Moods, baseball, and cribbing from Craig

NLCS starts Sunday. Go Milwaukee.

For the ten days or so since I returned from California, I've been kind of low-grade depressed. Not what I'd term a full-fledged Black Hole Episode, but enough to keep me slightly dazed and more than slightly unfocused and foggy.

It's not surprising when I think about it. I mean, I'd just spent a month immersed in my dad's slip into dementia and that's pretty depressing (and exhausting). I expect even someone not afflicted with fucked-up brain chemistry would come out of those weeks feeling a bit bummed out. Unfortunately, with me even a depression with a solid outside cause takes effort to climb out of and I'm not there yet. I'm actually counting myself lucky to only be low-grade depressed given the circumstance. Still, it's annoying.

Anyway, this moodiness is poorly timed in that October should be a time to thoroughly enjoy the baseball postseason, but instead I've been only moderately enjoying it, skipping a few games and finding my attention wander when watching others. Which is too bad given how some of the series have gone so far. The Milwaukee/San Diego NLDS was especially good, four games that were super close and hinged on weirdness and odd pitching moves, and even though I've not seen most of it, the still-going ALDS between the White Sox and Guardians has been goofily engaging. Going forward I'm rooting for Milwaukee, as they've been the closest thing to a Whitey Herzog-style team as we've seen in a very long time, plus the Dodgers have had their glory already. I suppose in the American League I'm mildly in favor of whoever wins tomorrow between Cleveland and Chicago since one of my Spuds teammates is from Ohio and another from Chicago, so one of them will be happy. Plus, the Rays are, I don't know, not that fun? I mean, they're super good, they're definitely the best of the three remaining AL squads and on paper they should wipe the floor with whomever they get for the ALCS, but it's hard to care about them. Maybe because they're Florida Men.

Still on the baseball front, we're a couple months away from another clash between players and ownership. When the current collective bargaining agreement between the players' union and ownership expires after the World Series, almost everyone paying attention expects owners to instigate a work stoppage via a player lockout. Meanwhile, the Commissioner's Office as a mouthpiece for the owners is negotiating in public, presumably trying to get the baseball fan base on ownership's side before the arguing hits full force, or maybe just because Commissioner Rob Manfred is an idiot. Basically, the owners want to institute a salary cap, something they've been gunning for since Bud Selig's coup d'etat in 1992. They're not going to get it, they've never made a persuasive case for it, and with teams being sold for billions—the Angels, one of the most hapless franchises around, just sold for $4 billion, the Rays with their iffy market and shitty stadium for nearly $2B—it's laughable when teams cry poor. But they're throwing these other things into the conversation to try and get support for their side and/or distract from their desire to facilitate their greed with binding documentation.

The latest "proposal" to the union contained this:

MLB has proposed returning to a 154-game Regular Season, best-of-seven Division Series, and opponent selection in the Wild Card and Division Series.

Starting in 2029, shortening the season to a 154-game schedule would create a standard weekly off day benefiting player health, and it would allow the addition of up to 8 more Postseason games by moving to a best-of-seven Division Series format.

Beginning in 2027, higher-seeded clubs in the Wild Card and Division Series would select their opponents.

Doesn't matter if these are popular ideas or not as they're not suggested in isolation, they're in a larger proposal that includes the salary cap poison pill. So the whole thing is a non-starter. Nevertheless, I have thoughts on them:

• The season schedule has been at 162 games since the dawn of expansion in 1961/62, when it changed from 154 to 162. Why? Fairness. Pre-expansion, the leagues were comprised of eight teams each and every team played every other team in the league 22 times per year: 22 × 7 opponents = 154 games. Then the leagues expanded to ten teams each and 154 didn't work anymore because every team now had nine opponents; 154 ÷ 9 = 17.111. Just going to 17 (153 games total) was out because you wanted an even number for evenly divided home and away games. 18 games per opponent works, though: 18 × 9 = 162. (The alternative was to go the other way to 16, but that lopped the schedule down to 144 and nobody wanted less baseball then). The next round of expansion in 1969, when leagues went to 12 teams divided into two divisions of 6, mathematically fit the 162 game norm: teams played 18 games vs. each division opponent, 12 vs. the other six teams (18 × 5 = 90, 12 × 6 = 72, 90 + 72 = 162). The next expansions (to 14 teams divided into 2 divs of 7) muddied things a little bit, but 162 still fit even if the balance was less than ideal: (13 × 6 = 78, 12 × 7 = 84, 78 + 84 = 162). But then we got Interleague Play in 1997, which threw fairness out the window. Teams no longer played identical schedules. By then, 162 games was seen as somehow sacrosanct even though the whole reason it came to be was to maintain scheduling parity.

