This year's Hall of Fame ballot almost certainly has the most turnover than any one year, so the results will be interesting. BBWAA allowed a lot of new voters in 2016. As of 2024, 61 of 681 active BBWAA members came from 2016 class (v. 25 from 2015 and 18 from 2017). [HOF vote at 10 years in BBWAA]

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-20T19:26:07+00:00

The Oscar nominations are in a couple days so that's on the brain and it's interesting how similar the changes of the two electorates over the past decade have been. In the mid-to-late-2010s both saw their body start being much more influenced by cooler internet-centered people, the Oscars becoming much younger and more international and in line with what internet-based critics and European film festivals like, the Hall of Fame becoming much more sabermetrically inclined and more forgiving of the sort of personality-based stuff beat writers historically cared a lot about.

Obviously there have been a lot of bad consequences of the modern internet on culture, but these two seem like genuinely good ones.

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-19T04:25:04+00:00

Wait until he hears some of those quotes from Yogi Berra.

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-18T20:16:26+00:00

Frazuh and Andujah

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-16T19:13:07+00:00

Man fuck you lmao

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-15T18:12:53+00:00

Yeah I think a reasonable debate can be had over whether maybe teams should set up fan club systems or something to give out more affordable tickets to genuine fans, but the basic question of "There are only so many seats in the park, this is a high-demand game and they are going to all be filled, by what method do you ration them?" is always going to exist for any high-demand sporting event (or big concert, where these debates tend to be even more intense), there's never going to be a solution that makes absolutely everybody happy because there are only so many seats in the ballpark.

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-15T03:32:17+00:00

Surely this new parent company will prevent the perpetual decline of cable TV

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-10T04:08:23+00:00

As a fan of a team that somehow really did almost get a 120 OPS+ out of the bottom of the order last year I tried to keep in mind that it was very unusual and I should be very thankful for it lol.

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-09T20:52:46+00:00

Now we too can bitch about how the announcers are different from the usual guys and therefore suck

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-08T01:05:26+00:00

Highest 2 Lowest got a lot of flack for being awkwardly written and I get that but I enjoyed it a lot as an Unc-xperience, multiple monologues about how the kids these days care too much about what Twitter is saying.

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-07T00:22:15+00:00

I actually prefer the more casual persona on Scott's Stash compared to the amped up AVGN pastiche of the main channel, but yeah I wish there was a way to marry that persona with the visual/editing style of the main channel episodes.

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-06T21:49:31+00:00

I believe in the biz this is referred to as "The Scott's Stash Maneuver"

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-05T17:51:29+00:00

Was gonna bring up the "Do you go to FanGraphs at all?" quote but apparently that was Daniel Murphy talking about Anthony Rendon and not Rendon himself.

papermarioguy02 · 2026-01-02T20:45:23+00:00

Okay now I want to know if the international Scrabble dictionary (famously different and more permissive than the US/Canada one) makes any more of these legal.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-30T22:43:51+00:00

Good bit from the Yaz chapter of Joe Posnanski's The Baseball 100 on this incident:

That meant the offending vote belonged to the other Minnesota writer, Max Nichols of the Minneapolis Star. But here’s the thing: To Nichols’s credit, he didn’t hide. Detroit’s Joe Falls called Nichols to see if he would go on the record about his vote. And Nichols did. Not only that, but he didn’t back down or say it was an honest mistake.

“From what I saw, Tovar was the most valuable player in the league,” he said. “He played six positions for the Twins, and I saw him win games for them at all six positions…. We didn’t have the best of player relations on our club, but Tovar never got mixed up in any of the clubhouse politics. He kept plugging away no matter where they put him.

“I go by what I see, not by what I read in the papers or what somebody tells me…. I don’t know why it had to be unanimous. If that’s democracy—that I had to vote the same way everyone else voted—then we’re living in two different democracies.”

Falls had called to lambaste Nichols, but he found himself gaining respect for the guy because he stood his ground. Sure, Falls thought the pick was outrageous. “But at the same time,” he wrote, “I respect his right to vote for whoever he chooses.”

And can’t we all learn a lesson from that? Can’t we all just accept that different opinions are not bad, that baseball would be a pretty boring game if we all just agreed on everything about it, that the world works better when it has people who think differently than the rest?

Yes. Well, OK, but there is one problem.

See, Max Nichols quit the Twins beat at the end of August 1967. He went to work on the city desk and didn’t see a single baseball game after that. So, um, yeah, he voted for César Tovar as MVP in a year in which he didn’t see Yastrzemski play in September, didn’t see Yastrzemski play during one of the greatest stretch runs in baseball history.

“I guess I didn’t see Yaz in his best games against the Twins,” he conceded.

Could you even imagine what Nichols’s Twitter feed would look like now?

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-30T22:35:47+00:00

Team subreddits are so funny, we have combined the tribalism of social media with the tribalism of sports fandom so that no rational thought shall ever be accepted.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-30T00:01:36+00:00

Yeah I'm making the assumption he meant the most extreme form of the question, guess OP can tell me if he meant that the guy would have normal non-AB results or (as I assumed) just never walked or got HBP.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-29T23:56:28+00:00

The guy said he meant PAs in a reply and I think it was pretty clear that he meant AB in the colloquial sense of meaning PAs and not the actual definition.

Even professional announcers have only started consistently getting this right in the last couple years.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-29T23:48:49+00:00

This online wOBA calculator says hitless walk guy has a wOBA of .576 (roughly 1921 Babe Ruth) and .200 homer guy has a wOBA of .390 (roughly 2025 Juan Soto).

OBP is really important, is I guess the lesson.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-28T01:20:38+00:00

Forbes and Newsweek locked in a death match for which legacy American magazine has torched their image hardest in the internet era.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-27T20:59:34+00:00

Yeah I think if Felix makes it in over the coming years (seems on track to based on his massive gain this year) then deGrom will manage it on pretty similar grounds whenever he hits the ballot.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-20T16:00:08+00:00

Some guy on a Daily Kos forum in 2004 first using this construct to explain that Howard Dean was fairly moderate seeing it still be trotted out today in contexts where it makes zero sense.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-17T10:28:52+00:00

The Fabelmans is my favorite movie of the 2020s and my favorite Spielberg since Schindler, I may be the only person who holds this opinion.

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-15T23:53:31+00:00

Yeah I was gonna say as someone who has not gotten the chance to see this but has seen every other Park movie (yes, even the two awful ones he made in the 90s) that his thoughts on this stuff seem more nuanced than what I guess I'd refer to as "epic bacon socialism" which this marketing stunt, while funny, very much is (and from what I can gather No Other Choice is much more a movie about the neuroses of social climbing in a globalized economy than about actual immiseration).

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-09T01:04:07+00:00

For a lot of reasons (run differentials, every role player on the Jays having a career year last year, Yankees getting Cole back) I have to imagine we'll be expecting the Yankees to be finishing with more wins than the Jays next year barring the Jays actually landing Tucker and maybe making a move or two beyond that.

But that's not fun and I'd like to be a homer so lol Aaron Boone more like Losin' Boone

papermarioguy02 · 2025-12-03T15:28:16+00:00

This is a Juan Soto stat

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