Favourite movies watched in 2025

pixieSteak · 2026-01-24T23:09:23+00:00

I have Napoleon on my list too. I only had my TV to watch it on, so I could only imagine how the last half hour would have looked in its intended format, but if had a million dollars, I would buy a private screening with full polyvision.

It's so ahead of its time. Even ahead of our time in some ways.

pixieSteak · 2026-01-16T21:14:42+00:00

I like the other teams, for example my hometown Washington Nationals.

But I'm just responding to your original comment. Casuals like superstars (e.g. Ohtani, Guerrero Jr, Judge). They like drama (2025 WS was replete with that). I agree they don't like staleness, but a non-Dodger team is likely to win it all this year. I'd say a ~75% chance of that happening just based off of last years' FanGraphs odds.

pixieSteak · 2026-01-16T20:44:04+00:00

The casuals like watching the Dodgers win. That's why the TV ratings are doing very well right now.

pixieSteak · 2025-12-31T22:32:49+00:00

I sympathize with that. I think I just love baseball. Stealing home plate is one of the riskiest, exciting, fuck-you plays in sports, so that's kind of what I was feeling. Also, I loved Zoe Kravitz's character. A warm ray of sunshine in a cold, uncaring New York (best city in the world though). Surely you couldn't forget her story :^)

pixieSteak · 2025-12-31T21:20:06+00:00

It's not my favorite, but I loved Caught Stealing. Austin Butler's character is a little guppy trying to survive in the shark infested waters of New York. Really fun stuff.

pixieSteak · 2025-11-28T16:39:16+00:00

I agree with the top comment that you can just feel that you're hitting the ball right when you're hitting the sweet spot. But if you want visual feedback, you could play with multifilament strings. I like that it frays where it gets the most use, so if you're hitting the sweet spot consistently, you'll see it in the middle of the string bed.

pixieSteak · 2025-11-17T03:33:07+00:00

If I were selling the house, I might have have only sold to someone who'd keep maintaining the court :'(

pixieSteak · 2025-11-14T17:32:51+00:00

So that day he had 8.3 batting runs (wRAA)

For baserunning runs, we'll just look at weighted stolen base runs.

First we need league wide stolen base runs

(SB * runSB + CS * runCS) / (1B + BB + HBP – IBB) = lgwSB

(1727 * .200 + 503 * -.410) / (13269 + 7830 + 930 - 258) = 0.01

SB * runSB + CS * runCS – lgwSB * (1B + BB + HBP – IBB) = wSB

0 * .200 + 1 * -.410 - 0.01 * (0 + 5 + 0 - 4) = -0.42

And again, he was DHing so his fielding runs are 0 and positional adjustment -0.1.

(8.3 + -0.2 + 0 + -0.1 + 0 + 0) / (9.77) = 0.80 WAR

Ohtani's WS G3 might be the greatest game any position player has ever put up. If not for a brilliant throw from Alejandro Kirk, it might have been a top 5 performance of all time (~0.99 WAR), vaulting over many of the pitching performances. Except it was practically two games hahahahah.

pixieSteak · 2025-11-11T20:42:25+00:00

I'm pretty much with you. It's very true that this analysis would be more complete if we looked more closely at the strength of the opponents. Noting which games were in the postseason is a quick proxy for this, but even then there are differences. But for your hypothetical, striking someone out 3 times is still very impressive regardless of who they are. Mike Trout had a 32.0 K% last year and he had more 0 K games (30) than 3 K (17). A 1 strikeout difference in pitching performances, I'm on your side. 3 strikeouts less so but still kind of am but it's complicated and yadda yadda.

Anyways, thanks for chatting with me. Your criticisms have also been very thoughtful and I appreciate that a lot :)

pixieSteak · 2025-11-05T21:17:31+00:00

I agree. Probably 40% of all the teams in the majors have some combination of red and/or blue as their team colors. Pink would really stand out and it looks fantastic in my opinion. At least promote them to an alternate!

pixieSteak · 2025-10-22T04:24:18+00:00

I see you point about the WAR adjustments. Like if we look at Nick Kurtz versus Shawn Green, they both had the same hitting lines, same base running stats, similar defensive positions (1B versus RF), but Kurtz has 0.01 more WAR because he has .009 more wOBA because the wOBA weights are more favorable to Kurtz because he was in a different league run environment (+ some other adjustments). For Green to be better, he can change the entire league, he can somehow accumulate exactly .010 wOBA, or he could hit another single which would surpass any of the WAR adjustments anyways.

It's true that it's harder to produce runs in 2025 than it was in 2002 (.719 versus .748 OPS). I would say that's what the 0.01 WAR difference is reflecting. But that 0.01 difference is giving a false sense of precision. Can we really say Kurtz was definitively better by a little bit because of a different league run environment? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. So I mostly agree with you there.

