The primordial time of the mid-to-late 2000s were a golden age for blogging collectives. Most of them have gone extinct. Victims of small environmental factors like social media or large impacts from pivot-to-video or gambling #content asteroids. [cont'd]
Many of us from that world were wiped out. Others retreated to caves. Others adapted. Either way, massive upheaval was the order of the age.
From the rubble-strewn wasteland of that apocalypse emerges . . . the O.G. Big League Stew crew! With @AnswerDave reunited with @KevinKaduk at @MidwayMinute! So cool to see Dave back with 'Duk like it was the damn Bush years again! midwayminute.win
I still maintain that the most epic interview ever was @AnswerDave talking to Luke Scott at the 2010 Winter Meetings. I was 10 feet from them as it was going down and it was like watching history being made.
Anyway, @MidwayMinute is, obviously, Chicago centric. Just today @AnswerDave has posts about The 10 biggest Opening Day moments for the Cubs and White Sox. @KevinKaduk has ranks the beers at Wrigley and Sox Park. midwayminute.win
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When GOPers get riled re: most things it *seems* like they're full of shit but requires some research to see exactly why. Them being full of shit about baseball, a thing I know about more than them, is a clarifying reminder of how blatantly full of shit they are from the get-go.
Their assumptions about the economic impact of things like the All-Star Game, their beliefs about MLB's racial/political orientation, both historical and current, the antitrust exemption -- they just comically have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
If you're lucky enough to see this in your own bailiwick the bad faith on their part is as plain as day. And a good reminder to never their take their bad faith on on its own terms elsewhere. It's not worthy of engagement most of the time. It's like bargaining with a child.
Baseball getting called out as "woke" is the most hilarious shit I've seen in a dog's age. There is none less woke a thing than baseball this side of the Eisenhower era.
There are blue 1952 DeSoto Diplomats that are more woke than Major League Baseball.
I know that I'm promoting a shit-ton today. Which, given how hard I promote, is saying something. In my defense it's Opening Day, so I'm stoked. But I'm also stoked for a different reason.
When I launched this newsletter, I had a modest short term goal and a bolder longer term goal. The modest goal was that it'd provide enough money that, combined with my NBC severance, I'd be able to ride out a tough job search and not have to consider reactivating my law license.
The bolder long term goal was that it'd be my full time job forever. To that end, I set a subscriber/income goal that I felt could make that work. I pegged that goal to August 3, 2021, the anniversary of the day NBC shitcanned me.
This very good story about Marcus Thames reminds me of one of the worst baseball columns I've ever read, which also featured Thames as its subject. theathletic.com/2489366/2021/0…
That column was by T.J. Simers, then of the Los Angeles Times, who decided to take the lowest of roads possible in using Thames to (I think?) make a point about the Dodgers' roster construction. latimes.com/sports/la-xpm-…
Lotta non-Ohioans gonna see this map and suddenly realize why the university in Cleveland is called Case Western Reserve.
Which, how lazy are people from Connecticut? Virginia sent surveyors over every hill and into every dale to stake its western claims. Connecticut just "called" the north part of Ohio, saying "yeah, save that for us, we'll get to it."
My thoughts on Republicans' refusal to accept the election results: like everything else, it's driven by Trump and fear of Trump. And, for the moment anyway, I think it's all about optics more than it is about actual ratfuckery or attempts to change the outcome. [cont'd]
At the moment even GOP election officials on the state level are not buying this. It all changes if they do, but for now they're not. In the meantime, it's about everyone being afraid of being the first one to break with Trump so they don't get MAGA base wrath.
That could be personal fear but also party-wide fear. A schism between Trump people and still-employed Republicans is really bad for 2022 and 2024, so they have to wait for Trump to accept reality on his own before standing down. This is what is animating McConnell, etc.