Cheat... lie... steal. The same mantra that gives Republicans a chance in any election. It doesn’t matter if your up by 20 pts, or if the person your against is a corrupt as a fluorescent three dollar bill, if they are a Republican, don’t expect them to ever respect the rule of law, democracy, or decency.

Dismiss the troll.

Probably worth mentioning that the reason Democrats didn’t show up, and the entire reason they were assured there were not going to be votes in the morning, was so they could attend a 9/11 memorial service (I mean, you can just imagine the fucking right wing conniption that would accompany Democrats holding a surprise…

Shut the fuck up, tomato.

Because they have convinced their base that Democrats and liberals are evil and out to destroy the country.  So they can always play the “we need to do whatever it takes to stop the libs from taking over our country” card, even if that means eroding away democracy.  It’s supremely messed up, but it’s just what they…

HAVE YOU HEARD OF RAINBOW PARTIES??!!???!!!?!!!

Already I’m reading the part where it says “the drones won’t have facial recognition capability” and I’m thinking that it doesn’t mean that video taken by the drones can’t be uploaded to software that DOES have that capability later...

“This asshole seems like he’d rather watch someone play OOTP than actual baseball.”

While I don’t disagree with the notion that the MiLB should exist (largely listed here by Burneko and by many of the commenters), I think the point of Sawchik’s article is that much of this should be able to be recreated in labs and closed settings. His book The MVP Machine outlines a lot of the new technologies…

That first sentence is a strawman of the day nominee. The whole point of analytics is to win games, dipshit.

This is neoliberal baseball, like Bill Clinton’s economic wet dream. Get as much production as you can out of as few workers as you can whom you pay as little as possible. Aggressively attack any decent workers who complain, with help from your media buddies of the same socioeconomic class, demonize any attempts at…

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

I only saw the headline and assumed that “Minor League Baseball” was the name for fivethirtyeight’s improv team and concluded no, no we don’t need that.

Long time Fangraphs subscriber here. Probably a little naive to dive into the Deadspin comments to say a nice thing but Sawchik is a good writer and a non-asshole. His books are very good, too.

Well, several MLB teams are already throwing out AAA lineups to be humiliated whenever a real team comes to town, so this would be the logical next step in dumbing down the sport and continuing to put out an inferior product for premium prices. The whole beauty of baseball is that if the pitchers and batters are…

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. 

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.

Along with these Disruption Ideas that Sawchik creduously passed along, he also holds up La Masia, Barcelona’s academy, as the optimal model for efficient player development, while curiously eliding the part that those academy prospects play proper competitive matches against other clubs’ academies, and that they…

The fact that FiveThirtyEight is even a thing will never cease to blow my mind. Nate Silver built a goddamn empire out of correctly predicting the most obvious election in a generation at a time when common logic was viewed as some mystical commodity (see also: Gladwell, Malcolm).