Hope Is Not A Strategy
I am resigned to the fact that Chicago Cubs are not going to be a playoff team this year, which makes them sellers for the upcoming trade deadline, and it is this idea of “selling” that makes me mad. We knew that Cody Bellinger was only going to be with the Cubs for a year and if he played to any amount of his capability would be a mid season trade, so his leaving is not a problem. What I don’t want to see is the Cubs trading Marcus Stroman.
Starting pitching is the foundation of a MLB team and the Cubs have no real pitching prospects in their farm system. Every free agent pitcher not on their team that the Cubs sign is an unknown. Jameson Taillon is the most recent case in point, the Cubs didn’t really know what they were getting when they signed Taillon but they hoped he would be as good as he was in previous seasons. When you sign a player not on your team you hope they will perform as you expect, but hope is not a strategy!
Stroman has been the best Cubs pitcher the last two years. You can make the claim he is one of the best pitchers in baseball and the Cubs should know best about his health, his mental make up, and his skills. In other words, Stroman is a known asset, and when you are building a team I think general managers should bias what they know about the players on their team.
If the Cubs trade Stroman, to me that not only means this season (2023) is down the drain, it is also that they are not closer to making the playoffs in 2024. What such a trade tells me is that the Cubs continue to tread mediocrity and have no real plan for returning to the playoffs. Further, if the Cubs trade Stroman and thus are sellers at the deadline ownership must make a change in the front office and the manager. I don’t think Hoyer has any real idea how to build the team, he is just hoping to improve, and hope is not a plan.
The “buyers and sellers” phenomenon is not good for Major League Baseball. The way teams treat free agency is destroying how they build their teams and farm systems for continued success. Now, because most teams in baseball are not very good, most teams are unloading their best players mid season for prospects that might never make it to the majors or at best won’t be on their team until 3 years down the road. Every off season teams buy a bunch of free agents (basically creating new rosters every year), all who are unknowns, and hope they perform well enough to form a competitive team. Most teams find their hopes were ill conceived and they rinse and repeat.
Put it another way, nearly all MLB general managers are doing their job no differently than fantasy baseball managers. Problem is, fantasy baseball is not the real world. MLB does not build rosters based on a draft of the entire pool of available players. Right now the Cubs, and most MLB teams, are building new rosters each year from a small pool of unknowns. I am looking for leadership from the Cubs with a real plan and the funding from ownership to stick to the plan. It is looking more to me that Hoyer does not have a real plan and Ricketts has to find another person to run team who has a plan, otherwise he is no better than all prior owners of the Chicago Cubs.
The MLB All-Star break is over and the Cubs play a rare Friday night game at Wrigley that I am looking forward to watching tonight to end the week. The next two weeks are critical to any hopes for the Cubs making the playoffs.
I am confused about micro.blog cross posting. It looks like I should be able to cross post to Bluesky and Mastodon as part of my “base” account, but so far items are not cross posting to Bluesky. I looked at my plan(s) and saw something called Cross Posting bot that was disabled… enabling it costs $2 more per month, but is it needed? Posts to Mastodon are working.
The reason I will never vote for Donald Trump as President is how he handled COVID-19. Trump demonstrated that he did not and will not see himself as President of and therefore accountable to all U.S. citizens, and I find that circumstance simply disqualifying.
In my opinion, the debate over whether or not the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a lab or naturally occurred keeps missing the real issue of the U.S. response, which is that Republicans, particularly the Trump administration, politicized the event. National emergencies like a pandemic that can, and did, result in the deaths of millions of people, should not be used for political gain or handled to minimize political risk. At a time like this the President of the United states has to stop being a politician and govern in a manner that treats all citizens of all political party affiliations the same way. Trump always analyzed very single aspect of COVID-19 through the lens of how it hurts or helps him politically. COVID-19 killed Republicans and Democrats equally. The very investigations going on right now about COVID-19 are still politically motivated, and that is the real problem!
Chrissy Stoop writes that the strongest promoters of Christian Nationalism are the church going true believers. I think that Evangelicals have unwittingly embraced the true founding of Christianity, which was to consolidate power in the Roman Empire under Caesar. Constantine, not Jesus, founded the Christian religion of what nearly every person who claims the identity, Jesus on the other hand started something very different. Oh, and by the way, the first amendment is more about preventing government from using religion to enforce tyranny than it is about allowing people to discriminate on religious grounds. The founders were not what one today would call Bible believers but they had seen how the powerful used religion in Europe to rule over others.
Finished reading: Treasure and Treason by Lisa Shearin 📚
Religious freedom is an oxymoron.
