Babkins

Though Davis appears to have dropped some weight, Perhaps this begins a home-run spate.

This is A+ work.

Uh...what?

Sounds like someone’s trying hard to gin up interest in a celebrity-athlete-drug-abuse memoir. Yawn.

That makes sense (even if if kind of sounds like the old regime). Increased aggressiveness doesn't seem to be leading to a ton of strikeouts—only four in his 30 PA—which is comforting. If he continues to slug in the high fives, I'll have no complaints.

Just took a first glance at some of our guys' spring training numbers, and to cut through some of the noise, I sorted them by number of PAs. Yusniel Diaz is one off the lead with 30, and I thought it was interesting that he has yet to draw a walk this spring. It's not a large sample, of course, and I guess it matters a little less when you're hitting .367, but I'll be curious to watch how his approach develops in his first full year with his new organization. I wonder how the new regime will bring him along—I can't imagine they wouldn't want to continue to develop his on-base skills, which were a strength of his in the Dodgers organization.

I will forever and always hate every single member of that 2014 Royals team. I’ll be rooting for the Rule 5 guys.

We can agree on that.

I think the "Oh" is absolutely perfect: a single, breathless syllable that articulates the wonder Magee beheld as he soared to the brink of the troposphere in his Spitfire. What better word do we have in the English language for rapture than "Oh"? It's exactly the right word to begin that poem.

Illuminating! Thanks for that analysis.

I’m infinitely more impressed by Eliud Kipchoge, who ran a 2:01:39 marathon in Berlin last year, or by Alex Honnold, who scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes in 2017 than I am by any of the tens of thousands of people who have collected a hit in professional baseball.

Thought I would throw Cal’s age-38 season into the conversation. It was 1999, the first year after he’d ended the streak, and the first time in his career that he’d spent time on the DL. A nagging lower-back issue limited him to only 86 games; he missed about four weeks in late April and early May, the entire month of August, and the season’s final stretch at the end of September. He was looking pretty hobbled at the beginning of June, but his bat heated up as the days did. (He was particularly lethal in the 22–1 victory over Atlanta on June 13, going 6-for-6 with a two homers, a double, and six batted in. Irrelevant personal-history note: I was studying abroad in London that summer, and one of the networks happened to carry that game. I was so pleased to see the Orioles on TV in England that I stayed up all night to watch it.) For the season, in 354 PA, Cal posted his highest-ever OPS at .952. Remarkably, he drew only a Schoopian 13 walks, but still managed a .368 OBP on the strength of a .340 BA (I’ll always be a sucker for batting average). Thanks to 18 home runs and 27 doubles, he slugged a career-best .584. Juiced-ball era or not, it was the last time Cal was awesome, and I was just young enough not to realize it was the end.

False. As GoldGlove21 indicated above, New York has "the best of every kind of food." Except pizza. New Haven has the best pizza, and it's not close.

The background music in sports highlight reels is one of the most serious problems facing us today.

Sounds as though they're trying to occupy the hipsterish niche that Grantland once did. I haven't read anything on The Athletic. Do the articles have footnotes?