The Buscher

Uhh...the Bills just signed Gable Steveson.

The first NFL Sunday of the year is 100 days away.

The deep dive looks awesome. My body is ready. I might seriously take a day or two off of work just to have uninterrupted time to play this.

Building UConn to a top tier program is gonna be such a wonderfully frustrating experience. I can’t wait for this game.

Yeah the news is overwhelmingly positive. I can't wait to sink my teeth into Dynasty. Sounds like it's pretty much spot on. Love what I saw that rather than cut players it's replaced with "encourage them to transfer". Aka you effectively cut them but they'll end up on another roster instead of a decent player just dropping out of the game entirely. Road to Glory starting you on a college team makes me a little sad as playing in high school and getting recruited was part of the appeal but not a big deal. Dynasty is the bread and butter mode and it sounds like they really went to great lengths to make the experience as authentic as they could.

Jorge Lopez got ejected from a blowout game today. Tossed his glove into the stands. When asked after this game if he regretted his actions he said no, and that he felt the Mets were “the worst fucking team in MLB” and whatever happens happens. Given a chance to clarify if he really meant that, he doubled down and acknowledged he didn’t know if he’d be on the team tomorrow. He was promptly DFA’ed. Honestly, good for him. He told it like it is and if you cared about winning you should do what you have to get off this sinking ship. This team is filled with complacent losers. The culture around this team is completely fucked and all the more reason to blow it up entirely.

Well turns out that's a non-issue. Exporting draft classes is not in the game. Reason likely being that the game includes real players and, therefore, EA can't have any official mechanism to have them added to Madden since they're not in the union. It's possible someone will eventually find a way to pull a database of your own "draft class" and convert it into a Madden file to import it yourself but there'd have to be a lot of manual work involved. Oh well. Dynasty mode is 30 years in length, the transfer portal is in as is the ability to hire and fire offensive and defensive coordinators.

And with a double header sweep (including blowing a lead in the 9th for the 5th time in the last 8 games) the Mets are 10 under .500. After the deflating loss in the first game they basically no-showed the second game. I've brought this up before but when Tommy Pham got traded last summer he went on record that the Mets were the least hard-working group of position players he's ever been around. As time goes on he looks more and more correct. The guys actively don't look like they want to be there. Jeff McNeil, on a fat contract hitting all of .230 with no power this year, reportedly played a round of golf this morning BEFORE A DOUBLE HEADER!!! He's played golf on game days a lot this year and, somehow, the team hasn't told him to cut that shit out. Seems he'd rather do that than play baseball. So sick of these guys.

Negro League statistics will be officially merged into the MLB database tomorrow. Josh Gibson will become the new all-time leader in career batting average, slugging, and OPS along with single season slugging and OPS.

I think it's proving more disastrous than expected that the Mets didn't fill their POBO job immediately. Cohen opted to bring Sandy Alderson back as the unofficial POBO, probably to try to help push his ownership approval across since Sandy was respected/an advocate for small payroll and he did the typical Sandy thing of "why sign JT Realmuto when you can sign James McCann" trying to prove he's the smartest guy in the room. And then they ended up with a parade of GMs underneath him - one who had to be fired immediately after being outed as a creep, one who got fired before the end of the year for DUI, and then you had Billy Eppler who failed to put a winning team behind Trout and Ohtani and by the time he was hired he was like their 12th choice GM. He didn't really do anything except spend Cohen's money and, unfortunately, Cohen himself bought into the idea that he could spend big for a couple years while waiting on the farm reinforcements came. Contracts like Scherzer and Verlander aren't/weren't bad since they were always short-term commitments, but the Lindor, Nimmo, and Diaz contracts all look horrendous now and they're here for a long time. Plus they have to pay a washed McNeil for 2.5 more years, the broken husk of Marte for 1.5 more etc. And not only has the team not won, the reinforcements never came either. And even with all of these bad deals Eppler half-assed the 2022 deadline when they had the best record they'd had in a decade and blew their shot to actually try to win it all. So Stearns has a bunch of bad contracts to navigate before he even tries to put something together. If he doesn't live up to his rep as a scouting and development whiz they're cooked.

