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I have the same feelings about Valdez that I do about Miggy: I don’t like what I know about the person, but I’ll root for the outcome, because he’s on my team.

I don’t think we were ever auditioning Gage Workman for a permanent gig on the team. He was always going to be Mr. Right Now for us, never Mr. Right. I think he will end up in Asia, maybe even Japan, and do pretty well there. Zack Short is the guy who’s going to have to find a long-term high school coaching gig sometime in the next couple of years.

Players dropping like flies and landing on the List will do that to a team.

Do you really think midnight has struck for this Cinderella organization? That’s pretty final.

I never thought Wenceel Perez could be any more than a second division starter at best, and we are now in the second division. If we had all our position players intact, we’d likely be a first division team, and Wenceel wouldn’t be starting. So, yeah, that tracks. In all seriousness, I don’t think Wenceel will ever be any better than he was last year, but he could definitely be better than he is now. It looks like he is selling out for more contact this year, since his walks and strikeouts are both down, which would help explain his power outage. His cratering defense, I have no idea about. In the end, though, Wenceel is just another somewhat toolsy player this organization signed a whole bunch of in the five-to-ten-year-ago range. If you look back, he was never any better than 8th best prospect, and more like 20th best prospect in the system most of the time, which doesn’t typically augur an all-star player. We can’t let him go just yet because we don’t have anyone we know is reliably better in the system, and we can’t just pick up a better replacement on the shelf at Walmart, so we are left to trying to develop and get as much out of him as possible before we get someone better to replace him.

That would, as a guy who sounds like a cartoon version of Charles Bronson would say, a fridge too far.

No. At this point, we need him to chow innings and save the bullpen at this point. We also have to figure out a way to score more than zero runs for him with this injury-replacement roster while he is on the mound.

And you're complaining about Wenceel's hitting?

There is no chance Baseball would force their constituents to carry an extra major league salary just for the potential to use them in maybe 10% of the games they play.

Not what I am talking about, obviously.

Yes, because of course. Their unrequited love of trump has given them permission to embrace their worsening life.

In a similar sense, assessing automatic balls and strikes on pitches not thrown is not baseball, either.

Bad: Tigers are 2-8 in their last 10. Less bad: Tigers are not in last place.

The more teams invest in players and skills to get a single run around the bases before three runs is up, the less they have to invest in players and skills to get multiple runs around the bases in an inning.

Since I was wondering whether our offense is maddeningly inconsistent, which I think every fan believes about their own team, I plugged the game by game hitting stats of every team through yesterday into an AI assistant and asked it to rank the 30 teams by most consistent to least consistent offense. Here's what it spit back out. For what's it's worth, of course. ***** Here's the full ranking, most to least consistent through May 15 (weeks 1-7, complete games only). The consistency score is the average coefficient of variation of runs per game and OPS — lower means more day-to-day predictability. Most Consistent (1–10) 1. Tampa Bay Rays — The most consistent offense in baseball despite being a middling team (4.54 R/G). Low run variance (std 2.49), low OPS volatility. They don't explode often (22% of games 7+ runs) but they also almost never completely die (12% at 0-1 runs). Quiet, steady, reliable. 2. St. Louis Cardinals — Nearly identical profile to Tampa Bay. 4.68 R/G, low variance, 9.8% goose egg rate — lowest in the majors. They're not flashy but they show up every night. 3. Texas Rangers — Consistently mediocre is still consistent. Third-best CV on runs despite a weak 3.71 R/G average. They don't beat you but they also don't completely embarrass themselves. Low floor, low ceiling. 4–5. Atlanta Braves / Chicago Cubs — Both are good offensive teams (5.55 and 5.28 R/G) that also happen to be consistent. The Cubs have an impressive 42.5% rate of scoring 7+ runs — they're consistent and dangerous. 6. Baltimore Orioles — Interesting case: 7.3% goose egg rate (2nd lowest in baseball) despite only a 4.17 R/G average. They almost never go completely quiet. The Middle (11–20) Washington, San Diego, New York Yankees, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Houston, Oakland, Cincinnati, Seattle, Kansas City cluster in the 0.506–0.535 range — solidly average consistency. The Yankees stand out here: 5.19 R/G is elite production, but a 35.9% OPS CV means they swing between dominant and dormant. High-variance good team. Detroit sits at 8th — a consistency score of 0.480, roughly top quarter of the league. Their 4.21 R/G average is pedestrian, but they hold their floor reasonably well (14.3% goose eggs) without many blowout games (16.7% at 7+). They grind. Least Consistent (21–30) 27. Boston Red Sox — 26.8% of games scoring 0-1 runs, worst run CV (0.876) of any team not in the bottom five. Genuinely Jekyll-and-Hyde offense. Their 3.83 R/G masks huge swings. 28. Colorado Rockies — 25% goose egg rate, 0.808 run CV. Playing at altitude masks how unpredictable they are. 29. New York Mets — 25.6% goose eggs, 3.79 R/G, 0.840 run CV. Consistent only in their inconsistency, and consistently bad on top of it. 30. San Francisco Giants — The least consistent offense in baseball. 32.5% goose egg rate — nearly one in three games they score one run or fewer. A 0.403 OPS CV means they also have some big games, but the floor is the lowest in the league. 3.45 R/G is the worst in baseball through this stretch.

Well, that's disappointing. We are now 20-26 with a pythag of 22-24, and not an over-.500 pythag mainly as a result of handing our asses to the Mets.

They are oddly fixated on everybody else's genitals and sex lives. It keeps them from having to think about how badly their guy is crashing the country.

Here's hoping this matters when it counts.

Yes, that's fair.

T-Mobile has to get their money's worth.

Could be worse ... you could be seeing those execrable Cure insurance ads with Tarik and Tork.

Man, we could use a revived Matt Vierling at the plate these days.

I thought it was another "I Love The Military" weekend? Man, so hard to keep up ...

At the risk of jinxing—as if that were a real thing—five innings in, I would say, yeah.

During the Year of the Pitcher, it was good to have the King Pitcher.