Month: March 2025

Happy Opening Day

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Happy Opening Day of the 2025 Major League Baseball season. As we begin the six month slog that is baseball’s regular season, I will remind everyone of the cardinal rule of baseball- the law of averages will always win. Bad teams will win games, bad players will have good moments, and good teams will have losing streaks, but in the end the deepest and best rosters will survive the season. We tend to try and not freak out about one NFL game going badly, well that equals approximately 9.53 MLB games. So at least wait 19 games in until you freak out.

My Phillies won 95 games and the NL East last year, but losing to the god damned Mets in the playoffs and watching the Dodgers (who we went 6-1 against) win the World Series made last year one of the most agitating seasons ever. There seems to be two schools of thought on the team. One is that they’re a year older, haven’t won yet, and are in the hardest division in baseball, so they should step back. The other is that they have the best rotation in baseball, have seen their win total go up in each of the last six full seasons, and have the most post-season wins in the league the last three years, so they should finally get lucky. It remains to be seen if they can stop chasing pitches out of the strike zone, but they still should be among the elites in a National League that is better than the American League. For my money, the NL East will be the most fun to watch division in the league, with three elite teams, a young and talented fourth place team, and Miami to go visit if you want to see your team win some games and lay on a beach.

A lot of national writers seem to want to pick Atlanta to win the NL East, mostly because at some point soon they will add Ronald Acuna and Spencer Strider back to the roster healthy, and with all due respect to Juan Soto, no team in the division will add that kind of talent this year. That’s assuming both come back at consistent 100% form, which eventually they will, but shouldn’t be assumed immediately. This team did lose a consistent high end starter though in Max Fried. The Braves feel like a playoff lock to me, even so.

The Mets are hard to read. By keeping Pete Alonso after signing Soto, this is a really scary lineup. Francisco Lindor was MVP level last season and they have some young talent ready to help this group. Can they pitch though? They already have some injuries, and this is a rotation that lacks a high end #1 (I’d hear an argument on a healthy Senga, but the Mets aren’t exactly raising expectations on him). What they lack in ace material, the Mets do make up for with starting depth. I don’t like writing this, but I do think they will hang in there enough to win a lot of games.

The shame for these three teams is that there’s really only four playoff spots available to them, so the room for error is minimal (you can’t win the other two divisions, so only 4 of 6 spots are possible). As I look around the rest of the NL, I see six other teams with some degree of a chance. Out west the Dodgers are a lock, Arizona and San Diego are very good, and San Francisco is worth watching. In the central, the Brewers and Cubs are the only two teams with the depth and talent to win. So by my math, nine teams will battle for six spots.

Over in the AL, it’s a bit of a mess. The Yankees pitching is kind of a mess, the Astros no longer terrify everyone, Cleveland tends to be good every other year, Baltimore seems to have stepped back, Kansas City and Detroit are hard to project, Texas looks good, Boston is back, Seattle feels unpredictable, nobody knows if Minnesota can recover from last year’s collapse, and everyone but me seems to be hating on Toronto (with good reason). That really only leaves four bad teams, some being historically bad. There’s no obvious runaway favorite though.

So, with all of that said, here’s some regular season predictions:

