Brock Beauchamp

Ick.

Made Wainwright work a bit that inning, I'll take it.

*not the double play

That's a start, more please.

The batting helmets have advertisements?

Me upon realizing I'm going to be forced to listen to John Smoltz for the next three hours

Yeah, exactly. Look at yesterday's win. They beat Atlanta by scoring 11 runs on nine hits. They also had six walks but teams just aren't going to regularly score 75% of their baserunners, especially against the Braves. And they won by one run.

BaseRuns, which I feel is more accurate than pythag, has them even worse at 34-42. What we're seeing is smoke and mirrors. Those wins are banked but unless the Reds get their pitching staff in order, regression is coming for them in a big way. https://www.fangraphs.com/depthcharts.aspx?position=BaseRuns

The Cubs kick off the London series against the desiccated corpse of Adam Wainwright. Given that they have Justin Steele on the mound, this is an opportunity to win going away, they need to take advantage of it.

If Bellinger gets really hot, I think the Cubs could do better than a comp pick. But I think the more prudent move is to QO Bellinger and then consider whether you want to sign him longer term.

The National League is exceptionally mediocre this season and the Cubs play in the worst division in the league. It seems premature to start speculating on the team selling in the middle of a hot streak. Are the Reds likely to sell? They're basically a week ahead of the Cubs in getting hot.

Interesting. Mobile, desktop, or both? And how often do you see this happen?

It sure is easy to hate East Coast media. I guess it's technically true that Bellinger would be a good fit on the Yankees but the Cubs are rolling right now! I know he writes for the NY Post and panders to his audience but given that the Cubs play in the second-worst division in baseball, are 3.5 games behind the Reds (of all teams), and are currently 8-2 over their last ten makes a mention of Bellinger feel more like wishcasting than useful information. View full rumor

Okay, GIPHY should be working again. Turns out the default key used by the software was banned because GIPHY was sold to someone and the tech industry is crappy.

They're down, I haven't had time to look into why that is the case yet.

A few people have asked about traffic and I wanted to give a quick update on site activity. The site re-launched on March 26th of this year and all data goes through yesterday, June 21st. Some of these numbers might not look that impressive but keep in mind that for 11 days in early May, we lost the NSBB domain. Two of those days had zero traffic and nine more had roughly 50% normal traffic while we fought to regain control of the primary domain from an unresponsive domain registrar. Overall, things are going pretty well in my eyes. Losing those 10+ days kinda knee-capped us in the short-term but we're not in this for the short-term. We lost some really vital SEO priority, regular direct traffic, and social influence that will take time to rebuild. We're still not quite back to where we were just before the domain went FUBAR for those ten days but that will right itself over time if we just keep plugging along. Anyway, some numbers. We will be comparing the same time period (Mar 26-June 21) for 2023 and 2022. We've seen a significant uptick in users thanks to our outreach with social media, search engine optimization, and use of content aggregators. That has led to a +49.6% growth in users and a +55.4% growth in new user visits. Our registrations are lower than I'd like to see but we've seen 32 new registrations to the site compared to only 12 over the same period last year. Forum content has been really promising, especially factoring in those lost days of traffic. During that period of time we've seen 11,929 posts created in the forums compared to 10,976 posts over the same period of time last year. One of the ways this is happening is changing up how game threads are handled. I hope to return to letting users create them in the future but I need to figure out a better way to manage those before we can do that. It's wayyyyyyy easier for me to create the thread every morning than juggling who has today's thread and making sure it gets on the site in a timely fashion. Don't worry, this isn't permanent, I just need a little head space to re-evaluate how to manage it under the old "rules". Anyway, already in 2023 we've seen 30 game threads go over 50 replies. In the entire 2022 season, that happened only ten times. The new system is attracting a lot more commentary, we just need to work in the old flavor while maintaining that uptick in posting. That's about all I have right now! Thanks again to everyone who has helped me navigate all the bumps and bruises of the transition and if you ever have input on how to change or improve things, my door is always open!

Thanks to @Seth Stohs for doing this research this morning, a lot of useful info in these tweets:

Gonna wait until the draft, as that will inject 2-3 additional prospects people will want to put in the top 20. Last year I tried doing it monthly and everyone kinda agreed that was a bit too much.

It's actually pretty simple, you get additional points for different content and I try to scale it based on the difficulty of creating said content. Going roughly from memory, this is the scale (or close to it): 1 point - get a reaction from someone 2 points - create a post 5 points - create a topic 10 points - create a blog entry Then there's a bunch of random other stuff, too. If you hit a milestone like 1,000 posts in the MiLB forum, you might get 50 points or something like that.

I am incapable of recalling people who played for two specific teams. It's just something my brain refuses to do for some reason.

I tend to agree with this, though the reality of the NL Central is that it's not going to take much to win the division and only the division winner will make the postseason.

Huh. So this team could leave London with a .500 record.