If John Bolton got fired for being too progressive, that says entirely scary things about the people he was working with.

Remember how the majority of these loons wanted to beatify Pat Tillman up until the point his family said that he didn’t believe the things they did and they would prefer not to paint him with their brushes.

The troops are convenient when they are not asking for VA benefits or the like.

For me, it was “Then, Cramer continued: “I’ve got to tell you when you get off the desk and you talk to executives, they’re more fearful of her winning.”

“There were these hearings in the ‘30s where they brought rich people in front of Congress and just kind of trashed them.”

Two to one odds happen ALL THE TIME. Roll a die. Get below a three? Congrats! Two to one odds happened.

The losing candidate drew 3+ million more votes than the winning candidate and the election was interfered with by a malicious foreign government, so as much as I’ve soured on Silver (more due to the reasons in The FedExPope’s reply to you than quibbling with his general analysis) since 2016, I think “so inept as to…

I don’t think it’s just analytics. I think it’s also the disassociation of winning from profit. Gargantuan TV rights deals have essentially guaranteed huge amounts of money for ball clubs in the NFL, NBA, and MLB, whether they’re great teams or total dogshit. We’ve always assumed that the natural drive should be to…

Exactly this. My wife works in a career where you ideally move around every 3 years or so, and this past spring when she was debating places to start applying I always asked, “Is there a minor league baseball or hockey team there?” Because it’s not just something to root for or whatever, it’s a chance to get away from…

Because my wife teaches high school and likes to support her students, we end up going to a lot of HS baseball games in the spring. Unfortunately, there’s no beer and the sometimes the games are a little sloppy, but I thoroughly enjoy grabbing dinner from Cookout and spending 2 hours of my afternoon outside watching…

This is “neoliberalism” in a nutshell, and it has infected every aspect of life from grocery shopping, to education, to medical care. 

this is actually what I always thought “fantasy sports” was

“It’s all just a ruse to cover for cheap billionaires.” Bingo. I like Moneyball, both the movie and the book, but the thing that always bothered me about the framing was a hard scrabble, poor franchise just scraping by and forced to dig to find undervalued assets. The A’s could have afforded to keep Jason Giambi, and…

Roll a six sided die. You got a 4? Why, that’s only an1 in 6 chance to have happened. I guess it didn’t.

“I get the feeling that none of these fuckers worried about the “future of baseball” actually likes watching baseball. Anyway, this was good.”

538 was also pretty spot on in 2016. They gave Trump a reasonable 1 in 3 chance, where all the other poll aggregator sorts did not. 

3. One need not perform sophisticated analysis to see that, both for the health of the broader sport of baseball and for the specific individual big-league clubs, it is in fact good for there to be lots of easy, affordable, family-friendly ways for people to consume the sport in person and form rooting attachments to…

PECOTA was legitimately part of revolutionizing baseball. Even if the 08/12 elections were favored for Obama, on a state-by-state level he was nonetheless impressive.

I recently moved from a small city with a popular minor-league baseball team to an even smaller city without one, and in all the things I calculated about making the decision to move, I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the simple pleasure of getting off of work, saying “fuck it, I’m not doing anything else with the…

Slow down there, hoss...Nate was a very big player in baseball analytics (see Baseball Prospectus, long before he moved into predicting elections), which allowed him to start 538.

And he’s spent the last three years turning into the sort of pundit he was supposed to upend - anecdotal and subject to whims and storylines rather than actual polling numbers.