  The schedule is a mess right now; teams play an odd number against their intradivision opponents and an extra game against some teams but not others. I'm all for cleaning it up and restoring parity, that's more important than the total number of games, but I have no faith in the powers-that-be to do it.

  Now we have two leagues split into six divisions of five and everyone plays everyone. We could have near-parity, but we don't because of greed surrounding "rivalry" series; instead of a near-fair schedule of 162 games—14 vs. 4 divisional opponents, 6 vs. the other 10 same-league teams, 3 vs. 14 teams in the other league, 4 vs. the "rival" opposite-league team—we have an unfair schedule to accommodate extra games for Mets/Yankees, Cubs/White Sox, and so on. If we were to return to a 154-game slate, the cleanest way would be 12 × 4 intradivision teams, 6 × 10 same-league teams, 4 × the "rival" opposite-league team, and 3 × the other 14 opposite-league teams. But you know that's not how it would go, they'd want to keep all six "rivalry" games and screw it up. Unless they went to 156 games, which would work even though it's not parity when the Red Sox get three extra games against Atlanta but the Rays get their three extras against the Marlins (or whichever teams are strong/weak in a given year). 

  Then there's the specter of further expansion—Manfred has stated this as a goal, and if MLB goes from 30 to 32 teams, how's that going to work? I know how I'd do it, but that just means Manfred and company would do something else. (I'd split 16-team leagues into four divisions of 4, have each team play each intradivision team 14 times, other league teams 8 times, and half of the interleague teams 3 times: 14 × 3 = 42, 8 × 12 = 96, 3 × 8 = 24; 42 + 96 + 24 = 162. Too clean, and it dispenses with the "rivalry" concept, so it would never fly.)

  The point being, whatever they do to the schedule probably won't be fair so whatever happens there is status quo.

  I've clearly spent far too much time thinking about schedule parity, it's been a bee in my nerd bonnet since 1997.

• Division Series going from best-of-five to best-of-seven is fine. Either way. What isn't fine is the unmentioned part of the idea, which is that there would be more off-days during the playoffs. There are already too many of those, it changes pitching choices dramatically. The last thing we need is more bullpen games in the playoffs.
• Choosing your playoff opponent? Eh. Added drama for its own sake. Don't like it, but also don't care that much.

Elsewhere, via Craig Calcaterra, is yet another timewaster on the Internet that has sucked up part of my day. It's called Tentpole, and it's a game wherein you pick elements from randomly-selected movies—stars, director, rating, genres—to create a "new" film. When you've finished filling the slots, you get a result. Here are a coupe that I got:

It's fun for a few goes, then it's not, but here you go.

I had more stuff to write, but, like I said earlier, it's hard to keep focused right now, so nothing else for now. I need dinner.

Tagged Baseball, The Black Hole, Movies, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on October 9, 2026 at 10:29PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Turning the page

The last couple of weeks haven't been great here in the confines of my chemistry-addled brain, but it's a new week now and the world keeps on turning.

Last night I had an umpiring shift, one of the final ones of the year as things wind down (I may get two or three more at most) and the final one that will involve some of my favorite players in the league. Bonus, I got to chat a little bit with Stephen, a guy that had been one of my favorite players to ump until he moved away last year, but who has now returned. Welcome back, dude! Hope to see you on the field next year. Also good to see Megan, Joel, Pat, Wyatt, Ray, and the rest of those folks yesterday for one final time until we convene again after New Year's. And Megan, thank you as always for the baked good samples. (Hey, I heard that, and they're not "special" baked goods. C'mon.)

