metsmarathon

you can look at it after the fact, to help inform your future decisions.

well, i managed to snag a fairly superfluous joe panik... he should significantly overperform his $6 salary, though i'm not entirely sure how much playing time i'll be able to give him. i need to offload an anchor first.

of course, maybe his strategy is to get us all to bid up against him, saddling us with players that we ourselves don't want, so that he can swoop in on our cuts! that clever devil!

except anybody he gets that a real good value, will continue to be a real good value next year, and if he's smart and good and a little lucky, he could easily build a juggernaut for next year, if we let him slide this year. fairly bid on the waiver wire guys you could use, or have interest in, i say. there's no reason he should get every guy for a buck. also, if you want to be able to get literally ANY decent mid-season waiver wire pickups, you should probably bid him up now.

i think the correct number would be closer to 10 than 3. i mean, if i could seed my team with the 4th best player from each team, well, hell, i might just drop my own team and pick up initech at the end of the year! if i just look at the 4th best player on each team, you'd get the following: Cory seager | albatrosses Carlos Carrasco | Assassins Jose Bautista | Baconators Edwin Encarnacion | Deathship Andrew Miller | Lunchladies Jose Altuve | Monks Lance McCullers | Red Flyers Mookie Betts | Chickens Rich Hill | smg58 Carlos Gonzalez | Snukes Aroldis Chapman | Devil Toads that's a hell of a team to start with - where do i sign up? 11th best player on each team still gives a solid lineup. i haven't gone all the way through it, but it'd still be a decent seed to plant. especially if it runs through like a full expansion draft. the real challenge would be how to run it efficiently and quickly.

i think that it's worth figuring out hte parameters now, and getting league input, too. before we need to. each team protects X number of players, and the expansion team gets to pick Y number of players overall. and what happens when one of your players gets picked? is there a maximum number of players you can pick off a given team? and when would we run the expansion draft? what if an owner crops up in-season? it's easier if we do it in the off-season, but that's no panacea either... if we wait to figure it out until we need to figure it out, we won't have time to figure it out until it's too late.

i love it when a plan falls completely to hell. had all my draft prep on my one computer, which failed to load at all during hte draft. boo. good thing i wasn't relying on that computer to play the part of m.e.t.b.o.t.! it would be tempting to spin up the 'bot to see how well he could do with picking up the pieces of the draft... there are still some useable pieces out there. and if the team were managed even a little, it could form the foundation for some future team to come in and not suck mightily for ever. or we could figure out how to run an expansion draft...

no deal. can't quite make it to the draft tonight, and no time to prepare even if he could. do we just let the team ride through the season, and let it get picked up at the end of the year? or let in some rando, either now or after the draft?

i have a potential lead, though he's pressed for time tonight, and a wee bit daunted by the challenge facing him. i should know after lunch if he's game.

it's conceivable that i could wind up m.e.t.b.o.t. and have him run his draft from a second computer... though last time i tried that it didn't work out so well for my primary team. for the record, my plan would be to use the average player salary for our league as his max bid, and also establish a set number of salary bins for the 'bot so he doens't just end up with a bunch of $30 players and $1 scrubs... though i may see if i could recruit a mets fan that i work with. that would probably be better!

so... um... do we have a replacement owner for initech yet?

so what's happening here? is vic taking over initech, or GGLDM? i'm so confused! and when is our draft anyways? --- also worth noting is that when you cut a player, you are responsible for 50% of his salary until someone else picks him up, or until the end of the season. so if you are taking over the deathship, and you were to, for whatever reason, cut $63 Mike Trout, you'd still be on the hook for $32 until he joined another team.

so it's confirmed that initech is indeed not returning? BTW, i'm good with the proposed new draft dates of 3/21 & 3/23

BAM! POW! ZIFF! batman battles joker and, like, all of the villains in an epic brick-built battle to save gotham. the only question remains... has ever a better batman movie been made? na na na na na na na na batman!

is everyone re-upped?

i'd love to volunteer, but with my work travel schedule, there's no great guarantee that i'm going to be available...

