Irrelevant Dude

This is going great.

Man, the vaunted Padres offense is really choking this away against the Dodgers. They are in the middle of a Cubs-like scoreless streak.

At a minimum, it limits the team's flexibility next season. Yes, I understand that those limits are mostly self-imposed, but going over the CBT by 280k has implications to which options are available to the team this year. In reality, the Cubs probably never planned to be over the CBT next year (Bruce Levine also says he fully expects them to be under), and they probably won't sign anyone who received a Qualifying Offer. If both of those things end up being true, then ultimately them being over the CBT won't really matter. But if they DO end up signing a Qualifying Offer player, now they lose their 5th round pick (in addition to the 2nd) and $1 Million from their international bonus pool. For what? That is why you don't purposefully go over the tax by a few dollars. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but I think Jed made a mistake somewhere, and when you are Mr. Play-it-Safe maximizing value analytics guy, those types of mistakes shouldn't happen. I'm not saying the Cubs shouldn't go over the luxury tax. They should be able to do it with regularity. But even if they were willing to do that, they should never go over in the manner they did.

That is apparently the amount the Cubs were over the CBT by this year. Honestly, that should be a fireable offense. That is just extremely dumb.

And your new owner is.....

Matt ShawCade HortonOwen CaissieMoises BallesterosCam SmithKevin AlcantaraJefferson RojasJames TriantosJaxon WigginsBrandon BirdsellCristian HernandezAlfonsin RosarioAlexander CanarioDerniche ValdezFernando CruzCole MathisMichael AriasDrew GrayNazier MuleTy Southisene

Where do the Phillies go from here? Keep running it back and hope the playoff dice roll in their favor next year?

How is Jose Quintana still pitching and pitching well in meaningful playoff games?

I have an idea to get three of those numbers down to 0. That frees up a lot of at bats!

The thing soccer has that might be comparable to the "small collisions" would be headers, but how many times is the average player actually heading the ball now? When I was a kid, we practiced them even at a young age, but now they don't do it at all for the younger age groups and even as kids get older I'm pretty sure there are significant limitations placed on the amount of heading that is done.

Blackhawks completely dominated the 3rd period, but couldn't put the puck in the net.

I'm honestly surprised that high school football has been able to continue largely unscathed. There was a time where there was a ton of mainstream attention on head injuries and it looked like schools might struggle to maintain their numbers, but it seems like the interest now is largely the same as it has always been. I guess football is just too ingrained in our culture and even the threat of brain injury isn't enough to change that. As a parent of young children, my approach has been to put more focus on the other sports, encouraging my kids to play baseball, soccer, basketball etc, but never seeking out anything football related. Even when my son's best friends are signing up for flag football, I just try to keep him focused on the alternatives. If one of my kids ever decided that he REALLY wanted to play football in high school, I would try to discuss the risks with him as best as possible, but I wouldn't stop him from playing if he insisted on doing so. As they haven't shown much interest though, I don't anticipate that being a conversation I will need to have.

It is working ok for me. From what I read, you need a relatively recent tuner though, and that is where the "sound but no video" issues occur when the TV tuner isn't new enough to support the format they are broadcasting. If you are connecting the antenna directly to a TV and that TV is several years old, you may have issues. I personally have a HDHomerun tuner and that is working.

I have been a boxing fan for a long time, but it's getting harder and harder to find any reason to continue following the sport. There just aren't enough compelling fights, and a majority of fights are either mind numbingly boring or completely non- competitive... That is if you can even find a fight to watch. HBO Boxing and Showtime Championship Boxing were huge when I was growing up. They had interesting fights/fighters and the added bonus of replaying the previous week's PPV fight whenever there was one. Even shows like ESPN's Friday Night Fights usually had better fights than anything happening today, and on basic cable nonetheless. Now, where can you even find fights to watch? DAZN had promise when it launched, but since then they have increased prices substantially, reduced the quantity of fights, reduced the quality of fights, and moved anything worth watching to PPV. So you can pay $20-$25/month for a few awful fights. Not worth it. ESPN has occasional decent fights, but they are few and far between. ESPN+ is another option for a somewhat more affordable subscription fee, but I haven't seen much of interest on ESPN+ outside of Japanese fights at 4am. What else is there? PPV's are insanely expensive, even when the fights themselves are awful. I think the last event I paid for was Mayweather/Pacquiao, or possible one of Terrence Crawford's fights, but that is about it. There was a time when I would try to find "alternative methods" to watch PPV fights, but even that isn't worth the effort anymore. All of those things add up to a rapidly dying sport. I just don't see how it ever gets out of this death spiral. I would love to be wrong and see some form of boxing renaissance, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

I never saw what he did, other than get blindsided after the play. But I assume he did "something."

I think the ship has already sailed on wasting a year of their careers. Regardless of the QB, they are still playing for Carolina.

Listening to these announcers twist themselves in knots trying not to declare a winner in the Bears/Panthers trade is hilarious.

Andy Dalton is a better QB than Bryce Young, which isn't saying much, but how is any of this going to make Carolina better? What's the point in having a 37 year old journeyman getting all the playing time for a team that is going to finish in last place again?

Could be worse. Last week against Penn St, Illinois went from having the ball on the goal line to missing a near 50 yard field goal.

7 scoreless innings from Wheeler, then the bullpen comes in and immediately gives up 5 runs.

I felt the same way until I read some stories about Bob Uecker talking with players in the clubhouse after the game. As annoying as the Brewers are, I have always loved listening to Uecker, and it would have been cool to hear him call an NLCS and/or World Series. He has had more than his share of health problems and wasn't in the booth for the first 2 Wild Card games, so it is entirely possible that he may not be back next season.

If you want it to be absolute madness without really impacting the integrity of the playoffs, go ahead and expand to 6 Wild Card teams. The bottom 4 play each other on Day 1. The winners play the top 2 Wild Card teams on Day 2. Winners of those games play each o ther on Day 3. It could be pure chaos, but would be fun to watch. Can a team run the table and win 3 straight games? It's a tough road for any team to get out of the Wild Card round, but that's the way it should be.

I was originally in the "3 games series is better" camp. Now that we have seen it in action for a few years, I am changing my vote back to a single game Wild Card, with the caveat that division winners all need to receive byes into the NLDS. The problem is, I'm not sure how you do that with the expanded playoff format.

The thing is, the player will be very unlikely to get another deal in his post-prime years that beats the back half of his original megadeal, so the opt out at that stage doesn't really do anything for anyone. I don't see anyone negotiating hard for an opt out after year 5. If anything, they are going to want an opt out after 2 or 3, which would be a complete no go for me.

Those are odd results, but there's no logical reason why that should be the case. I suspect it's primarily just randomness that will even out over a much larger sample. Maybe there is a LITTLE bit of added pressure on the team that loses the first game, causing them to play tighter and increasing their chances of losing the second, but no way that explains 15 out of 18.