The Mets got to Memorial Day 8 games under .500. I didn't exactly have high hopes for this season as they were thinly veiled punting the year and signing one-year stopgaps they could trade if/when they fell out of it but I didn't expect them to be this bad this early. Last week was an absolute disaster blowing leads in like 6 games in a row, glad I was away and didn't see any of it. The funny thing about it is the stopgaps Stearns has signed have mostly been good. JDM, Severino, Manaea, Bader, hell even Jorge Lopez have done good things - unless the team wakes up in June most of these guys will likely be gone by August. But the fact they've been good really highlights that the team's main failing is the underperformance of the core players who have been here the whole time, further illustrating they need to strip the team down for a full-on rebuild as soon as possible. Their top two prospects Jett Williams and Drew Gilbert have been hurt all year and probably aren't getting to the big leagues yet either, so even in a blow up situation there's really not going to be much reason to watch this team play out the string either. It's one of those things where I support the rebuild as the right thing to do, but at the same time I don't particularly want to spend my time watching it either. It's probably a guaranteed 3-5 years more of sucking when the team has sucked most of my life, like 1 or 2 good seasons per decade. The last time they had a prolonged window of contention was 2 months before I was born. Even if I support the decision to rebuild I've no reason at all to assume it'll finally work. So yeah, if they get good again I'll watch them and if that makes me a frontrunner I don't really care, I've put enough hours into this team. I'll bandwagon a more competent organization in the interim.

Speaking of umpiring, on this day 8 years ago (!) Terry Collins went on his epic tirade that got picked up by the hot mics. The Mets were facing Chase Utley in Citi Field for the first time since he broke Ruben Tejada's leg with a dirty slide in the 2015 playoffs. Noah Syndergaard threw a ball 25 miles behind Utley's back, clearly no intention on hitting him but obviously sending a message. An understood baseball move and probably 99 times out of 100 that would've been the end of it. But unfortunately it was a call-up ump from Triple A making his debut behind the plate and he then promptly tossed Syndergaard out despite zero pre-game warnings being issued. Hence, Collins went on a rant as crew chief Tom Hallion intercepted him. Terry was really just yelling what every Mets fan was saying. "WHY DON'T WE GET A SHOT TOMMY? MLB DID NOTHING TO THAT GUY! NOTHING! IT'S BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!" and Hallion seemingly agreeing with him but saying the ejection had to be made because "our asses are in the jackpot".

You know you’re bad when you retire in-season despite working for possibly the strongest union in sports. Umps are normally pretty iron clad. Supposedly an enhanced severance package settlement was negotiated with the league, so the league clearly wanted him gone. Would be hilarious if he was intentionally flubbing calls that were bad even for him because he was trying to get a bigger payday.

Being able to import draft classes from NCAA to Madden was always a cool feature in theory but in practice it never actually worked. Just about every player in every outgoing class was a 95+ OVR in NCAA which makes sense considering almost every NFL player was one of the best players on their college team, but when these classes get moved to Madden the rookies were either super overpowered or they just nerfed everyone so there was no variation. Projected 1st rounders were an 80 OVR, projected 2nd rounders were a 75 OVR etc and nobody actually played like their real life counterparts. Plus they only imported a small number of players relative to the class size so you’d see big names get dropped out. Modern Madden draft classes are like 400-450 players so in theory if they bring back class importing every big name should be there but it remains to be seen if stats will be “randomized” like an in-game draft class or if it’ll be half-assed. It would be game breaking if every rookie QB came into the league amazing, etc. The good news is you can edit draft classes on your own but if that means you have to set your own superstar/surprise late round breakouts, set up who the busts are etc and if you know all of this it takes the fun out of the scouting.

The Show's progression/regression has always been pretty unfair for older players. I understand players naturally regress as they age but the system seems to do it automatically regardless of how you are at playing as them. Feel like if the game can sense you're doing well with a player they should progress or at the very least stay where they are. It's not unusual for people who like to have "realism" across their game look around the league at the older players and bump the guys who should still, in theory, be good. Like I know Verlander is 41 but there's no need for him to arbitrarily lose 5 points off his rating every month if he's still pitching to a 2 ERA. Left untouched players over 30 become pretty useless in the game as far as CPU sims go.