TheGoodBits

This site is hilariously bad. 95 between the beltway and Dumfries is possibly the single worst stretch of road in the entire region. Zero public transit options. Nothing at all interesting about the site (waterfront, etc). The stadium will forever be half full at most. It’s like they took everything bad about FedEx and made it 10x worse.

His durability over the course of his career has been perhaps his top attribute. A serious injury at some point was probably inevitable and I’d been waiting for it the last few years. But still, it’s least a little jarring to see it happen to him after this long.

You know if I’m the Lerners and I’m trying to sell the team, it’s pretty appealing to a prospective buyer to have a superstar like Soto signed longterm. But it might be *more* appealing to have a sub $100m payroll, next to nothing on the books after 2025, and a farm system that is flush with talent.

If the Nats got 22 hits in a game but it was on Apple+ so nobody could see it, did it actually happen?

Yep, Dbacks lost 110 games last year and look like they could push 130 losses this year. Nice outings for our younguns but that was a minor league lineup. ooof

My take on the news yesterday was that the idea they would consider selling wouldn’t hit the press unless they were very serious about selling.

Leonsis is… ok. Not sure he’d commit to to a top 5-8 payroll every year but I also think he’d support continuity in the front office and staff. He doesn’t seem like a guy who is overly involved in the operations side of the teams he owns, which is a good thing.

Yeah this scares the hell out of me. New owners will inherit all the bad habits and unfortunate circumstances from the Lerners, with no guarantee they’ll be as willing to spend as much on payroll as the Lerners have. A quick snapshot of the circumstances: -several large, very bad contracts (Corbin, Strasburg, deferrals from Strasburg contract pt1 and Scherzer) -MASN money issue unresolved -megastar due for a megadeal. Will they execute a huge extension while trying to sell the team? Will they delay the decision and miss their trade window? -farm system ranked last in MLB and has been ravaged by years of being competitive -one of their consistent best ways to sign top prospects is about to be destroyed (international draft coming) As successful as we’ve been for a decade, new owners are going to inherit a bit of a mess. And we can all just sit here and hope they invest top dollar to fix it.

Just hoping we can take one of the games this series… W/L record isn’t going to be super important this year but it would annoy me to start the season 0-4 against the Mets.

That should come back as soon as they ban the shift. Good counter-balance.

While Soto may be good enough to command top prospects with just a year remaining on his contract (or hell, even at the deadline during his walk year), more team control will always result in a higher trade return. In his case, possibly substantially more.

Nats aren’t winning anything in the next three years, so why keep him? Your trade return is *substantially* greater if he comes with multiple years of team control. This year’s trade deadline = 2.5yr, this coming offseason = 2yr. Honestly this past offseason was the best time to do it but certainly don’t wait any later than next offseason.

Stras and Corbin have negative trade value right now. We’re just stuck with their contracts for the next 4-5 years. Soto you can absolutely make a case for. You should try really hard and be really aggressive trying to sign him to a life contract, but if he doesn’t sign then absolutely trade him before next season.

Alonso needed to work on his cardio a little more in spring training

I kinda like our 2-5. Falls off very quickly though. Would like our 3 or 4 hitter to be a little more multi-dimensional though. Pure power guys.

Welcome back to 2010.

I don’t think Strasburg has been on track for opening day at all this spring training. He’s slowly ramping back up and has started throwing live bullpen, but the reports a couple weeks ago were that he was “weeks” behind and they’re trying to get like 20 starts out of him this year. Would put him on track to join the rotation mid May-June ish.

This is an excellent basketball game.

One of my favorite ES stories is when certain posters accidentally got put on ghost mode, where NOBODY could see their posts. You’d occasionally get a notification that they’d quoted your post in a reply, but nothing would be there. One guy, can’t remember his username but believe he posted in the Nats thread, went years posting here with zero engagement from anyone. No responses, no liked posts. Just talking to himself the whole time.

I’m just stunned that happened and they just… let Smith continue sitting there and the show continued. And then he won and they let him deliver the acceptance speech. Like, nobody thought “hey maybe the dude who just walked up on stage and hit someone should take a little break outside.”

ACC as a whole was very underrated this year and all the teams saw their rankings impacted because of that. In the end the conference got 3 teams in the elite 8 and 2 in the final four.

Absolutely fitting that Coach K’s storybook ending will include beating UNC for a trip to the championship game.

Duke is finally coming together at the right time. I watched a number of their games earlier in the year and they never felt like they played cohesive basketball. They’d also get frustrated and off their game easily. But watching how they closed out Michigan State and Texas Tech in the last three minutes of each game, that’s as impressive as anything I’ve seen in this tournament so far. I’d go so far as to argue that among the teams left, they are the favorites to win the championship.

She was most likely over here on a seasonal visa. Lot of Europeans work seasonal jobs in beach towns during the summer. The quantities of those visas is capped and they are not country-specific, fwiw. But yeah outside of that, I did see where we were taking in 100k Ukrainian refugees. Drop in the bucket when looking at the total number of people displaced, but hopefully the majority of them that remained in Europe are able to return home at some point in the coming year or five. It’s going to take a long time to rebuild in some cities.

It does, and that’s why I struggled with my own opinions on transgendered people for some time (and still do). Fwiw one of my buddies from college came out as transgender a few years ago so I do at least know someone personally who has transitioned from male to female. Here’s the thing though. It’s also reality. If someone wants to change themselves from male to female, even up to the point of getting surgery, they don’t end up functional female genitals. At best they end up with something that is supposed to resemble female genitals. And the idea that people would let a child go through with permanent changes like is crazy to me. Imo it’s totally different from sexual orientation. And people do struggle with sexual orientation and identity as they grow older, and sometimes that orientation ends up kind of fluid. For kids, you’ve got to leave them room to figure that out and encourage them to NOT make permanent decisions until they definitely have that fully understood.