Dan Szymborski

For those new to BlueSky and interested in FanGraphs writers -- or those who aren't, making this an odd choice -- I put together a FanGraphs starter pack of writers/editors who currently are staffers or contributors to the site. go.bsky.app/Q1Dm1ED

FanGraphs mailbags are educational for me too. I discovered recently from a commenter that I've used the word "oubliette" *seven* times on FanGraphs.

Dang, even the weather knows this offseason is going to suck

"Danny, can I come borrow your chef's knife? I have this big butternut squash to cut through." "Sure. Be careful, mom, it's extremely sharp." (Hones it in her view right before giving it to her) Text message received three days later:

“Second, unlike a [ChatGPT], ZiPS doesn't have an inherent incentive to please its creator.” That’s quite a confession

I recently recorded some video for a documentary and I said at one point "The best pitcher who ever lived may have been from, say, Egypt in 1100, but never knew that baseball would ever exist," and I fear I may be setting myself to be the "Aliens guy" of this doc. My hair is terrible too.

what if the anthem singer had to throw pitches while singing? we're talking full wind-up on the mound. it's a long song.

I ask ChatGPT for a simple bit of advice, and now I suspect it is in league with ZiPS.

I'd kinda like to see a team line up all 81 first pitch throwers and national anthem singers at the start of a season and at the last minute, flip all their roles, so I can watch the chaos that ensues.

I propose the Turang test, where we test whether an autonomous robot can exhibit Brice Turang-like baseball ability.

I’ve spent the last several weeks interviewing amazing candidates for this role and my insights on the landscape of sports psych / baseball mental performance are definitely different since the start Here’s some of my observations and thoughts about the state of psychology and cognition in sports

A Pat Murphy bed saves space, but you get one goddamn pillow and you like it.

Now, it's far better to actually win the game of course, but ZiPS actually has this loss as the least damaging in that the Rays had the worst probability in this game than any of the current foreseen matchups.

What I find funny is how poorly Mr. Show's McHutchence vs. Greeley bit has aged. Not because it was poorly written, but because these political commercials designed to be pointless and obnoxious are nowhere near the crap that we get 30 years later. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptEr...

Also, I think ZiPS has developed a cybersexual crush on Lazaro Montes

Looking over the very prelim 2027 ZiPS projections (there's still a lot more stuff to be done before launch) and I think Eli Willits might have broken it and I have to start the whole thing over again

Or he wants to be Paul Lynde.

Justinian plays more golf than a politician.

In the last couple of hours, my cat Justinian has brought me a cat toy shaped like a flamingo, a cat toy shaped like a large soda, and a cat toy shaped like golf clubs, so I think he wants to go to Florida

Wisconsin is one of two states I've lived in whose insularity leads to the kind of evolutionary cultural craziness you find in animals in the Galapagos or language in isolated settlements. This is what hath been wrought in the name of sausage

The problem with naming your business Crumbl is that when you have bad financial news, all the headlines basically write themselves.

Oops!

For our seasons of postseason managerial report cards at @fangraphs.com, this year I wrote about Dave Roberts. blogs.fangraphs.com/postseason-m...

You start as a UGA star and have to play Grand Theft Auto to make it to the draft.

classes: player, coach, front office, fan, media side quest ideas: pressurize game balls, keep jerry jones alive, help a player mask a drug test, show someone the money expansions: Grow Your Own Manning, NFL Oceania, Move a Franchise

After completing the infiltrate substation stealth quest, you can turn the dial up or down to manipulate the outcome of the season.

Gonna do nothing but side quests. "Your team is playing in the Super Bowl next week!" Yeah, I'm not going to go get ready for that, gonna go and do the Lost Playsheet fetch quest and go craft a bunch of hoodies in different colors with the team logo on them.

"ADVENTURER! Bill Belichick has listed all his players as Questionable on the injury report. I need you to fight each one so you can identify which ones are truly injured!"

You have to convince local politicians to divert taxes for schools, roads, and the fire department to instead finance your new stadium.

Man, in five minutes I went from wondering WTF an open-world football game was to wanting World of Warcraft, but Madden.

There’s a little yellow circle in front of Dan Marino and if you get too close to it you automatically start the quest where you steal Jerry Rice’s Super Bowl XIX ring.

I'm guessing that this open-world EA football game is a bit different than what me and the LLM are thinking about.

It’s probably where every snap is a separate microtransaction

when you change teams via trade or free agency, you have to actually drive yourself to the new team a la desert bus. once you're there though, it unlocks a fast travel point.

Instead of driving towards the opposing goal line you can ally with the other team against the fans

OK...what is an open-world football game? Does Pat Mahomes have to do some sidequests before the game? Is there a minigame where you have to get Sauce Gardner's sauce company off the ground? Is there a branching storyline for Brock Bowers romance options? I'm confused but slightly intrigued.

Do Grape Job stickers still smell like grape or did they discover in 1995 that it causes nasopharyngeal cancer or something?

When I first got cats: <crash sound> OH crap, something happened, I better go check it out! Now: <crash sound> Smoke detectors aren't going off so everything's fine enough

As a longtime owner of a menagerie of cats, I've accepted for a long time that something chaotic is always happening upstairs, there's nothing I can do about it, so I'm just going to enjoy my bowl of cereal and my nonparametric model.

I'm kinda digging that the Grand Theft Auto VI release is right at the start of what's going to be a phenomenally boring part of MLB's offseason.

This trilogy is all over the place

If Wedgewood were a social experiment and not a scam (it's a scam), then after being "caught" they would be discussing at length how they did it with every media outlet, show documentation of how they planned it out and everything. Instead, crickets and blocks.

Annoying that I had to drag out the old AIO to get my secondary PC back online, but at least it works now and you can get 360 AIOs for only $50 now.

True story, I once left a modifier in place and a computer spent an entire day projection A.J. Achter 1800 times.

It already exists

That the owner has to wear publicly at all home games.

MLB should take a page from fantasy leagues and design a "punishment" uniform for each last place team to have to wear as their primary uniform in the following year.

Oops, that feeling when you accidentally remote connect into the computer you're working on.