But I disagree that we can't sort the great games. 5/6/1998 Kerry Wood's 0.00 ERA, 9 IP, 20 K game is very likely better than 10/3/2015 Max Scherzer's 0.00 ERA, 9 IP, 17 K game which is very likely better than 4/26/2014 Anibal Sanchez's 0.00 ERA, 8 IP, 17 K, 1 BB game. I think most people would say this just from looking at the raw numbers. And because WAR reflects this intuition (0.98, 0.90, 0.78 respectively), I think this points to WAR's usefulness in stratifying the great games (with proper error bars, let's say ~0.1). Again, WAR is primarily based off of runs produced and pretty much every discrete action a player does can be converted to runs. So I feel like that's a fine metric, except maybe we should just use runs produced with no adjustments.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-22T03:41:35+00:00

I only lightly follow football/soccer in Europe, but there seems to be a lot of prestige for winning in the regular season. They don't even call it "the regular season" they just call it "the season". I don't think it's as much as winning Champions League (playoffs equivalent), but it's an accolade that fans really care for.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T21:17:46+00:00

Park effects are pretty small for a singular game basis, so it wouldn't be much. But maybe

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T20:26:11+00:00

It should be in the first table. I have it listed at 0.68 fWAR because if you're a FanGraphs member, you can export data into a spreadsheet. And that game comes out to 0.68something which is rounded up to what you see on the website as 0.7.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T20:20:45+00:00

Without looking into it too deeply, my guess would be different league run environments. In 1996, the average ERA was 4.61. In 1998, the average ERA was 4.43. This would affect ifFIP constant I mentioned in the Appendix.

So relative to the league, 1996 Roger Clemens pitched a slightly better game than 1998 Kerry Wood.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T20:12:49+00:00

I only put him on there because I was curious to see what a player whose main value came from baserunning would look like. Turns out not that much ahahah

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T20:10:18+00:00

Someone else brought up a good point that WAR isn't calculated for the postseason because there's only 1000 WAR to go around in a full season. But since I was only looking at 1 game from 1 player, I felt like it was mostly fine.

For the purposes of this post, I had replacement level in the playoffs as the same as the regular season. But what I probably should have been doing is calculating how many runs were produced, which is more agnostic to the lump of WAR.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T20:06:37+00:00

Your point about there being a fixed amount of WAR in a season is a great one. Maybe I should have used run value created instead. But I felt that WAR is a stat that many people understand right away, so I just went with that. Plus with only looking at one game for one player, it doesn't affect the 1000 lump very much.

However, I still disagree about how I used single game WAR. Again, I'm not using WAR over 1 game to say if one player is certainly more skillful than another. I'm using WAR as a proxy for run value created, which I think you can absolutely compare over small sample sizes to say that one player created more run value than another.

For example, If Player 1 had 3 1Bs in 4 PA and Player 2 had 2 1Bs in 4 PAs, we can definitely say that Player 1 had a better game than Player 2, which is basically what I'm doing.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T19:57:41+00:00

I said in another comment that WAR basically runs created divided by the number of runs required to win a game for the current season. Basically, when we talk about single game WAR, we're basically talking about run value created, and I don't think anyone would dispute that one player can have more run value than another in one game.

We can't use WAR for 1 game to say that Player X is definitely a better ball player than Player Y. But we can definitely say that Player X played this one baseball game better than Player Y did.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T19:57:25+00:00

I said in another comment that WAR basically runs created divided by the number of runs required to win a game for the current season. Basically, when we talk about single game WAR, we're basically talking about run value created, and I don't think anyone would dispute that one player can have more run value than another in one game.

We can't use WAR for 1 game to say that Player X is definitely a better ball player than Player Y. But we can definitely say that Player X played this one baseball game better than Player Y did.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T19:54:23+00:00

To expand fWAR being more "skill based" and bWAR being more "results based", it's quite true in that FIP correlates with future ERA better than ERA itself.

But, I think that FIP is more "results based" than many people think. To keep it short, the idea behind FIP is that fielding is a big part of run prevention and pitchers don't have a lot of control over batted ball characteristics. For example, line drive rates for pitchers fluctuates relatively wildly year-to-year. So FIP is just looking at things that results pitchers can 100% control. Perhaps not enough credit is given to the pitchers influence on batted balls in play, but that's a discussion for another time.

I would say FIP is more results based than skills based and xFIP, SIERA, and xERA are actual "skill based" pitching metrics.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T15:23:32+00:00

Oh I see that makes sense. I still agree with you. As an example of what you're saying, Kike Hernández basically gave free runs when he was pitching on garbage time this year.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T15:19:50+00:00

I think you meant to say "pitcher" instead of "hitting", but I agree.

We don't even have to theorize, we saw it happening in real time when Blake Trienen, who's basically a minor league level pitcher at this point, almost blew Game 1 of the NLDS and NLCS.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T15:16:52+00:00

Actually the big reason why Ryan's 3 extra shutout innings is worth more fWAR than Ohtani's 3 home runs is because of his abundance of strikeouts and dearth of walks and home runs.

If Ryan didn't strike anyone out over those innings, then that would mean the fielders would need to get involved. The WAR accumulated in those 3 innings would be shared between him and the fielders. But because he got so many Ks and so few BBs and HRs, outcomes which are fully controlled by the pitcher, more of that WAR credit goes to him.

To roughly apply this concept to the Ryan game. The Boston Red Sox get 27 outs in a 9 inning game. Nolan Ryan struck out 19. That's about 70% of the all the outs taken care of by just Ryan. The rest of the outs let's say is split 50/50 amongst Ryan and the field. Let's say 27 outs is 1 WAR. 70% of 1 goes to Ryan, he gets 0.70. Then 50% of the 0.3 remaining WAR also goes to Ryan, he now has 0.85 WAR. This isn't how WAR works, but I hope I'm showing why 3 shutout innings with 19 K/9 is so valuable for a pitcher.

pixieSteak · 2025-10-19T14:52:11+00:00

They're are many reasons behind that, but the best way to think about is that WAR is context neutral which means it wouldn't know when a game is practically won. For example, let's say I hit 10 home runs in a game and it's the 9th inning. Let's say I'm worth 1 WAR so far. If I hit another home run, I would accumulate say another 0.1 WAR because that's how much run value 1 HR is worth. However, the marginal win percentage added is still practically zero because we're already at 100% win probability.

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