I'm going to miss umping in the fall, but there'll be plenty of chaos to keep me occupied. Which is good, because the continual meltdown of the nation will undoubtedly pummel my psyche some more.

Meanwhile, there's three weeks of baseball left before the postseason and I've got tickets for three more Seattle Mariner games with the ever-present possibility of an extra or two. Despite their crappy last three weeks or so in which the M's went 6-15, they've decided to put some effort into it here at the end and have won their last three with 18 games to go. They're somehow only two games worse off in the standings since starting that 6-15 would-be collapse, going from tied for first place to, well, two behind, and two games is plenty surmountable with 18 left, especially since three of those 18 are against the team they're chasing. I say that, but I've also been a fan of Your Seattle Mariners for long enough to know that the most likely outcome is yet another missed-it-by-that-much end to the season.

This week also will see the season finale of Strange New Worlds, which has been really uneven in this third season of the series. After I have a chance to process Wednesday night's episode, I think a season recap/analysis post will be necessary since this show has been so frustrating to me—it has been so good in prior years, has the potential to be really great, and has shortchanged itself this season in some annoying ways.

Also, I watched Thunderbolts* the other night, having skipped it in the theaters. You know what? Pretty good. Certainly by the standard of recent efforts from Marvel Studios. I'd been forewarned by Erik's review that I probably ought to be in a decent headspace when I saw it, and I was. It is an interesting way to go, making depression the actual Big Bad of the film. Wielded by The Sentry, a character I was aware of in comicdom (a would-be Superman type created on purpose by nefarious experiments but that ends up being unstable) but never paid much attention to, I appreciate the way the depression was depicted, with Sentry's victims just poofing away leaving an ashy shadow behind; later we see what happens to them post-poof, they're trapped in a mindspace of sorts, reliving their traumatic or hurtful memories over and over. It's not a perfect representation, but damned if it isn't at least in the ballpark. The solution is for our reluctant (except for gung-ho Red Star, played to perfection by David Harbour) would-be heroes to coax Sentry out of his depressive episode and then after that restores everyone to normal keep working with him to manage his moods. There's also some absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely messaging here, which is good, but it is entirely unsatisfying to have the film end with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss' character Allegra de Fontaine slither out of trouble and manipulate things to her advantage again. Maybe that's appropriate given the real world we're living in, but that's also the main reason it's so irritating. Can't these criminal asshats even face justice in our comic-book movies??

Anyway, new week, new turn of the page, life goes on.

 

Tagged Umping, Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Star Trek, Movies, Posted on September 9, 2025 at 7:13PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Attention Overload!

Wow, is there a lot going on right now. Big things, little things, consequential things, trivial things, nerd things, political things, sporty things, personal things, many combinations thereof.

Now, the personal things tend toward the nerdy and trivial. Don't want to get anyone's hopes up. But between the news, pop culture, and baseball/softball, my brain is jam-packed with musings.

Some, about the latest debasing of Major League Baseball by its own commissioner, were posted yesterday, so no need to rehash that except to just say once again—because there's never a bad time to say it—that Rob Manfred is horrible. But related to the All-Star Game are musings about the gathering I hosted here for it; I invited a bazillion people, but knowing it was for an event that has lost its luster and that started at 5:00pm on a weekday, I figured maybe seven or eight people might show. I overestimated by a few, but we had fun and I ate way too much junk food, including some oddly-made pizza from Spiro Not-Agnew's down the street and so-so store-bought guac. (Always worth it to make your own guac, dummy.) Thanks to Abe, the one person from my umping world to pop by for a while, and Mack and Erik for bringing some of the junk food. (Abe didn't know my dietary preferences, so I skipped his, but still thoughtful.)

That was Tuesday night. Last night was my softball team's final game of the year—we play a really short season, for better or worse—which was typical: We lost by a lot, only got to play a little over half a game because of the enforced mercy rule, and in my one at-bat I swung blind as the sunset was happening right behind the pitcher and tapped out 1-3 but still managed to tweak my ankle running to first. Kind of fitting, really.