today felt like a good day to finally see this movie. i must say, i rather liked it. i'm sure i've got some quibbles on plot and character development in there somewhere, but i'm not exactly prepared to elaborate on them. my biggest complaint is that i didn't catch all the rebels tie-ins - i only caught the ghost on yavin 4, not in space; and i missed out on chopper. boo. the attention to physical detail was terrific. it looked like everything in that movie was from the same exact timeframe as ANH. the same is not at all true of the prequels, where technology appears to have really regressed a few centuries' worth in thoe last 20 years BBY i know there was some quibbling with the fan service bits, but i really had no issue at all with either the two cantina guys in jeddha, nor our two favorite droids on yavin. i'm not entirely sure how they get to scarif just yet, but there were a whole hell of a lot of starships moving about there. probably could've had them ambling towards a ship or something, instead of just hanging out in a hangar. as far as the two bits of cgi actors... my wife had no idea tarkin wasn't real. i had no issue with his appearance and was looking for something. was the sheen off? was that it? maybe it looked worse in 3d, or imax, or whatever, but from where i sat in the theater i saw it in, it looked perfectly normal and natural. again, i wasn't poring over the pixels, but still - i was looking at it. i think cushing just kinda looked like that in the first place. he had that uncanny valley look in ANH already. and leia, too, i had no problem with the execution there. lets hope, though, that they don't pull the same trick with leia in 9. i know they agreed not to, but still. so yeah, good movie. very star warsy, in all the best ways. very dark, too. i'm mostly bummed about k2 and chirrut. those guys were awesome. i hope they find their way retroactively in other material. there's no way minimm can watch this movie. not until he's like 20 or something. i am looking forward to the little golden book release, though. one parting thought though... i really do hope the empire has a backup library somewhere, or its going to be rather difficult to build new things in that galaxy.

i do like matz, and i made the trade! wanna send him back over (assuming the trade goes through) for severino instead?

i'm strongly considering the trade. been a wee bit busy. you'll have a response tomorrow.

i forget when, but i saw this on the backside of a headrest on an airplane recently. the audio was intermittent and i couldn't get the screen was all jumpy and frequently self-paused. overall not a fun experience, and i'm sure it helped un-immerse me in the movie. that said, batman was awesome, and awfully written. superman was also quite good, and quite badly written. and wonderwoman was superb... and... well, they managed not to fuck her up too badly. the villains and the drama and the whole "versus" thing was stupid and silly, but not stupid and silly in a remotely good way. it made me weep for what could have been the foundation for a much, much better movie. or, well, maybe just hte window dressing of a much better movie. the foundation would be the story, the plot. and all that was just terrible. nonsensical and pointless and dumb and brainless, with things happening either for no reason or simply because hte movie needed things to happen to have a reason to keep showing us things get destroyed. but, ysy. i guess bits of dirt can fly, so superman might not be dead. hopefully they can figure out how to write a story for the next one.... and maybe retcon some better villains...? is that asking too much? sigh...

holy heck, i cannot wait until i can have the opportunity to see this one. definitely will not be seeing it with minimm, though.

cut away!

Allocate, holdouts!

i saw storks so you don't have to. storks used to deliver babies. then one of them didn't, so they all stopped and turned into amazon prime instead. oh, the one baby they didn't deliver? they adopted her (reluctantly). because of course. now it's her 18th birthday, and the boss stork tells underling stork to fire her. hilarity(?) ensues as, instead, she mistakenly makes a baby sister for a little boy who wants a baby brother with ninja skills because his parents don't spend enough time with him. using the magical baby making machine. as you do. things happen, there's chases and jokes and puns and wolves. and then... [bigpurple:3qfku2j2]spoiler alert!!![/bigpurple:3qfku2j2] to win the day, the orphan girl makes about a million babies at the throw of a switch, answering all the baby delivery requests that'd been piling up since the storks stopped delivering babies. [u:3qfku2j2]18 years ago.[/u:3qfku2j2] it's really quite horrifying if you actually think about it. [bigpurple:3qfku2j2]end spoiler alert!!![/bigpurple:3qfku2j2] the movie promises that in the preceding 18 years, babies have been delivered by other means, but misses out on offering up a clever alternative. and therein lies the problem for the movie. it's a weird universe, with opportunity for something new and clever. but instead, it just kinda falls flat, like a delivery box ready for the recycling heap. the movie damn near bored minimm to tears. we stuck it out because we'd paid good money for the dang thing. don't make our mistake. don't see this movie if you have to pay for it. i guess it was harmless, and we didn't have to answer any baby-making questions after. the only one we did field was, "that's not where babies come from is it?" "what do you think?" "no - they're just being silly" "whew" i'd score it above angry birds, if that helps. from the previews, i thought it could have promise. it never quite took flight.

i was surprised that we didn't have a thread for ST Beyond on here... there's a big dropoff from undiscovered country to the search for spock. it's almost as if you should insert a blank tier in there.