  • AL East- This feels to me like there’s no right answer. I like Boston to edge out the Yankees, mostly because I like their health and pitching better, right now. If the Yankees health improves, a month ago I thought they’d run away with it. This really should be Baltimore’s time, but they will need to pick up a pitcher to have a shot. I still like Toronto’s roster, but the uncertainty around their future seems to be a distraction. Tampa plays in minor league park, and maybe that’s an omen for the season.
  • AL Central- Other than the White Sox finishing last, anything could happen here. On paper, Cleveland could be better than last year, with Bieber and Means getting healthy and joining an already good rotation. I feel safer that Kansas City will repeat last year than Detroit, but both have a lot of talent. Unfortunately I don’t see the Twins pulling it together, though I guess the talent is there. I’ll take Cleveland here, because I don’t think last year was a fluke.
  • AL West- I feel pretty strongly that the Rangers bounce back this year. I see the Astros stepping back to at least second, if not third. The Angels are literally hoping Trout is healthy enough to trade, so figure they get last. The A’s play in a minor league park, which is again, an omen. Seattle is the team I can’t figure out. I’ll put them in second for now.
  • AL Playoff Prediction- Cleveland (AL Central), Texas (AL West), Boston (AL East), New York (Wild Card 1), Kansas City (Wild Card 2), and Baltimore (Wild Card 3).
  • NL West- There’s just too much talent and depth in Los Angeles for the Dodgers to not win. I like Arizona’s off-season more than San Diego’s, so put them in that order. I liked San Francisco’s off-season, but they’re not there yet. It will be fun to see how many games behind Colorado ends up.
  • NL Central- Pittsburgh and Cincinnati often behave like poverty franchises, but it’s impressive to watch St. Louis try to pull it off. I’m going Cincinnati three, Pittsburgh four, and St. Louis five. That leaves two teams to fight for the division. Chicago is here based solely on being the only real big market. Milwaukee has actually run their team pretty well. Seriously, Chicago traded for one year of Kyle Tucker, then traded Cody Bellinger in a salary dump, then DFA’ed the guy they got for him today. Wtf? They have talent, but seemingly no idea how to use it. Milwaukee may have taken a step back, but they still seem to be the smart ones here. Eventually someone else has to win though, right? Ok, I’ll take Chicago.
  • NL East- Ok, the easy parts first here- Washington fourth, Miami dead last. Then it gets fun. My concern with the Mets is pitching. I worry about the Phillies line-up after Harper and Schwarber. Atlanta has to stay healthy and maintain last year’s pitching, which feels unlikely. I’ll take my Phillies, because I expect big years from Harper and Turner, to go along with great pitching. I think the Mets out slug the Braves for second, mostly because I think Acuna will need to get his feet under him for a while after his latest ACL injury.
  • NL Playoff Prediction- Los Angeles (NL West), Philadelphia (NL East), Chicago (NL Central), New York (Wild Card 1), Arizona (Wild Card 2), and Atlanta (Wild Card 3).

We’ll come back to who wins in October in a moment. Shohei Ohtani will win the NL MVP, because it’s preordained, but he won’t be the best offensive player or pitcher. I expect Juan Soto, Bryce Harper, Kyle Tucker, Francisco Lindor, and Freddie Freeman to all have MVP level seasons. I’m taking Trea Turner to win the batting title and Pete Alonso to win the RBI title. Ohtani will win the homer title and win the award. Corey Seager will edge out Jose Ramirez on the AL side. Aaron Judge will be good, but I’m guessing he misses some time. I still think Judge edges out Vlad Jr. for the home run title, Jose Ramirez edges out Vlad in RBI’s, and Bobby Witt Jr. edges him out in batting again.

Paul Skenes seems to be everyone’s Cy Young pick, and he’s nasty, but the field will be stiff. Corbin Burnes, Zack Wheeler, and Spencer Strider will be in the mix. Never pick the favorite, so I’m taking my guy, Wheeler. As an aside, I’m predicting Ohtani throws about 100 innings. In the AL, it’s hard to argue with Tarik Skubal. Garrett Crochet and Jacob de Grom will make a fight of it. I’m going to get risky and pick Jacob de Grom.

I’ll take Cam Smith to win AL Rookie of the Year and Bruce Bochy to be AL Manager of the Year. Roki Sasaki will win the NL Rookie of the Year award, while Rob Thomson will win the NL Manager of the Year award.

Ok, so now the playoffs. I’m taking Boston over Baltimore and New York over Kansas City in the AL Wild Card round. I’ll take Texas over Boston in the AL divisional round, while Cleveland beats New York. I have Cleveland edging Texas for the AL Pennant.

In the NL, I’m taking Atlanta over Chicago in the NL Wild Card round, while the Diamondbacks beat the Mets. I’m taking Arizona to again beat the Dodgers, and the Phillies to beat the Braves in the NL divisional round. I have the Phillies winning the NL Pennant over Arizona.

So a Philadelphia-Cleveland World Series… of course I’ve got my guys. Play ball.

The System the Democrats Insist on Saving Isn’t Worth the Saving

/ Rich Wilkins / 3 Comments

A week ago today, Congressional Democrats sure had some real leverage. The Republican Party controlled the White House, both houses of Congress, every agency in the government, and the courts, but needed Democratic votes in the Senate to pass a funding bill to keep the government open. Senate Democrats half the ability to kill the completely partisan House spending plan and force a bipartisan plan that rolled back much of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts. If Republicans refused to make an agreement, Democrats could have walked away and left them holding the bag. After all, the offer on the table was absolutely nothing at all. Trump told them to pound sand.

By now you know what happened. Chuck Schumer’s Senate Democrats, fearing that Trump’s White House would destroy the government if they let it shut down, sent 20% of their caucus over to bend the knee. They took the offer of nothing and gave the Republicans a hand. In the week since, the Trump Administration has still managed to burn down the government. He signed an executive order to basically close the Department of Education. He held an infomercial for Tesla at the White House. They ignored a court order to halt deportations without having hearings to determine if the people being deported were even immigrants or not. They even took down Jackie Robinson’s biography page at the Department of Defense, saying the Hall-of-Famer and veteran of war fell under their anti-DEI policy. It turns out that regardless of whether the Democrats voted to fund the government or not, Trump was going to Trump.

