i just feel like being reminded that THE CRUNKLETON exists would've pinged my radar a little bit harder.

have i been missing it for THAT LONG?!? it must be the end of the semester.

i'm not sure when it happened, but i'm just here to thank you for this specific name change.

please note that all obvious caveats apply here.

i've said this a couple times before: it shouldn't be *that* hard to get this team into at least the wild card conversation in 2026. if they're even *remotely* interesting in spending even a little bit more than they usually do, any GM worth his salt should be able to pull it off.

it's probably an easier sell than the one they had to make to people in 2011-2012, actually.

i mean, statistically their offense was worse than it should've been last year. their pitching is likely to be very good for 2-3 years while skenes is still around. everyone will be watching them because of skenes. it's not an impossible sell, i don't think.

that's how he ends up on the pirates.

so it seems plausible to me that teams are not jumping out of their seats to give him that deal if they think they'll lose of the years he's most likely to be productive.

given that by signing him at his age with his skillset, you're accepting that you're very likely going to be paying schwarber a ton of money for 2-3 years where he's not very good on the back end of a 4-5 year deal ...

anyway, this is what i mean by "do not toy with me," w/r/t schwarber; unless they're very serious about going above and beyond and doing the thing, do not be someone else's useful idiot in public to gain PR points with your fans, because i don't think it'll work.

BUT. i do think the functional ceiling on schwarber is too high for the pirates, given the way they normally operate. and i do think that probably schwarber's agent has identified them as useful idiots that can get a fifth year or an extra $3-4 million per year from a real baseball team.

pudge rodriguez signing with the tigers, russell martin signing with the pirates, the royals building a rotation the way they did two winters ago, etc.

traditionally, when a team like the pirates wants to stop being a team like the pirates and wants to transition to something else, what they do is overpay for the free agents they want/have identified that they need.

and you can also then therefore posit that there's an amount of money above what the phillies or another contender will offer him that the pirates could offer that he might take.

the pirates *can* sign that sort of player, operating like a slightly less spendthrift version of themselves, way more than they could sign a judge or soto or ohtani.

schwarber being in his 30s and having a limited skillset that won't age great means that no one will sign him for more than 5 years, and that there's definitely a limit on how much someone will pay for him (say, $150 million total, which is probably more than he'll get but is a functional ceiling).

what i think is this:

1. the pirates could sign schwarber. i mean this in a way that's different than "the pirates could sign ohtani, because everyone has way more money than you think."

i was wondering about this! i kind of thought it might not be explicitly banned, because ... what advantage would you hope to get in baseball from blood doping?