Routine Revelations

The best thing about baseball is that until playoff series deciding games there is always tomorrow and a chance for the team to redeem itself. Yesterday the Cubs won and continued to avoid a three game series sweep and thus keep avoiding long losing streaks, which are the real deal of a major league team. The team’s weaknesses are real and could be exposed in the playoffs, but avoiding being swept and winning a majority of the season series ought to be the path to the playoffs. On August 18 the Cubs will play their last four games against the Brewers for the season, and in some ways that will be their last best shot at controlling their own fate.

I wonder if Tom Ricketts can be embarrassed? First he extends Jed Hoyer’s contract before the trade deadline, then the lone pitcher Hoyer trades for to help a severely depleted starting rotation pitches two innings before being injured, and there were concerns about that pitcher’s velocity decrease prior to the trade. Finally, the Cubs hitters have gone cold as ice and have dropped to four games behind the Brewers for the NL Central lead. In fact, the Cubs now only have a 2.5 game lead in the Wild Card. Most likely Kyle Tucker, for whom Hoyer traded away a top prospect to the Astros, will leave at the end of the season. Factor all these recent events with the over all failure to win the National League or the division under Hoyer’s leadership sums up the very questionable decision by Ricketts to extend Hoyer before seeing whether the Cubs win the NL Central this year. Instead Ricketts rewarded mediocrity and sent a message to the team that he is not committed to winning.

The wild fire smoke moved in late yesterday creating this sunset like view.

Hoyer can rationalize his trade deadline decisions all he wants the bottom line is he did not get the job done, and no improvement to the starting pitching rotation has been done. Assad better perform when he makes it back to the team after being out all season. I don’t doubt that the additions that he made will help, but it was not enough.

Truth is, the real failure was made during the off-season by not signing more high quality players. I doubt that Tucker wants to stay in Chicago, in fact if I were him the lack of signings sealed the deal of going to another team; the Cubs can and will be outbid for his services . The consequences of Hoyer’s failures is he lost one of his top prospects while getting no closer to the World Series just to make the playoffs.

Yes, the Cubs likely will make the playoffs as a wildcard team, but they probably will not advance out of the divisional round and winning championships is the measurement. Why Ricketts extended Hoyer before seeing how the team ends up this season tells me that he is more concerned about making money than winning a World Series. An owner expecting nor less than championships would not reward mediocrity.

So far, not impressed by the Chicago Cubs trade deadline deals. Ricketts extending Hoyer before the deadline and not at the end of the season tells me all I need to know, the problem is ownership. Cubs ownership is reverted to being happy enough in collecting the money off the team than in demanding championships.

I think that the iPadOS 26 UI looks best in dark mode than light mode. I don’t normally use dark mode except on my smaller screen devices, but I have enabled it on the iPad Air that is running the public beta of iPadOS 26.

Hall of Fame Chicago Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg died yesterday after surviving cancer and the treatments of it for several years. As a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan Ryne is cemented in my memories of the turn around of the Cubs that started in 1984. He became known to the nation on June 23, 1984 when he hit home runs off Bruce Sutter in the 9th and 10th innings of the nationally televised game against the St. Louis Cardinals. Sutter, himself a former Cubs hero, was the best relief pitcher in baseball at the time, featuring a nearly unhittable split-finger fastball. Having defected to the hated Cardinals, Sutter was the villain of the game that made Sandberg’s home runs all that much sweeter.

Prior to 1984 the Cubs had not been in the playoffs for 39 years. Back then only four teams made the playoffs, the winners of the NL East and West and AL East and West, so the champions in each league faced each other in the World Series. Further, the league championship series were five games whereas the World Series was seven games. The 1984 Cubs won the first two games against the Padres, meaning they only need to win 1 of 3 games in San Diego to advance to the World Series, but was unable to get the job done. The Cubs would advance to the NL Championship again in 1989 with Sandberg on the team and again fail to advance.

Due to Cubs decades history of losing the 1984 team was pivotal to their eventual World Series championship in 2016. Nearly all transformations of losing sports franchises to winning sports franchises lies on the cornerstone of one or two super start athletes and it is safe to say that Ryne Sandberg is the cornerstone of the Cubs current success. I watched Ryne’s entire career with the Cubs and grew to understand his cold hitting in the spring months that always warmed to peak performance in late May. As a fan you expected every ball hit toward second base to be an out and every big moment that found Ryne at the plate to be big hit.

It’s a privilege to grow old and a consequence of time is the seeing the death of your childhood sports heroes and so the news of his death during the Cubs/Brewers game last night hit hard. I am so happy that he, like I, got to see the Cubs win the World Series in 2016 and I hope he took some satisfaction in knowing his part in that moment. The path from lovable losers to World Champions rides on the shoulders of legends. Farewell Ryno, say hi to Harry!

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power

Not only is this not pro-life, it is not in any way consistent with the teaching of Jesus. The parable of the Good Samaritan tells you to help your neighbor who are even people who you might think don’t have the same values as you. Next, go read Matthew 25:31-46.

Summer mornings on the patio are for blueberry oatmeal bake and coffee.

So many things we take for granted have interesting histories, take for example the Graham Cracker.

Kyle Schwarber was the first player of the Chicago Cubs 2016 “core” to leave, not even given an offer to stay, and he was had the most success since that World Series of all the players who were on that team, winning two more World Series and now the 2025 MLB All-Star MVP. How he came back from knee surgery that kept him out of the 2016 season to contribute in a big way in that playoff run was plain evidence of his unique abilities. Not trying to find a way to keep him was negligence.

Doc Searls has a blog post that both demonstrates an effective use of ChatGPT and has insights on education in the United States. I added this comment:

I think there is one important part missed here regarding thoughts on learning. Society in the United States establishes intelligence (IQ) as a constraint on learning, but is not and one might argue that intelligence isn’t a real thing. The constraint on learning in the United States, which I think is implicit in all of the above but not explicit is motivation. Children motivated to learn will learn and likely will see learning as fun. Highly motivated children will route around the problems of the current system. Unmotivated children will not learn and will not see the value in learning.

Motivation comes from parents, which makes good parenting so important to society. Problem is the United States society is basically in opposition to parents mostly because those who influence our society want a narrow definition of good parenting and support only that definition.

Why would anyone seriously think the billions of dollars earmarked for the Department of Homeland Security will actually go towards what is said it will be used for? My bet is a small fraction will go toward ICE agent salaries and the vast majority will go toward the existent and persistent “military industrial complex” that views the states of the Union as a new market. Follow. the. money.

There are two fundamentals of a blog, one is that it is a web page and the other is that the page includes links. A linkblog is a special form of blog the soul purpose of which is the sharing of links to other web pages and therefore contains only the titles of the source pages and a link to them and no real commentary related to the links. All blogs contain links but usually include commentary, hopefully in the voice of a human author. Because the purpose of linkblogs is sharing and the purpose of RSS is sharing, the alignment and perhaps even the dependency of one on the other is natural, but the RSS feed is only useful with a RSS feed reader whereas the linkblog is useful in every web browser. In some ways the focus on the RSS feed is anti web. Mastodon, Bluesky, and other timelines are conceptually RSS feed readers but I do not think they are the web.

Finished reading: Good Soil by Jeff Chu 📚

Finished reading: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield 📚This book is full of useful nuggets. I particularly like the author’s point of view on fundamentalism and ego.