Offseason Notebook - October 23
Thoughts on the World Series, Bronny James and Good Old Fashioned Nepotism, and the Election is Coming Up!
I’m starting a new “series” just to entertain myself and share some tidbits with you readers during this offseason. I’ll use these to get thoughts and analyses out on various topics. It’s going to be a mess, but this is my publication and I can do whatever I want with it.
The World Series
We should start with baseball, I suppose. We are in the middle of our four off days leading up to the beginning of the World Series. I think I first mentioned in the Daily Notes in July or so that I was rooting for a Yankees vs. Dodgers World Series, and we got it!
It’s funny to see people on Twitter complaining about the matchup. Nobody liked the Diamondbacks being in there last year, and now nobody likes the big boys in there, either? I’m not sure what exactly these people would want besides just their preferred home team being in there.
The Dodgers are -125 to win it, and the Yankees sit at +105. Neither team has a lockdown ace that is likely to carry them through a couple of games. Gerrit Cole has an 8.6% SwStr% on his 256 playoff pitches. He’s not the Cole of old.
The issue has been more with the curveball. In 2023, he threw that pitch 12% of the time and posted a 10.4% SwStr% with it. Last year, the slider had a 16.3% SwStr%, so neither of those pitches has been nearly as good this year or in these playoffs. The fastball marks aren’t as far off from 2023, so maybe this is just a feel thing. Maybe he’ll have figured it out in time for his big World Series outings. It’s possible, but I doubt it.
Carlos Rodon is the Yankees’ best pitcher right now, and he lines up for game two. His 18.8% K-BB% led the team in the regular season, and he’s looked sharp in his two playoff outings with 15 strikeouts and no walks in 10.2 innings.
The Dodgers open with Jack Flaherty and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Both of those guys are capable of dominance, but they’ve been quite inconsistent.
I think the bullpen advantage goes to the Dodgers, and we’ll surely see a bunch of these bullpens.
I’d have to give the lineup advantage to the Yankees. With Stanton healthy and swinging the bat well, it’s just a brutal 2-4 to get through four times a game. The top of the Dodgers lineup has at least a few Hall of Famers in it as well, but Freddie Freeman just isn’t himself with that banged-up ankle.
If I’m picking a winner, I’ll take the Yankees. I think their rotation is in a better place to set up their bullpen for optimal use, and it’s so tough to keep that Soto + Judge + Stanton off the board.
One angle for the conspiracy bros. Yankees vs. Dodgers was clearly the matchup the MLB prefers. Both MVPs in there, the two biggest markets, coast-to-coast… so if you think they rigged it - then you should bet on both teams to win the series in seven games. If they rigged it to this point, they’d rig it to go right down to that game seven. And I hope they do. That would be sick.
I honestly wish sports leagues would rig the playoffs so there are never blowouts. I don’t want any 7-0 games here; that is the worst. So guy behind the curtain - get to work.
Bronny James
From like 2012-2019, I was pretty into the NBA. I loved playing NBA DFS, even though I was awful at it. Basketball is probably the best sport out there for projections and predictions. It’s pretty easy to figure out at a game-by-game level. I’ve considered throwing myself into NBA projections, and maybe someday I will, but I’ve avoided it for the last few years just because I don’t want to put that workload on myself. I’m a baseball guy, and I like the NFL quite a bit as well. I just don’t have the time for the NBA. And the problem with the DFS game over there is that you really have to be online right up to lock, which I cannot do as someone with kids, so I’d be a guaranteed loser.
But this story is interesting. LeBron James used his power to get his son on the team. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that it’s pretty clear that this kid wouldn’t have sniffed an NBA team if not for nepotism.
Nobody seems to be mad about that, but it does seem like something today’s world should be mad about. Everybody claims to be very angry about injustice. And here’s a case where somebody undeserving got a very high-profile job at the expense of someone else just because of who their father is. Where are the protests?
If the protests pop up, I won’t be joining them. I’m not bothered by nepotism at all. There are two ways to deal with reality:
Embrace It
Be Stupid and Miserable
If you’re going to get bent out of shape every time reality is reality, you’re in trouble. Nepotism is reality. Some people get things that other people have no chance of getting.
LeBron has taken this to the next level, but that’s the path he’s forged his way through. The guy is essentially the GM and head coach of the Lakers. That’s what happens when you have the kind of career he has had. Everything else aside, the guy’s career is amazing. He’s been in the league putting up numbers for 21+ years now. That’s insane. Most people can’t run a 5K once a year for 21 years. He’s never missed a year to injury or had a year where he just stunk - nothing like that. Total alpha.
So if anybody has earned the right to force their undeserving son onto the roster, it’s him. And isn’t it nice to see a father having a strong relationship with their son? I guess I’m assuming some stuff there, but I think it’s safe to say LeBron has been a pretty good dad to that kid. He’s still married to his high school girlfriend, right? That amazes me. Most of these pro athletes who get rich and famous real quick just start having kids with a dozen different women and living these wild lifestyles, and to my knowledge, LeBron hasn’t done that. And I respect the hell out of that.
So many of our societal problems would be solved if nobody ever got divorced and nobody ever slept with someone they weren’t married to. Almost nobody actually fits that bill, so this is a utopic hypothetical, but it’s true. We had it right 150 years ago.
Election Thoughts
I don’t have to get too far into this. If you’ve read my stuff at all, you know I’m a devoted Christian - and that pretty much tells you my politics in such a binary environment.
The one thing that occurred to me recently is that this election seems a lot less crazy than 2020. That isn’t to say that things aren’t crazy, and maybe I’m remembering 2020 wrong - but things were insane back then. This one feels more calm. It seems like there are a lot more people who don’t really care that much about what happens. It seemed like 90% of people in 2020 had hyper-emotional, visceral opinions about it. And I think that’s bound to happen when you shut down the economy for several months like we did - people turn to politics, and their emotions run wild.
It’s quite possible that I feel this way because I live in Indiana this time while I lived in Pennsylvania last time. PA is probably the most important state in the election, so you probably see more of the craziness living there. Everybody knows how Indiana is going to go, so there’s not much tension here - and they don’t spend much money pushing ads on us either. I also bought YouTube Premium this year, so I don’t have to watch any ads at all on there - that helps.
The other thing is that Elon Musk owns Twitter now, and the algorithms have changed. All I see all day on there is people that agree with me. It’s delightful.
I’ve also grown up with the four more years of being a father and growing in my faith. Pretty much nothing bothers me anymore. Bring it on.
The best part about elections, of course, is the data. I love the numbers. I even compiled this Google Sheet that has all of the vote totals from 2016 and 2020 - even down to the county level. So check that out if you’re into the numbers like I am, although I’ve never met a single person who is. At least a dozen times in recent months, I’ve told somebody how much I like the numbers and how I’ve compiled all of this, and not a single person has even been able to fake interest in it.
I wonder what percent of people even know how many total electoral votes there are and general knowledge like that. I’m not saying you should know that stuff, or that knowing that stuff is better than not, whatever is fine - but sometimes it can be tough for me to know that almost nobody else thinks like I do. I’m all alone in my head, although my head is a pretty good place to be.
That’ll do it for this morning. In the future, these will have more baseball-related news analysis, but there’s just not much to talk about right now. This did scratch an itch, though; writing makes me feel good - even when it’s crappy writing like I just did. Peace out!