Meanwhile, I went to see the new Superman film and enjoyed it. If you want a good rundown on it, I recommend Erik's review, I basically agree with everything he says there. I now want to see it a second time to better gauge my feeling abut it as it was somehow both really good and kind of a drag and I can't quite put my finger on why. It's very comic-booky, for lack of a better description, as opposed to the gritty/angsty Zach Snyder version of Superman or even the operatic Richard Donner Superman; in some ways, that's great, kind of my wheelhouse, there was a lot of funny stuff in it that required that sensibility. In other ways I thought it was maybe too fast-and-loose with conceptual reality with its "pocket universe" and off-hand inclusions of semi-intelligent "troll monkeys" (though that made for one of the biggest laughs) and an unexplained kaiju-like giant monster that was the least effective sequence for me. But on first viewing, I'd say Superman (2025) ranks below Superman (1978) and Superman Returns (2006) but way ahead of Man of Steel (2013).

Also, the long-awaited season three of Strange New Worlds premiered last night with two episodes. Both eps were good, neither was great, and there was plenty of good character stuff and smart dialogue to meet my high Trek standards.

Those all fall in the pop-culture/trivial/personal buckets. As for the big political world-affecting stuff, I find myself navigating a mix of outrage, hopefulness, hostility, schadenfreude, anxiety, callousness, and trepidation. Which is, let's face it, the new normal, but with new dimensions given the latest info:

• The MAGA civil war is fascinating as some of the cultists belatedly realize that their champion actually is a lying garbage person who gaslights them and thinks they're stupid. The fact that they see this only because they bought into a conspiracy theory he and they promulgated for years that he is now denying hasn't sunk in yet, but hey, baby steps.
• Today's publication of an article in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, that reinforces what most of us already knew—that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were two peas in a pod in their depravity and criminality—is outstanding, as it is causing the wannabe dictator and his minions to panic and dig themselves deeper into the hole they're in with the cultists. I've oft wondered what it would take to get the cult to turn on this subhuman stain when none of the prior atrocities seemed to make a dent, and it figures that the answer is apparently reneging on an implied promise to inflict cruelty on people they don't like.

• With all that creating chaos for the White House, official spokesmodel Karoline Leavitt told the press corps that our wannabe-dictator has health issues—which, again, duh—that she plays down as minor but actually might well prevent him from finishing his term of office.

  The demented occupant of the Oval Office has Chronic Venous Insufficiency, which in and of itself is not a big deal. Lots of senior citizens deal with it. But the patient in question is not "lots of senior citizens," he's an obese rage factory who doesn't believe in exercise and maintains a fast-food diet. And this has progressed enough to include Stage 5 or 6 elements, e.g. venous ulcers (evident from photos of POTUS47’s hand and the lie from his press secretary that he was bruised from aspirin and an overabundance of handshakes). Whether the hand wound is from the CVI directly, a complication of it, or from something else, it indicates something more serious than swollen ankles. Add to this the daily evidence of cognitive decline and one has to wonder if the CVI is severe enough to have hindered blood not just to the extremities but to the brain.

  What makes this especially hinky is that the White House—in the first term and in this one—never reveals anything about Dear Leader's health. They give bogus doctor notes from their very own Dr. Nick that say he's the healthiest person that ever lived. We got no information when he had COVID. We got no information after he was mildly wounded when someone took a shot at him last summer. They never reveal anything about his health, yet today Leavitt said he has CVI, probably the most innocuous explanation for the photo of his swollen ankles.

  It's probably true as far as the CVI goes, but what's not being said? Is he looking at heart failure? What about vascular dementia? Has he had a stroke? It sure fits the observable circumstantial evidence that long-standing CVI (pun not intended) correlated with lack of circulation to the brain begetting vascular dementia accounts for a lot of his nonsensical rants and wandering tangents and inappropriate dozing off. (Then again, this is the laziest, stupidest, most emotionally stunted public figure in the world, so all that crap might have nothing to do with his blood flow.)

