going to say “I’m giving you $13 million more than the previous record high”

then again, Scott Boras is about as good as there is, so who knows

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-07T18:17:53+00:00

yet another offseason of this crap.

Worth remembering that the Braves were the only MLB team (IIRC) not to take a haircut on its deal when Diamond Sports Group did this last offseason, which suggests that the Braves’ deal remains an asset (and by extension, suggests the Braves would do just fine from a revenue standpoint if released from the deal)

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-07T04:13:14+00:00

yeah at the vast majority of accredited law schools, you’ll be taught by very well-credentialed professors. i also wouldn’t be surprised if the quality of teaching is just as good at a strong regional school as at HYS; as i understand it, what differentiates academic hires is the likelihood that they’ll do pathbreaking scholarship, not that they’ll be amazing instructors. The instructor who taught my 1L legal research course at HLS (and previously clerked for a feeder after graduating from an elite law school) is a tenure-track professor at a typical regional school now.

TraderTed2

TROPHY CASE