Some of you may have noticed that the management likes to match the image to the post subject from time to time. I'm always amused when I check for something weird and it already exists.
23 thoughts on “April 21, 2025: Vast Catalog”
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Thought the Wild played well, but they're going to need some lucky breaks to beat Vegas.
Kaprizov-Ek-Boldy is a dangerous line
Gus was good
Zeev looked like a rookie.
Giving up a power play goal 5 seconds into the first kill of the playoffs is a borderline devastating outcome.
According to Russo, the refs might also actually have to call a penalty or two on the Knights.
Yeah, they won't do that. Vegas is always the least penalized team in the league (4 years in a row?)
Freddy Gaudreau was basically tackled on the power play faceoff that lead to the Vegas goal. That left Foligno covering three players by himself.
The amount of interference allowed in the playoffs has been pointed out as a problem before by many people, but it's not going to change.
That seems pretty common in a lot of sports where physical contact isn't necessarily a foul -- basketball and soccer also have an issue with different officiating in the playoffs and in the regular season, to varying degrees.
One nice thing about baseball is that there's not much room for subjectivity in the rules. An umpire can have a bad strike zone, but there's not a consistent shift amongst umpires to tighten or loosen the strike zone in the playoffs.
Can you imagine? In the MLB playoffs this year, runners will be out if the ball gets there at "about the same time" as the runner.
Or like Joe Mauer would have to hit his doubles at least 20 feet inside the foul line to have them count in the playoffs....
Yes, Zeev looked like he has a bit of a learning curve. We are basically a one line team. The other 3 lines buzz around decently, but will probably not accumulate much in terms of scoring. I think our only hope is if Gus stands on his head and we win a few 1-0 or 2-1 games.
Gleeman is such an engagement whore. He knows bb-ref playoff odds aren't as accurate as the Fangraphs odds, but he'll use the bb-ref ones because they are more extreme. Even the bb-ref explainer for the playoff odds points you to Fangraphs. Fangraphs has the Twins at 29.5%.
Clearly an accurate reflection of a team's strength, especially early in the season.
The thing I usually take issue with in these MC simulations is that they take one estimate for the team quality and stick with it for all the simulations. They need an estimate of team quality to use as the mean, but for each iteration, they should draw the team's quality from a distribution centered on that mean. Early in the season, that distribution will have a bigger variance than later in the season, and it reduces these big swings in playoff probability that aren't really reflective of reality.
What happens when you do it naively is that inevitably a lot of teams then have some incredibly high or low odds by the end of May and then when August rolls around, the engagement peddlers can start talking about how X or Y team battled back from the brink or colossally fumbled from a "guaranteed" playoff spot, using these weak-ass simulation results as "evidence" to support their narrative.
I thought his piece last week (“Twins’ declining attendance has turned Target Field into the Land of 10,000 Fans”) was the best thing he’s written in over a decade. My brother informed me that AG was telling Bonnes on their podcast that he got a two-hour phone call from an angry Twins official, and that these are at least somewhat routine for him. It struck me as the kind of thing one says to service an ego at least as much as it is letting fans know how the team is operating…
That sounds like something St. Peter would do.
I’d probably have a lot of pent-up frustration if my last professional experience was readjusting Joe Pohlad’s training wheels.
Yeah, that's a nice piece. I suppose it is the nature of the beast these days, he's gotten to be just like Patrick Reusse was when AG was starting out. Reusse could always write a good article when he put his mind to it, but usually he just put out junk that his editors probably pushed him for. Gleeman pushes out stuff that gets him engagement, which has basically editor feedback in pushing writers one way or another.
The other part of the problem is that there's not always a good article to be written, but everyone's pushed to constantly churn out content, whether it is articles or tweets or whatever.
If Gleeman is the new Reusse, I assume Doogie is the new Sid?
Definitely. That's his goal
Seemed appropriate for Mrs Runner and me to watch Conclave tonight.
I'm curious what you think about it. My wife read the book and saw the movie and she thought the book did a much better job of explaining everything going on. (No surprise.)
I didn't find the movie too difficult to follow -- we both enjoyed it. We're not Catholic, but have some understanding of the process. Mrs Runner was surprised where it ended, but it would take a whole 'nother movie trying to wrap things up from there.
I'm not sure that anything more needed to be explained in the film, and I thought it was quite good. Personally, I find it really hard to read a book and then watch the adaptation, there's almost always something that I'm not going to agree with in the adaptation, so I understand that viewpoint, too.
Maybe explaining isn't the word. She's said there was more to the politics and a lot more discussion.
It wasn't that I didn't follow it. I just thought people s' minds were changed too fast without seeing the prices play out.
Oh, well, no doubt