Rooting for Kyrie to win a second title — dude was so based during covid, withstood a ton of heat for his principles and was 100% correct.
My fantasy baseball teams are crushed by injuries. High stakes team lost its top pitcher (hamstring), second pitcher (TJ surgery), top closer (oblique), third pitcher (hamstring), seventh and eighth pitchers.
Also top hitter (hamstring) and a few others. It’s only June 2.
Baseball is not supposed to be as hazardous as NFL, but seems like it.
Some assorted thoughts about what’s going on in sports:
- In the NFBC Main Event, most people wanted 1.1 or 1.2 to get Ronald Acuna or Spencer Strider. Now those teams are largely drawing dead. It feels like injuries in baseball are as prevalent as in football now.
- Good news for the Braves is every time Acuna tears an ACL they win the World Series.
- Imagine bullding your fantasy team around Esteury Ruiz’s steals. DOA from Opening Day. (I shouldn’t talk after building my Main Event in part around Trea Turner and Jackson Chourio.)
- Elly De La Cruz has nine homers and 31 steals, and it’s still May. He also has 72 strikeouts, and his average has sunk to .254. Everyone can now claim to be right about him.
- Last year, league ERA was 4.33, this year, 3.97, same as 2022. And that’s despite Spencer Strider and Gerrit Cole, the top-two starters by ADP, being out (though two players would only move the needle very slightly.) I don’t know if it’s the pitchers getting used to the pitch clock after an adjustment year or more tinkering with the baseballs. I hope it’s the former because I’m sick of the run environment being created by fiat.
- I expect Corbin Carroll to be fine. Jose Ramirez, peak Derek Jeter and peak David Ortiz all had years where they were hitting around .200 into June and turned it around. Unless his shoulder is the issue, but he’s playing every day, and if it were, I imagine they would have rested him more.
- Corey Seager was off to a slow start, but now he’s hitting a HR every day. For hitters like him and Yordan Alvarez the *only* ingredients you ever need are health and time. The worst is when a guy is off to a slow start, then gets hurt before he can make up for it. Knock on wood.
- Julio Rodriguez is heating up, but so far the only right answer to an early pick was Bobby Witt. (Most people took Kyle Tucker, Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts mid-first.)
- Jurickson Profar might set the record for “post” in a post-hype breakout.
- Freddie Freeman (5 HR, 1 SB) might be aging (Mark) Gracefully.
- Someone has Chris Sale, Ranger Suarez and Shota Imanaga on a roster. Garrett Crochet, Luis Gil, Clarke Schmidt, Jarred Jones, Jack Flaherty, Tanner Houck and Seth Lugo were also dirt cheap. So far it looks like this was the year to load up on hitting and gamble.
- I faded Jose Ramirez because I thought the team context might hurt his counting stats, and now he’s leading the league by a mile with 54 RBI in May despite batting only .266.
- Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic show (to my great surprise) you can be fat and white and still dominate in the NBA.
- I just can’t care about the NFL or fantasy football until at least late June. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, let me have some absence from it, FFS.
- Mike Tyson has about 60 seconds to knock out Jake Paul, or he’s toast. Not saying he won’t do it, but at 57, he won’t last long.
- The dust-up about Harrison Butker is ridiculous. Teams need to stop caring what players think or say off the job, and if fans bitch, tell them to take it up with someone who cares. That Trevor Bauer doesn’t have a job, and that people defend this by saying, “no one wants the headache” as though a headache is reason to set a precedent where fans can dictate what a player can and cannot say at penalty of losing his career is short-sighted in the extreme. And don’t pretend Bauer is being punished for what he did rather than who he is — he was not even criminally charged, and his accuser admitted to extorting him while players who are guilty of domestic abuse served shorter suspensions and are playing. While Colin Kaepernick protested on company time, his blackballing for that, rather than just a fine, was really the modern precedent that set this off. That’s why you should be for free expression you don’t agree with because once they start down that road, there’s no stopping it.
57-YO Mike Tyson has about 60 seconds to knock out Jake Paul or he’s toast.
He might do it, but the longer it goes on, the worse it is.
What Doncic’s and Jokic’s NBA success shows is that surprisingly you can be fat and white and still dominate in the NBA.
RIP all of those teams that draft 1.1 this year.
Players' political views should be off limits. If Kaepernick wants to protest police brutality or Butker wants to advocate for the nuclear family, the teams/leagues should stay out of it.
If fans don’t like it, they can say whatever they like, but the teams should send a clear message they won’t stifle player speech.
If you’re a fan who doesn’t like a player, go post about it on nostr, start a blog or a podcasts. Stop watching that team on TV, whatever. But your remedy is not to get him blackballed from the game.
Teams are cowardly about this, should take a clear stand.
Baseball injuries happen all year, but it’s worst in March and April when they’re just ramping up and playing in chilly weather.
Guys will still get drilled by pitches and have fluke broken wrists, but the soft tissue injuries and pitcher arm injury *should* be less plentiful as the year goes on.
Of course there still will be many.
As a Knicks fan, I’ve been checked out the last couple decades, but people have been going on about how might fight this team has, so I tuned in last night.
They were down 35 early in the second half, so I turned it off.
He's the closest to making it of the guys I left out. I think if he had *any* playoff success (not necessarily his fault, but it is the whole goal of the sport), or had he aged better (really fell off a cliff his last 5 years except for one decent rebound in 2021), I would have put him in. But he’s basically the same WAR as Freeman and Goldschmidt, but five years older and no playoffs.
Faded all of them except Strider who I missed because I never picked early enough to get him.
Velocity kills.
I forgot what an injury bloodbath the NBA playoffs is each year.
Unfortunate as he was having a great year, but he probably remembers now why he hadn't been stealing bases for the last five years.
Every era has its demographic you are allowed to discriminate against. Bauer (Trump supporting cracker) fits the bill for this one. Only reason he’s not signed, especially given the decimation of pitching due to injuries this year.
(Not only were all charges against him retracted and his accuser exposed for premeditated extortion, but there are other active major leaguers who served far smaller suspensions who actually were guilty of domestic abuse.)
Hit an inside-the-park HR last night now too. Still hasn’t hit a traditional HR, one month into the year. Probably just noise though.
Paul George is unconscious — draining every shot from everywhere.