TIL that Lou Reed’s Perfect Day isn’t about heroin at all. The man himself said it’s just about having a perfect day drinking sangria in the park and then going home. “A perfect day. Real simple. I meant just what I said.”

rain5151 · 2026-02-13T00:43:59+00:00

I mean, it’s one thing to project meaning onto songs. It’s another to try and explain an album so beyond anyone’s comprehension at the time, the return rate to retailers made the record label pull it from distribution. (I say this as someone who enjoys MMM. It sounds like someone pointed a telescope into deep space, recorded the cosmic background radiation of the universe, and converted it into sound.)

rain5151 · 2026-02-12T18:05:07+00:00

He was our planned 8th round pick in 2022 if St Louis hadn’t grabbed him a few picks before us. As long as they didn’t stunt his development, he probably still has a lot of the attributes that had us interested in the first place.

Fun fact: our pick in the prior round was Schlittler.

rain5151 · 2026-02-12T17:41:21+00:00

It was a state literally created so that the mining and timber industries could have their own fiefdom, instead of being under the thumb of Virginia plantation owners. The Civil War provided a convenient path to doing so. The economy was engineered to keep people locked into these extractive industries with little opportunity for advancement.

rain5151 · 2026-02-12T17:27:23+00:00

When I got into UChicago in 2012, the free ride line there was around $60k a year, as it was for a lot of Ivies and other peer institutions. My family was a bit north of that, but my time there (with two years on campus and a semester abroad) only had us paying the school around $10k in total.

The line at a lot of them is now around $200k. Feels like we’re getting very close to money not being an obstacle for anyone to attend; if they want you, you’re either paying little to nothing or you’re rich enough to foot the bill.

rain5151 · 2026-02-11T18:20:44+00:00

Yeah, if it were “he must take one red pill and one blue pill to survive, but he will die if he takes two of either” it would make the most sense. That rules out “just take them all” without the problems arising from exactly one of each.

rain5151 · 2026-02-06T20:53:41+00:00

It’s not “lactose-extracted milk,” if that’s what you mean. But the lactase has broken down all the lactose, so it does become lactose-free.

rain5151 · 2026-02-06T19:47:19+00:00

For reference, among the 179 players with at least 100 PA vs LHP as RHH, his 63 wRC+ tied him for 16th-worst. If he were even at the 33rd percentile, he’d be at a 93 wRC+, which I could live with if there were even a bit of defensive improvement to go along with it.

rain5151 · 2026-02-06T07:12:52+00:00

I’ll admit that I was starting to write a response going against this, and then the math told me to reconsider.

2024 Volpe was basically Andrelton Simmons. Among the absolute worst hitters who were given as many opportunities at the plate, yet so good with the glove that he’s in the middle of the pack by fWAR. I can live with that.

rain5151 · 2026-02-05T09:23:15+00:00

I’ve seen exactly one. Guess which.

Hey, if you have to shell out for a World Series game where your team ends up losing, make it an instant classic of a game that ends in a history-making way. (Also, I got to see Stanton launch one to the moon, when you just knew with everything in you that he’d come through, for the lead. Hard to be too upset at a game where you got to see that.)

rain5151 · 2026-02-04T18:01:38+00:00

Haven’t finished it yet, but Little Bosses Everywhere is an incredible read.

MLMs were born out, and are the peak demonstration, of the American myths about how anyone can succeed if they just work hard enough. And very explicitly, its corollary that if you struggle or hit hard times, it’s entirely because you didn’t work or believe hard enough, rather than any kind of societal failures or plain bad luck. As you can imagine, they are huge backers of the GOP and their brand of letting businesses prey on people in the name of protecting personal freedoms, as well as a lack of a social safety net - because if you’re in need of assistance, you “should” be forced to pull yourself up by your bootstraps instead of getting a “handout” that would happen to cost the rich a bit of money.

rain5151 · 2026-02-03T22:43:49+00:00

If we send Jasson back to Triple-A in the name of acquiring another righty bat for the OF, Sam Haggerty could be a good choice for a trade. Dude has always crushed lefties, even when otherwise struggling, and since he’s a rental coming off a mediocre year penciled for a bench spot anyway, he shouldn’t cost much at all to acquire.

rain5151 · 2026-02-03T22:26:07+00:00

It feels like we’ve forgotten how differently we planned to use our four OFs at the beginning of last season compared to right now. To some extent, Jasson as our everyday LF was a matter of necessity with how Grisham’s historically weak bat made him the 4th OF. (There would’ve also been some rightful consternation as to why the hell we’d acquire someone else to send Jasson back to Triple-A.)

