Jack Shine

The Summer of Jimbo

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I met Jimbo on my first trip to Colorado. The trip was to visit a buddy from High School who was enlisted and stationed at the Air Force Academy. Jimbo was still active duty Air Force at the time we met. If you’ve seen The Big Lebowski, his aura was much aligned with The Dude’s.

We picked him up before heading to Denver for a Rockies game. Me and three airmen made the trip in a Chrysler sedan. The guys had a pony keg from a gathering the night before with about a third of the beer still in it, and they dressed it up to look like a little kid in the middle of the back seat. It had a Rockies hat set on the tap and a Rockies jersey buttoned up around the keg.

I sat up front and didn’t drink any of the beer on the ride, but the boys in the back took the occasional pull from the tap.

On the way there I came up with a game called “Rock n Roll Draft” where we took turns drafting musicians to build out our dream lineup, and then debated afterwards whose was best. I remember drafting Chris Robinson and Keith Richards, the rest of the lineup escapes me.

Jimbo was later deployed to Afghanistan, where he worked as a medic. He had a fiancée at the time. He’d sent her an iPad and a phone, and a few other gifts. A few months into his deployment he found out she had been stepping out on him, and he broke things off. It was a serious detriment to his morale, but as Jimbo does, he carried on.

Speaking of breaking things off, I asked him about the weirdest injuries he saw during his stint in the middle east. He mentioned a man who had been having carnal relations with a female colleague at the air base and had broken his penis during the act. I immediately felt better about having only broken my forearm, my clavicle and my nose.

Jimbo was an avid reader. He had read every Stephen King release, and over 30 of them on that deployment alone. The pace having quickened after his engagement fell through.

He got back to Colorado and finished his time and was honorably discharged. He then used his GI Bill to attend HVAC, heavy equipment, and plumbing trade schools. But after completing them, he wanted to lay low for awhile. He grew out his beard and slept on my buddy’s recliner every night for a year in the house he was renting in Manitou Springs. He even dated the waitress at the Irish Pub we all had a crush on. My friend in the Air Force and I took a road trip back to California, and Jimbo came along for the ride. He was that sort of feller. I called him our Kramer.

We went to see Furthur, one of the Grateful Dead lineups post Jerry Garcia, and he passed out in front of me and hit his head. Me and my buddy had to pick him up by the arms and legs like a lifeless corpse we were throwing overboard. He came to in the midst of us walking him out of the floor area of the arena in Broomfield, CO. He was fine, but in all the concerts I’ve been to, I’ve seen numerous people pass out, yet had never been with someone who had done so themselves. Well, the law of averages caught up with us that day.

Then at the end of spring, that buddy of mine got out of the Air Force and moved out of state to cash-in on his GI bill. Jimbo knew it was time to return home and get a job, but he wanted one more Colorado summer before doing so.

I was in college at the time, working nights and weekends at a pizza place, and I couldn’t let him stay with me. But I got him a job delivering pizzas at the shop. His tenure there actually outlived mine. The manager was happy to have an honest and reliable employee that showed up for his shifts.

Jimbo took to living in his car to get the last Rocky Mountain summer in. There was a learning curve as he transitioned to vehicular life. The shop had a big stainless steel dishpit, and when it was empty, he’d use the drop down sprayer to wash his hair. I told him that wasn’t the best idea for a restaurant, and he ended up getting a membership at 24 Hour Fitness where he could shower, hang out, and watch cable TV. I don’t think he exercised there.

After he finished his shift at the pizza shop, he’d take his cash and get some food, then head over to the mall parking lot. He’d trap towels and t-shirts in between the windows and the door frame to create curtains. He said he’d then “get really high” and read until he fell asleep. He never had any trouble from cops or mall security.

It’s easy to look at some of the behaviors and label him a loser or a bum, but he was also a genuinely good guy who could always be relied upon when you needed a favor in return. He honored the bro code. He wasn’t ever the reason anyone out with him had a bad time. He never stepped on anyone’s toes. And he had a funny way of telling his stories from overseas and his upbringing.

He had a great mind for frugality — he had many stories from trips to Vegas and Reno, getting free drinks and discounted rooms. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of sports, which was a big anchor of our friendship. And he had the stomach to handle and the appetite for sports betting back when the only place you could legally do so was in the state of Nevada.

The subtle art of sneaking down into better seats at a sporting event was another of his specialties, and he was always interested in a scheme on how to do so. At the Rockies game we had two good tickets, and then bought two $4 Rockpile centerfield bleacher seats. Two of us went down into the good seats with the good tickets, one came up with both tickets, brought another guy down with him, then repeated it so all four of us were a few rows behind the dugout. This works at Rockies games, but it gets trickier in a place with regular sellouts.