  Might this health admission be the first step in a soft coup by the oligarchs that want JD Vance to be emperor? Might it be a first move in a fallback contingency should the Epstein mess actually catch up with him—he could resign for health reasons, get pardoned by Vance, and completely avoid any accountability for anything?

  And why am I conflicted about the prospect of PseudoPresident Convicted Felon dying of heart failure soon? Frankly, that's a better scenario than a pardon.

Oh, and CBS canceled Colbert because they need to not piss off the regime in order to get FCC approval on their corporate merger with SkyDance. That's just lovely. (Skip the below video to about the two minute mark for more context.)

 

Tagged Politics, Movies, Star Trek, President VonClownstick, Baseball, Softball, Posted on July 17, 2025 at 9:02PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Moving Beyond

I'm still sad, but this movie was a good salve

I've been pretty dang depressed this last week. Losing Pixel has been hard, and when things start to level off into a sense of "normal," I'll run across a clump of her fur between couch cushions or something, or just realize that my big new condo feels really empty without my lovely ball of fur and attitude running around it. It's kind of refreshing in its way, because being depressed when there's a clear, external reason to be depressed is a kind of novelty for people like me that take medication to keep the personal black hole that follows them around at bay. But I am working my way through it. Still procrastinating on some things, but starting to get other things done and putting my mind to positive things. Intermittently.

One coping mechanism this week has been one part lazy/one part distraction/one part mood-enhancer, and that's movies. I've watched a few movies this week. Erik suggested one, People, Places, and Things, about a cartoonist with a fucked-up love life. He thought I'd relate. He was right. It's a nice little movie. I also watched Irreplaceable You, which is about a character dying, which I thought might be good perspective but just turned out to be sad (though Christopher Walken has a fun curmudgeonly supporting role). Also Laggies, about a directionless 30-ish woman who backslides into adolescent habits, which I rather enjoyed. But also some good old reliable "comfort food" movies: Spider-Man Homecoming (as fun as I remembered), Thor: Ragnarok (funnier than I remembered), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (fun, but too dumb/shallow for repeat viewing and more violent than necessary), and tonight, Star Trek Beyond.

I'd watched Beyond once before since it left theaters, and liked it well enough but maybe not as much as I did when I first saw it. This time I give it a lot more credit. Simon Pegg and his writing partner (whose name escapes me at the moment) pulled off something really impressive: They made a movie that has the modern-studio-mandated action set pieces and spectacle that also has a solid Star Trek story. It is much better than the 2009 J.J. Abrams Star Trek and a billion times better than the idiotic mess that was Star Trek Into Darkness. Granted, that's a low bar.

Still, it's a really enjoyable movie. It has its issues—Captain Kirk is really stupid in one critical point, something that could have been avoided with a few lines of dialogue to propel the story/action without making him an idiot—and the Villainous Plot™ has a MacGuffin (two, actually) that doesn't have enough explanation to make any sense. (Oh, and a motorcycle? That's 100+ years old and runs great and has fuel in it? Really? OK, I'll let that one go.) But the villain at his core has a nice backstory (not well-developed enough, but points anyway given the need for ACTION SPECTACLE), the story flows well, our heroes are handled (for the most part) well. And the in-jokes/callbacks/homages are organic and serve the story (unlike in Into Darkness, where whole sections of the movie are poorly done callbacks/recreations there for no reason except to be callbacks). And they're funny. Simon Pegg does subtly funny really well. 

It's a shame it didn't do the box office business its immediate predecessors did. But as Erik has pointed out time and again, a sequel's ticket-selling success is largely based on the quality of the previous movie, not its own. And STID, let's be generous here, sucked. But there may not be a follow-up to this one. Which might be OK. Star Trek is not nearly its best when treated as an action franchise, and that's what Paramount Studios seems to think these movies need to be, and the rumor mill has a possible sequel written or co-written by Quintin Tarantino, of all people. Hard. Pass.

Anyway, Beyond is a fun movie. I liked it (again). And it picked me up a little bit.

Tagged The Black Hole, Star Trek, Pixel, Movies, Posted on September 1, 2018 at 3:59AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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