The Buscher

This will probably come back to bite me but I really am not concerned about it. Neither Plawecki nor d'Arnaud were hitting a lick. Tomas Nido's bat may not be ready but he's a well-regarded defensive prospect who was rated one of the top pitch framers in the minor leagues. And Jose Lobaton's always been known as a no-hit, solid glove catcher that many teams have as their backup anyway. Nido and Lobaton are both better defensively than Plawecki and d'Arnaud. So it may be a lateral or slight downgrade offensively but notable upgrade defensively, which will make the pitching staff better. I can live with that.

I'm laughing/crying imagining a scenario where the Giants have an offensive attack that includes OBJ, Dez, Sterling Shepard, Evan Engram, and Saquon Barkley yet they still can't do anything because Eli and the O-line are still bad.

Dez to the Giants for league minimum!!!

When I heard the Yanks and Sox had a brawl I was hoping that it'd have been initiated by Matt Barnes. His dad is the CFO of my company, so it would've made for a laugh.

Runners on second and third with the pitcher due up and a lefty reliever in the game. Terry Collins would've pinch hit Jose Reyes who is the worst player on the team. Mickey Callaway actually understands the concept of reverse splits and knows the lefty reliever actually has worst numbers against lefty hitters. So he sends up Adrian Gonzalez instead, who promptly laces a 2-RBI single. Callaway is a mad scientist and I love it so much.

Seems that way and they're currently being no-hit through 5 against the worst team in baseball.

10 games into the season and the Mets are on pace to go 146-16. Is that good?

Should've been thrown out of the league a long time ago.

I, for one, am ready to crown his ass.

Yeah, I'm instinctively waiting for an injury to pop up at any time. I mean I'm intrigued by the changes the Mets have made in their medical personnel. They finally got rid of their beleaguered head trainer who had been with the team since the '80s, and guys like Cespedes and Syndergaard eased off of the ridiculous amount of strength training they did during the 16-17 offseason which may have contributed to their injuries. They need Syndergaard and deGrom to make 32 starts each and Cespedes to start 145 games in left field. If any of those three miss extended time they're probably cooked.

I'm trying not to get carried away about the Mets' 6-1 start, which is their best start since 2006. Tough not to feel really good about winning a road series against a Nats team that dominated them the last two years. That being said, the Nats are without Murphy who turns into Ted Williams when he plays the Mets. If I have a concern it's that they're still a station-to-station, strikeout-prone team offensively. And while the bullpen has been stellar so far, starters have only gone six innings twice so far which means the bullpen is on pace for a lottttttt of work. The series against the Marlins this week is actually kinda important because I think the Mets simply can't afford to let games against the Marlins slip away if they're gonna have playoff aspirations this year.

I'm hearing an unnerving amount of talk that the Giants supposedly love Josh Allen. If they take him, I will need to get a new TV remote the next day.

I have no idea why he's done this, but it is amazing.

Ironically, my insistence on being accurate inadvertently conked things up a bit more for me when I set up the 25 man rosters. A lot of teams only started the year with four starting pitchers due to early season off days. So the Show automatically bumps a reliever into the rotation to fill the spot. Unbeknownst to me, some of the teams then re-ordered their rotation. And so the Padres decided to give the Opening Day start to submarining reliever Kazuhisa Makita. 6 innings of 1 run ball in his Major League debut.

Because you can set 29 teams to autopilot while still giving yourself a hedge against some of the really perplexing things the CPU teams will do. Like I saw Mike Trout get traded for a C-level prospect in MLB 16. Stuff like that just kills the immersion for me. At least with 30 team control I could jump back in and reverse out dumb stuff like that. And I find a few years in that you end up with a backlog of A-level prospects who never get added to teams' 40 man rosters because there is no way to set up when guys should be Rule 5 draft eligible. For example, if I didn't intervene I'm willing to bet the Braves will keep Ronald Acuna in the minor leagues for like three more years even though he's going to debut this year in real life. OFSM walked me through setting up a new profile to get the difficulty sliders the way I want them, so now I've played a few games and am having a blast.

I'm now trying to figure out how difficulty settings are supposed to work with 30 team control. I have a new profile set up for the Mets on dynamic difficulty, which is always my personal preference as the game will adjust as I go along. Usually I'll kill the computer for a game or two before the difficulty will adjust and I'll get a real challenge. Then there's an "Other Teams" profile. Apparently by default, they are on Beginner difficulty. Which means that, from the CPU's standpoint, they're playing on beginner. AKA the second I fired up Opening Day, Syndergaard gave up 5 runs in the first inning even though I was supposedly on the easiest possible level. Sooooo I guess that means everything is reversed I need to set the Other Teams profile to Legend difficulty? But that means the CPU will always suck even as my Dynamic sliders change. Even if I set the CPU to a middle of the road setting, they won't ever improve or get worse. Or I could set both to Dynamic but I feel like that's bound to mess things up big time and neither side will ever adjust in difficulty. I may need to start over without 30 team control, meaning the couple hours I spent accurately getting DLs/40 man rosters set were a complete waste of time.

The Mets and Phillies are currently airing a game streamed exclusively on Facebook. Pro: It's the only time I've been able to stream a weekday day game at work because Comcast doesn't allow me to stream SNY like every other provider does Con: John Kruk and Cliff Floyd are making this broadcast borderline unwatchable

As best I can tell a lot of those glitches are based on the Phases system. So if the World Series ends earlier than the game expects, the next offseason phase will start earlier than it is listed, and it will cause stuff to cock up. So basically the only thing they changed about franchise also bugged it to hell. Lovely. Good thing I'll probably take my time with the first season as I normally do. I never play every game but usually I play at least one game in each ballpark I visit along with key series and home games.

I never bought that the Giants were trading Beckham for anything less than a king's ransom.

For further filing under "SDS doesn't care about franchise", there is apparently a bug where you lose the ability to offer arbitration or sign free agents after year 3.

Honestly the fact that shifts even work to the extent that they do is kinda remarkable to me because it shows that so many professional players are incapable of making adjustments. Everyone should always work on bunting against the shift and hitting to opposite field.

I spent a couple of hours last night setting up 40 man rosters, now I just need to manually injure people who are gonna be out for a while and then I can start my franchise. Pretty stoked.

OSFM rosters are out!!!

CB Bucknor is atrocious.

Two games into the season and Mickey Callaway's already shown a much more outside the box approach to bullpen management than Terry Collins. He had Swarzak and Familia throw 30 pitches each, effectively making them unavailable tomorrow. Sounds like a batshit crazy thing to do so early in the season, but I think that might actually be his style. He'd rather get his money's worth and burn a guy out for the next day than get into the habit of running five or six relievers out there every game.