We just had a four year Presidency where the underlying theme was restoring normalcy. It turns out the public was completely not interested. This shouldn’t be that shocking. Basically since 9/11, public polling has said the American public almost constantly feels our country has been on the wrong track. It turns out that terror attacks, Enron, Iraq, priests molesting kids, a bank crash, Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme, school shootings, the Patriot Act, Afghanistan, the bank bailouts, COVID, Me Too, Epstein, celebrities stealing PPP loans, opioids, inflation, a broken immigration system, wars in the Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza, and probably lots of bad shit I’m forgetting, has left people feeling as though the world is in decay. It turns out that giving us some unchecked social media, cryptocurrencies, and trash reality TV isn’t making us feel better. Returning to normal doesn’t sound that appealing. Being the party that insists we’ll make it normal again doesn’t help much. Maybe, just maybe, burning it down in the name of a fight over something, like maybe Social Security and Medicaid, would be pretty appealing.

Democrats need to lay out some sort of new vision. Many people who were loyal Obama voters 15 years ago have given up on the product being offered. Responding to banks melting down our economy with a bailout and not jail sentences in the name of a better regulatory system for the economy we have wasn’t it. Responding to people without health care with a better system to buy health care doesn’t excite people. Responding to a crooked student loan system by giving people some forgiveness while leaving the system in tact, only to predictably have it struck down in court, wasn’t popular. Responding to a broken and unfair immigration system with some executive orders and hoping it went away, well you get the point. Continuing to put up some smart, corporate, highly educated Congressional candidates who promise to “run the system better” and maybe throw around some buzz words like “empathy,” is about as appealing as Taco Bell leftovers in your fridge from two weeks ago. The status quo blows, and everyone knows it. Not one fucking halfway normal human being wants to “bend the cost curve” on health care, they want greater coverage for less money out of their pockets.

The Democrats had a chance to demand some good things a week ago, and they passed on it. They passed on it because they were afraid that if they shut down the status quo they’ve spent a generation defending, we would be worse off. Most of the public thinks we’ve been worse off for many years. All the shock to the system they were afraid of, we’re getting anyway. Say whatever you want about Trump, at least he can tell which way the wind is blowing.

What if Biden Hadn’t Run?

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

One of the most debated questions of 1960’s politics is still a subject of great debate: what would have happened if LBJ hadn’t dropped out in 1968? If you want to get older political hacks into a debate, just ask them this. Some of them literally end up debating themselves.

The new emerging “group think” inside the Beltway and the political press is that if Joe Biden had never run in 2024, or dropped out earlier, Kamala Harris or some other “stronger” Democrat would have been better off. The number of “if/then” off ramps in the theory alone probably should disqualify it. The popular theory now though is that the problems in 2024 were somehow “local” to Biden and his team, and the party would have been better with some other mythical candidate that could separate from his record. I’m making the assumption that they think some other candidate could have taken some demonstrably different position that would have drawn out more Democrats or converted some third party or Republican voters. I’m very skeptical. Joe Biden had political weaknesses. There’s no one else who would seem likely to navigate those rough waters easier in the party and environment that existed in 2024.

Presidential elections are not a job interview. Resume comparisons don’t win or lose them. They are not battles to show who has superior white paper positions on specific policy issues. They are largely contests to articulate a broad cultural vision for the country that appeals to more people. The Democratic Party being mostly a coalition of interest groups puts them at a disadvantage against a party that is mostly a cultural and ideological unified front. Democratic candidates have to do outreach that is interest group specific, and sometimes puts groups at odds with each other. It’s very hard to do that and also present that as a strong, unifying cultural vision of what kind of country you’re building. Biden, for his faults, had a fairly sturdy brand. Anyone running in his place in 2024 would have had to build that. Yes, more time would have been nice. Given that they would not have been President at the outset, I’m not sure how anyone believes they wouldn’t have been forced into some fairly uncomfortable political compromises. This was an issue for Kamala Harris, but it would have been even worse for someone attempting to beat her for the nomination.

The truth is that the Democratic brand is further from the average voter right now than the Republican brand. Given how ideological wealthy, big Democratic donors and small dollar online Democratic voters are right now, no one was going to enter and move the Democratic Party fundamentally in its image, unless they were personally a billionaire that could somehow evade those donors demands. Virtually no Governor or Senator currently alive could have entered the race and evaded Republican attack ads on inflation and being for “they/them,” or not backing police. Maybe a major celebrity with a brand could have outrun those labels. Democrats have been resistant to nominating those kinds of candidates.

