Patrick Dubuque

@euqubud.baseballprospectus.com

7105 Followers 573 Following

bbwaa // writer with a thrift store degree // managing editor @ baseball prospectus

Blackburn! On Sports!
And it’s this, more than the budget constraints, more than the market, more than the injuries, that has done the Reds in, and will continue to do them in until something changes. Cincinnati, as a baseball franchise, doesn’t do anything better than anyone. They haven’t directed their energies into any aspect of development, or roster construction, or even marketing to overcome their disadvantages. They don’t file off the edges of every coin the way the Rays do. They don’t hunt for some invisible advantage through technology, some high-up, unpicked fruit. Even beyond the results, the Reds have never really evoked a compelling reason for caring about the Reds, beyond “we’re here and so are you.” Even that, as the years stretch on, takes on the tone of a threat. Boys in grade school are told to grow up watching Ke’Bryan Hayes, and wonder if they’ll actually have to.
Look at this 1985 Fleer Eric Davis rookie card. It's gorgeous
A still from S3E23 of the Simpsons starring Omar Vizquel
An email from Fandango with the subject of "An Exciting Change is Coming" with a text of "Nothing about your account is changing"
Eight different pickleball movies released since 2023
"this has been talked about extensively you're just 21"
But there’s a bigger and more boring problem, as well. Salary caps are popular because to a fan, they represent an end state. If the money is split evenly, that’s the final midpoint; how could both sides continue to argue? We’d be free of the existential threats leveled twice a decade at the sport and the industry around it. Except that this, too, is a fairy tale. Instead of arguing over the shape of the pie, the owners and players would be free to argue over what the pie actually is, and it’s an argument that’s even more fruitless than the technicalities of the current CBA. What, precisely, qualifies as baseball revenue? Would it have included the sale of MLB.tv, or BAMTech? What about the team shops outside the stadium? Or the restaurants next to the team shops that fans visit when they come to take in a game? The gambling partnerships? Without opening the books—MLB will not open its books—players are resting their welfare in the hands of creative accountancy. We saw this happen in 2007 with the Writers Guild of America strike, when a new revenue stream (DVD sales, 20 years is a long time) opened up that fell outside existing lines of negotiation. These revenues could have been distributed fairly through the spirit of the agreement, but they didn’t have to be, and weren’t. The salary cap doesn’t make these problems go away; it just moves the battlefield to a new location. There will always be one.
The common mistake people commit lies in thinking of the Los Angeles Angels as a baseball team. This is understandable, because it is what the Angels pretend to be. They put on baseball clothes and play in a real baseball stadium with fish tacos and helmet nachos and everything. The PA announcer tells everyone to clap their hands. They even draft players out of the same talent pool. What the Angels are, instead, is a corporation that sells Baseball Product, the way that “orange drink” contained a lot of orange, but not the fruit. And when you think of them that way, it’s hard to consider them anything but a success.
google doc draft title
Adventures in Math (1983), published by IBM
AAA Septic, which is I’m sure a fine septic company
Patti LaBelle once spilled water on a baby, according to her wikipedia page, and settled out of court for $100,000
Do I like basketball? Yeah, I guess, kinda. But not too much
What have you got to lose, John Smiley
Juan Guzman, perhaps suffering from proximity bias
What the hell is going on
Baseball's biggest Steinbeck fan checking in
This is a man who clearly practiced being rich in his head
Bill Swift thinks One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would have been better if Clint Eastwood was in it
1992 Studio Mickey Morandini
1992 Studio Ron Gant card back
The last piece I published
James Jones
A signed ball that has seen better days, much like its signors
The back of a Mark Guthrie collegiate baseball card
A passage from Sweet Thursday
Poor Mike Greenwell, about to be eaten by a wall
someone somewhere was awakened by this. terrifying
Bobby Bonilla with a... cyclone for a hand? Does the ball get sucked into the cyclone or get thrown forcefully away from it? I know where I'd put my money
Robert Sean Leonard would never smirk like this. He’s too pure
Dizzy Licks
The Creator from Final Fantasy Legend 1. Three people will get this reference, and two will hate it
Film Flubs by Bill Givens
Skwinkles. Taste the hatred
An mp3 collection, properly labeled
MATTEL SUPER GLOVEBALL
Notgraphs: In my blog I invented a team of 25 Adam Dunns as a cautionary tale. Fangraphs: At long last, we have created a team of 25 Adam Dunns from the classic blog Dangerous Experiment: A Roster of 25 Adam Dunns.
say the line, bart
the only pen you need, unless you think you're too good for it
Joe Wilkinson, aghast after opening up a B-Ref page
Hi-Q solitaire game from the 80s
But what really concerned me was that I was missing everything. You expect a certain loss of fidelity when you listen to baseball on the radio, which is often fine; it allows you to fill the space with your own thoughts, and feelings. But while MLB’s lone Opening Night contest was turning into a non-contest, I could tell that everyone else was watching a completely different game, or rather, the same game wound with so much packaging as to be unrecognizable. This game was doomed to be the First Netflix Broadcast, and as it snoozed its way through the middle innings, very little else. Much like I could only guess at the rustiness of Webb’s pitches, or the throws on defense, I could only imagine the horrors my friends were encountering on national television: all of ESPN’s tricks, the live interviews and talking heads and stunts and promotions, done on a level of clumsiness unimaginable. The whole thing felt like witnessing a murder through a peephole.
There’s something about Opening Day that makes people want to write about Opening Day. We can’t help ourselves. James Michener once advised prospective novelists, “Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you,” and yet there are more novels than ever, hundreds of thousands, because as much as novelists will protest that the craft is torture, a thankless and endless grind, it’s also a millstone they keep pressing themselves against. And that’s because as awful as it feels in the thick of the sentences, it also creates a shapeless, subtle high. It’s the feeling of creating something unique, something beautiful, a heaven of one’s own.
tony soprano in his pool, with a boat full of lobster poutine sailing by
In early June, with no warning or context, the league’s PR department issues a press release naming Smith and Wesson the “Official Gun of Major League Baseball.” No one is particularly sure why baseball needs to have an official gun, or what Smith and Wesson get out of associating their brand with the national pastime, but within days MLB.com is talking about which outfielders have cannons for arms and how many bullets are left in the arms of contending pitching staffs. By the All-Star Break every team has replaced the ceremonial first pitch with a man solemnly marching out to the mound, pointing upwards, and firing a pistol into the air during the high note in the Star-Spangled Banner. Soon Polymarket is speculating on who will be the first player injured in a ceremonial gun-related mishap. —Patrick Dubuque
Mario is sad
A Nintendo Wii left out on the street, along with four games, including Steven Spielberg’s BoomBlox
1999 Topps
1998 Topps
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1996 Topps
1994 Topps
1993 Topps
1992 Topps
1991 Topps
1990 Topps
To accuse anyone of sticking to sports, of eschewing politics, when it comes to the WBC would be madness even if it weren’t a team representing a country that launched airstrikes on the other country less than three months ago. Nations are inherently political constructs, people literally separated by invisible borders that everyone agrees on, or agrees to agree on or else get shot. The difference is that when my local baseball team fails to represent me, it’s because they’ve refused to reinvest their postseason earnings into next year’s payroll, whereas with my country, it’s more of a Henry David Thoreau situation. With teams, you get to choose who you want to be a part of. With countries, especially one particular country at the moment, a key part of their identity is about not letting people join in.