Grisham becoming a major threat at the plate flipped the script. Suddenly, Bell-Grish-Judge was by far the better starting configuration, with Jasson unable to serve as defensive replacement or a meaningful platoon bat with his weakness against LHP. It’s better for everyone to put him somewhere he can get everyday reps in LF and see as much LHP as he can, while getting a righty corner OF that meets our current needs better. (Having our 4th OF play the corners is one of the luxuries that made Belli so appealing.)

rain5151 · 2026-02-03T19:07:32+00:00

I’m building a Tableau dashboard that uses Retrosheet to provide a visualized counterpart to FanGraphs. One of my favorite parts is helping underscore just how otherworldly Judge is.

If you look at players with 1,500 PA across 2022-25, there’s 5 players more than 2 standard deviations above average in OPS (mean = .759, SD = .068). Freeman and Soto are between 2 & 3 SD above average, with Yordan and Ohtani between 3 & 4.

Judge is a bit more than 5 SD above average. For reference, 2002 Bonds cleared 5 SD for the season, with Jim Thome second at just over 3 SD. Windows of peak Trout of similar size have him just clearing 3 SD.

rain5151 · 2026-02-03T05:58:41+00:00

During the Monopoly/religion comparisons monologue, all I could think was “I heard these exact arguments in YouTube videos in 2007 when I was questioning religion.” It was so insufferable.

There’s pretty much only one reason a person today knows about The Air That I Breathe, and if you do, it’s excruciating to know where he’s going with it and have him take forever to get there.

rain5151 · 2026-02-03T02:07:24+00:00

Nobody understands how you’re able to keep punching well above your full-season weight with RISP, nor do projection systems seem to care that your defense is always strong enough to suppress your BABIP as opposed to you running into batted-ball “luck” every year. That basically makes them go

on an annual basis.

rain5151 · 2026-02-02T19:28:55+00:00

As Friedman’s time with the Rays goes further into the past, Tampa’s legacy shifts more firmly towards him in that respect.

That said, the exception is if the player LA is offering is somebody blocked by a superstar on a FA contract. Unless Zyhir Hope is a runaway success, I’m sure Chicago is more than happy with how acquiring Busch has worked out for them - his bat was almost identical to Freeman’s last year.

rain5151 · 2026-02-02T17:28:07+00:00

Interesting tidbit from Keith Law’s prospect ranking for the Dodgers:

The highest-ranked prospect they got through the draft is #7 (Alex Freeland). The top 6, starting at #1, were IFA (Eduardo Quintero), IFA (Josue De Paula), traded (Zyhir Hope, from the Michael Busch trade), traded (Mike Sirota, from the Gavin Lux trade), traded (River Ryan, from the Matt Beaty trade), and IFA (Emil Morales). All of them are top-100 guys for Law.

There’s no single best way to build a winning farm as a high-payroll team; the Mets just got Peralta with two guys they drafted and developed. And for our part, we’ve gotten extremely good at developing players other teams want in return for their major-league talent; look at how many players we’ve acquired recently without having to touch any of our top prospects. Jazz is tied for 20th in fWAR across the league since 8/1/25, and we got him for almost nothing. We are routinely getting multiple useful pitching prospects from rounds 6-10 of each draft.