Biden and his inner circle, after a deceptively good midterm election, decided to run him for re-election because they thought he had the best chance of winning. My estimation is that they were likely right, and certainly no definitive evidence exists that says they’re wrong. Had Biden not been the nominee in 2020, Democrats probably would have lost. There’s sufficient evidence to say they’re wrong were likely to lose either way in 2024. Biden started from a better position than anyone else though, and remains the only person to have beaten Trump. Most of this narrative that Democrats probably would have been better if Biden was out of the way earlier is just spit balling by interest group and media leaders that didn’t get why Biden won the first time. This is why I have genuine worries about the future of the Democratic Party.

America Surrenders the Cold War

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment
From the internet, but too good to not use.

I realize we’re here because the Democratic Party decided to surrender all of it’s credibility in recent times trying to be a pluralistic political party in a time of simplistic, contrarian thought, but hear me out- we actually owed a better fate to Ukrainians. We owed them better morally. We owed them better as a matter of policy. We owed them better based on promises and obligations. Late last week our resident edge lord Vice-President made sure to make clear, right next to his boss, that we withdrew from all of that. I’m sure the corks popped in the Kremlin.

First, a bit about the country they are abandoning. The Ukraine as a country and culture is one of the oldest, pre-dating Russia even by about 400 years. It is the second largest nation by land in Europe, and has it’s own language. There’s exactly no reason to think they should actually be a part of Russia. They were absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1919. In 1941 they were overrun by the Nazis. Over 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered. Over 2 million Ukrainians were enslaved in Germany. The Nazis withheld food from the country. Some Ukrainians cooperated with the Nazis, mostly in exchange for food, so after the Soviets regained control, they punished Ukrainians. After losing 5 million in the war, and having 10 million left homeless, Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of “disloyal” Ukrainians to Siberia and other work camps. Much like Putin today, Stalin accused Ukrainians of generally being Nazis. He closed down the Greek Catholic Church. His policy of Russification moved Russians in to replace Ukrainians and pushed people to speak Russian. Greek Catholics were “reunified” with the Russian Orthodox Church. Ukrainians artists and writers were persecuted. While things got somewhat better under Khrushchev, his decision to give Crimea to the Ukraine was a big part of why today’s war is happening. In 1959 he forced schools to start teaching in Russian, as he began his own Russification efforts. Following Khrushchev’s removal, Brezhnev cracked down even further on Ukrainians, installing his protege Shcherbytsky, who lead the Ukrainian Soviet until 1989. It was a period of economic deterioration, nuclear crisis (Chernobyl), a crack down on human rights activists, and Russification. The horrors of the Soviet period badly damaged Ukrainian political and cultural life.

Now that the history lesson is mostly over, here’s the important part. In 1994 the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom signed the Budapest memorandum with Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. The Ukraine agreed to surrender their vast nuclear weapons cache from the Soviet Union, in exchange for the nuclear powers protecting and respecting their sovereignty. It was supposed to mark a clear end of Cold War era hostilities. In 2014, Russia broke the agreement in Crimea. Last week, we all but gave them the green light. Using excuses like Zelensky didn’t wear a suit and didn’t thank us profusely enough, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance verbally assaulted Zelensky and notified Moscow that we will not honor our agreements to our allies anymore. To be fair, I don’t think we should give Barack Obama a pass here- he chose to not engage Russia in any significantly agressive way after they invaded Crimea in 2014, which also violated the Budapest memorandum. To be clear, if Ukraine had said no and kept their nuclear weapons, no one would be invading them today. They did so under an agreement with us. We’re going to break that agreement now. One could argue we already have.

I doubt Ukraine surrendering some land to Putin’s Russia means the United States is in physical danger. At least not right now. The signal is out though to other American allies in the region- they can’t depend on us. If Putin comes for them, they’re on their own. Putin, who was stationed in Europe when the Berlin Wall fell, probably will. He doesn’t believe Slavic nations in Eastern Europe should be independent. Obviously those nations don’t agree. So now the threat of him creating some neo-Soviet version of the Russian Empire is real. In Berlin, Warsaw, and capitols all over the Eastern Bloc, the alarms are going off. They’ll start ramping up for potential war, and a few of them will even try to build nuclear bombs. This hellish reality will roll back nearly 30 years of peace in Europe.

It’s almost like everything America won with the end of the Cold War will be rolled back at once. But without the word “almost.”