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First comment:

Jordan Yost every day, and twice on Sunday.

To be clear, I am not genuflecting at the altar of the AI god here. Anyone who believes I am is free to continue doing so. That neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I am using AI here as a jumping off point for understanding what it is I have, what I might need, what my options are, a ballpark on what it might cost, and how to tailor my approach with professionals about my needs. I can also bounce what they say against what we see here and use that as a way to understand what's going on. The alternative is, I'm completely in the dark and at the mercy of the professional, who might possibly have more of a vested interest in misleading me than ChatGPT would.

Perhaps another reason they don’t publicize their work on WAR is that with at least three different versions of it out there, each proprietor might have a proprietary interest in keeping their versions secret from the other two?

It’s Revenge of the C- Students.

We’ve are at capacity with our electrical panel and I went to ChatGPT for some guidance on approach, and I mean, this really helped a guy, who knows practically nothing about it, a lot. https://chatgpt.com/share/696d29c4-59e4-8004-8d42-bc005e8e18b1

Chad? Do you mean this one? https://chadgpt.com

Solid burn!

They acquiesce because they know that if they don’t, the government will use as much time and public treasure as they want to make them pay by bleeding them out in court, mobilizing White House cabinet PR and their RWM running dogs in a unified effort against them, doxxing specific executives and talent in tweets to make them targets for motivated red hats, and probably any number of things I’m not thinking of now. Of course, the government would almost certainly eventually do all this anyway, but the media company in question would be gambling that the hammer never comes down or, failing that, at least get their beds sufficiently feathered in advance of being pressured (i.e., practically forced) to sell off to Trump comrades, as Paramount had to. I’m definitely not saying it’s right.

For a moment I thought you were advising Ed to run away from Florida! 😉

Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some dishonest pundit on Fox has pointed out that there are no rights for trans people explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

Agree. They are so loaded, they definitely don’t need Skubal this year.

The thing about WAR I don’t particularly like is how under the hood the calculation is. I have always wanted to know it so I could tinker with myself. Maybe they hide it by design to prevent that. Who knows. I do trust it to be accurate at least within reason.

I could see where, if Skubal loses the arb case and gets the $19 million the Tigers imply he’s worth, and then they turn around and bring in Chris Bassitt for something more, Tarik might be at least a little annoyed.

Make your friends' eyes roll at parties with this one.

Some will find this interesting.

Here are a bunch of maps dividing the eastern US from the western US. On that second one, I wonder whether the numbers would show if California were removed from the western US.

This poll was taken by Morning Consult among Americans in 2020.

I get how it can be difficult to understand just how much positional adjustments should matter because we can't see under the hood how they are done. I generally trust the hundreds of baseball minds who have been (and presumably continue to be) working on establishing and honing the valuation, but I do grant that it's possible there's a huge blind spot afflicting the entire informed-outsider analytical community about it. Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't let that possibility lead me to reject outright the current calculations, though.

Granting your point about first basemen positionally penalized by WAR, here is how Spencer ranks among all first basemen with 1,500 plate appearances or more since 2022: This includes no fewer than 12 first basemen ranking above him who've had fewer than 2,000 plate appearances the past four seasons, far fewer than Spencer's 2,118—including the guy above him who just retired because he can't perform to his own standard anymore. I'd be surprised to learn that the Tiger coaches and front office are unconcerned about his -42.5-run defense, let alone consider his +0.5-run offense to be good enough to disregard or even accept that.

Lack of spending by the Central teams? Probably both to some degree, perhaps independent of one another. The various ownerships may feel it's not worth it to pursue top free agents because they won't go there anyway—look what happened with the Tigers making the richest offer to Bregman, and yet his going to Boston for less money anyway. (At least that's how it looked at the time—it ended up being a smart money move after all, with teams he preferred to play on.) And the best the Pirates could do was make a half-assed offer to Schwarber, probably a performative gesture for their fans since they must have known that he was never going to take it. But players also have their own agendas as to whom they want to sign with, too, and that encompasses a small subset of the total number of teams. It's mostly about winning a ring now. That's why everyone wants to go to the Dodgers and Blue Jays right now. But I think it's also a combination of who has a recent history of throwing big money at players, and have a perceived chance of winning a ring or pennant right away. These eight teams—Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Mets, Giants, Blue Jays, Phillies—qualify by a long shot in the minds of players. A couple other teams qualify, I believe, as good "close to home" venues that also spend a bunch of money, also an attractive proposition to players, especially those who have school-age kids (Arizona and San Diego come to mind). Only one team seemed to have broken that cycle—Texas, for a couple of years—but now they are back in the dumps and are noncompetitive for top free agents. If the Royals had offered 4/260 to Tucker over the Dodgers, would he have taken that KC offer if the Dodgers were to not budge on their final number? It comes down to whether $240 million and a bunch of rings would have been more or less valuable to him than $260 million and no rings. I know what I think he'd do. It's no accident that since the 2021-22 offseason, of the 35 contracts of $100 million or higher, 25 of them, or 71%, come from those eight teams above, which make up 27% of all teams. Same when it comes to high AAV contracts: of the 34 contracts with AAV $25MM or higher, 22 (65%) come from those teams. That's 27% of teams more or less monopolize more than two-thirds of top free agents over the past five years. is that really sustainable state of affairs? We'd have to ask the MLB business people that question. If your question is coming down to, "Is it the chicken or the egg?", I think the answer would have to be, "Yes".

Agreed. Maybe they prefer to play in Boston or Chicago or San Francisco or Toronto or Baltimore or Philadelphia instead. What I have seen is that outside of the Cubs, almost no Central teams have been signing top free agents for big money or long terms the last few years. Of course, this year, short term/big money contracts have become the big thing, which players have gravitated towards I believe so they can make as much money as possible before the expected work stoppage.

My point is that I believe Bassitt, and any other free agent who has a choice, would choose to take slightly less money from a high profile team than slightly more money from us, at this point in time. That could change in the future, meaning we could become competitive for top free agents with the “best” teams, but before that happens I think we would have to both (A) win a pennant, and (2) commit to at least one star for a long-term, preferably high-dollar contract while under team control.

This probably won’t happen, but maybe reducing the responsibility of the Senate to being more like the House of Lords, more of a deliberating and delaying body than a full legislative body, would improve things? I don’t know, just spitballing.