Threads is having rapid success because it’s not really a new social network, it’s the Instagram social network in a different form. You “sign up” to Threads using an Instagram account and when you do, nearly all of who you follow in Instagram is on Threads and that gives the perception of overcoming the social network barrier. (The barrier of joining a new network hand having to build a new list of people to follow.) When you realize that Instagram is all about influencers and that nearly every commercial entity, actors, musicians, publications, etc. are influencers that brings a built in group of users who must sign up for Threads. I am on Threads but I probably won’t use it any more than I use Twitter, which honestly is not much.
People in power who have a chip on their shoulder are dangerous because they cannot be influenced by the will of a majority. Such people live their lives convinced they were wronged and dedicate their lives to right that wrong. In my opinion the majority of Supreme Court justices have such chips, and as they are in the most authoritarian seat of U.S. government, we will all suffer the consequences.
I am a life long Chicago Cubs fan, and so that gives me the perspective of comparing the current Cubs teams to those of the past. The 2023 edition of the Chicago Cubs is frustrating because there is so much talent on the team that is not living up to its potential, and the result is very inconsistent play. Simply put, the Cubs lose too many games in a row. Really good teams don’t lose more than two games in a row, whereas the Cubs often fall in to a streak of losing 3 or more games in a row, the result is an attempt to move up in standings is like being in quick sand.
Unlike other weather items, it appears there is no common source for air quality stats. Right now Google says AQI here is 167 while AccuWeather says it is 204. That’s a big difference. Which is right?
Smokey Eye Not Good
I watched the Air Quality Index for my home showing on the Nest Hub creeping up all yesterday afternoon to as high as 193, due to the wildfires in Canada. Right now it is 187 and I am planning on not going on my normal walks. It’s troubling to me for it not to be raining or incredibly hot yet avoid being outdoors. Last night I watched the Cubs play in Chicago, somewhat surprised they were even playing the game with the AQI over 200. I would have expected the teams and Major League Baseball to be concerned about the health of players and the fans. As far as I know, there is no change coming soon.
We have an Airthings Wave Mini in the basement to track humidity and temperature, but it also tracks what they call Volatile Organic Compounds, which are airborne chemicals emitted by every day items. The biggest influence I see on VOC in our house is the furnace and air conditioning and the good thing is that the AC was not running as much as it could so the VOC number has stayed in the good range. VOC is not the same as Particulate Matter pollution caused by the wildfires and currently affecting the outdoor air quality, I would need a different sensor for that reading.
The Air Quality Index has cross the unhealthy range here in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
I have an account on Bluesky: @frankm.bsky.social. It looks and feels like Twitter. In summary, I question whether the world really needs more social networks. My daily check-ins are to micro.blog, Facebook, and Instagram. I will classify Instagram as my guilty pleasure, I check Facebook because that is where my friends are, and micro.blog is the only real social network I go to for networking with others. I read a lot of what is made visible to me via RSS, and I write my thoughts in this blog and my Daynotes, and here in summation is my use of the Internet.
Dan Seifert writing for The Verge provides an interesting comparison between the Samsung Z Fold and the Pixel Fold. Samsung’s foldable is optimized for portrait orientation while the Pixel Fold is oriented around landscape. I note that the Surface Duo has a similar design perspective, and the consequence is better single screen, phone-like usage. Seifert’s opinion is that one buys a foldable for the inside screen thus Samsung’s approach may be better. I agree that portrait is right for small screen tablets, but I understand Google’s approach to making sure there is a good phone experience. What I wonder is, how does the Kindle app look in portrait on the Pixel Fold?
The Pixel Fold has started to ship and tech reviews are being published. The reviews that I have read so far are biased by the cost of the phone, the gist being that it’s not good enough for the price. Given the $1,800 price, I wonder whether it could ever be good enough at that price? In my opinion this is the consequence of a company releasing an expensive first generation device, the price does not allow any grace for the fact that it is first generation.
“If capital wishes to call labor entitled, capital must acknowledge that it is the most entitled creature in society, craving eternal growth at the cost of the true value of any given service or entity.” – Ed Zitron, The Rot Economy
I am now curious enough to want to create an account on Bluesky, does anyone have an invite code?
As the Chicago Cubs prepare to play the St. Louis Cardinals today, I reflect on my comments during the winter on how much the Cardinals improved during the off-season in comparison to the Cubs. I did not expect the Cardinals to go 13 below .500 and sit in the cellar looking up at the Cubs. Shows the importance of playing the game. The Cubs need to at least split in London, but really should sweep.