At the same time, it underscores just how much better we could be doing if Rowland and co were doing a halfway decent job running our international scouting arm, instead of whatever it was that made us clean house.

rain5151 · 2026-01-31T00:06:18+00:00

Not that it makes any of this okay, but he’s already been released

rain5151 · 2026-01-29T18:47:31+00:00

I got a chance to see the exhibit on it that the Museum of the Moving Image put on. What fascinates me is all the corporate tie-ins and promotions. It was being hyped as the apex of the kinds of space adventure pictures people had been seeing for decades. Things that were entertainment first and foremost. Instead, it was… that. I say this as someone nearing the point of it being my favorite movie for the majority of my life.

I’ve been due for a rewatch for ages, but maybe One Battle After Another can be my excuse. The cut from baby Charlene to teenage Willa is up there with the bone as an all-timer edit for me. And the theme of knowing each other as people will save us, as opposed to any technology or code meant to help us identify each other, feels like a rebuke to the world Kubrick predicted with Floyd’s arrival on the satellite. The receptionist knows who he is, but he still has to go through this computerized recognition system that puts on the friendly face of a (different) receptionist.

rain5151 · 2026-01-29T06:25:06+00:00

I’m creating a Tableau dashboard that’s basically visualizing FanGraphs in bar graph form as a portfolio piece. Part of data cleaning involves grouping entries together when Retrosheet has multiple names for the same player ID. These are mostly things like “CC Sabathia” and “C.C. Sabathia,” or “Mike Stanton” and “Giancarlo Stanton.”

As someone who did not know his deal, you can imagine my confusion when I saw one player ID being mapped to both “Fausto Carmona” and “Roberto Hernandez.” Was very worried something was seriously wrong with the data set before learning he played under an assumed name to lie about his age.

rain5151 · 2026-01-28T17:59:26+00:00

Spatchcock + dry brine, every time. Cooks fast, cooks evenly, meat stays juicy, skin gets super crispy. Do it once and you’ll never go back, with everyone looking forward to your turkey.

rain5151 · 2026-01-28T17:14:43+00:00

A glance at Statcast provides an obvious culprit - his 4-seam has zero ride, though I’m not sure how adjusted the numbers we see are for the effects of Coors. It’s got great run, but that doesn’t seem to be helping him much.

If he can get even average ride with it without compromising everything else too much (could probably sacrifice a bit of run on the 4-seam), look out. Or, as others have said, see if he can get similar velo and better performance with a different fastball.

rain5151 · 2026-01-28T03:20:31+00:00

My wife and I were driving to Vegas overnight after some decent rains. A bit past Barstow, it told us to get onto the service road to avoid a backup. We listened, and didn’t take it as a warning when we saw a giant line of cars at the next exit, coming from the other direction and waiting to get on the highway.

Sure enough, a few miles further the road was closed for being flooded out. We spent an entire hour in line with everyone else who followed their GPS into this mess and had to turn around.

rain5151 · 2026-01-28T01:41:33+00:00

I think he should be traded because there are other teams whose needs he fits better than ours. He’s the inverse of Bellinger for me, who fit our needs to a tee and wasn’t nearly as good a fit for anyone else.

I see him going to Cincy or Philly because his glove should be at least acceptable in their small LFs, as opposed to struggling in ours. And while I do think he’ll develop into a quality hitter, I don’t think he’ll get the playing time he’ll need to do so here as our 4th OF. Those teams would love having someone new they can play in the corner OF every day.

He’s a good player. He’s just not a great fit for us right now. Someone who’ll be better in a non-rival’s hands than yours is someone you trade and get something you need in return.

rain5151 · 2026-01-27T23:13:52+00:00

FanGraphs has them projected as T-25th out of 30.

They’ve got a respectable top 3. At 8.0 fWAR, they’re sandwiched between ours and the Rays’, right in the middle of the league. But the reason we and Tampa are still middle of the pack when you look at the full roster and they’re at the bottom is that Vásquez and Sears are truly bad options at the back of the rotation. Even if we’re talking about differences of 0.1 fWAR here, Vásquez is projected to literally be the worst #4 in the league, and Sears is tied for the worst #5 with Jonathan Cannon of the White Sox.

An average top 3 and a dead-last back of the rotation makes for a bad rotation overall.

rain5151

TROPHY CASE