If you asked him anything about his life, he’d just come right out and tell you, he didn’t withhold details even when they were to the detriment of his image. Jimbo had lost his mom at a young age, and some felt he was out searching for that place that would feel like coming home.

He was a Mets fan with a Yankees tattoo. He reminded me of the song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” by Kris Kristofferson:

He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

He was something of a millennial cowboy that summer, a free spirit on the Front Range, taking each day as it came, holding off the impending responsibilities of adulthood just a little bit longer. The way I saw it, after six years serving his country and being deployed in a war zone, it certainly wasn’t for me to tell him to approach things any differently.

All of this was jogged loose in my memory after seeing a Subaru Outback with the back seat folded down this afternoon, and it brought to my mind that summer of freedom ol’ Jimbo got to live years ago.

I lost touch with him a few years back, but I hope the cool breeze finally guided him to a place that feels like home.

Photo by Jeffrey Beall, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Bitcoin Brain

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Many people who I admire as intelligent thinkers and creative minds suffer from a key blind spot I see occurring repeatedly. From Andrew Torba, Jay Dyer and Sam Hyde — they all carry a condition I describe as Bitcoin Brain. Or as the crypto community outside the Bitcoin bubble refers to them, Bitcoin Maxis.

Through this condition, which as it appears to me is caused by having bought into Bitcoin, or BTC, at a significantly lower price, realized 50-200x gains on the asset, and now have a devotion to it that causes all criticism of it to put them into a state of cognitive dissonance.

Just mentioning use cases for other cryptocurrency projects can trigger an adverse reaction. Bring up ISO 20022-compliant utility tokens in a social setting and you’ll more often than not hook a maxi who will launch into a myopic BTC fueled diatribe that lays out several of the arguments I’ll counter in this article.

To be clear, this is not financial advice. Nothing here is a price prediction. We could see a $200k, $300k, $400k Bitcoin, depending on how much institutional money comes into the asset in the near term.

Price is not the argument I’m making. What I’m interested in is the shifting paradigm — that a first generation technology from 2009, one that is slower, more expensive, and has fewer real world uses than what came after it, is still being sold to us as a revolutionary force in the future of global finance.

There is a maximum supply cap of twenty-one million Bitcoins. This is often one of the first points made by the champions of the token, scarcity.

There is a finite amount of gold. There is a finite amount of silver. There is a finite amount of beachfront property in Malibu. And there is a finite amount of Bitcoin. All four of those are true, but one of these things is not like the other.

Gold is scarce because it can’t be manufactured. You cannot copy the periodic table, change one line, and roll out Gold 2 with an extra 21 million tons.

There are other cryptos. And it isn’t just that they exist — it’s that they already do things Bitcoin is technologically incapable of doing. Foreign exchange that happens damn near instantly. Payments that settle across the world in seconds for a fraction of a penny. Commodities trading around the clock with a record of every transaction that’s open for anyone to inspect and impossible to go back and doctor.

So sure, you could build Bitcoin 2 and mint yourself another 21 million tokens. But why would you want to? You’d be launching a brand new product that’s already a generation behind the competition. Nobody would give it a second look.

And that says something very damning about the asset.

The original pitch, the one that made every libertarian I know fall in love, was peer-to-peer electronic cash outside the money printing governments and their fiat system.

It doesn’t do that and it never really did. Transactions take ten minutes to confirm and about an hour before anyone serious calls them final, fees float on congestion, and nobody is buying a latte with it.

The fix that BTC developers promised for eight years running has been the Lightning Network, where payments happen off-chain and settle in bulk later. On paper it solves the problem in an inefficient way. In practice, the node count continues to decrease, inhibiting its ability to ever operate at scale. But as is often the case with Bitcoin, the goal posts have already been moved. The pitch now is that it’s a “store of value,” not currency, not a payments network. When has a store of value been so volatile?

While we’re doing inventory, there’s the matter of what’s been buying all this. Tether is the largest stablecoin on earth and for years people have wondered whether every digital dollar it issues actually is backed by a real one. The stablecoins can then be used in transactions to trade for Bitcoin.

In 2021 that got answered twice. New York settled with them over misrepresenting the backing, and the CFTC found Tether had enough actual cash to cover the tokens on about a quarter of the days they examined.

“Tether reserves were not ‘fully-backed’ the majority of the time.” — CFTC

They paid, admitted nothing, and publish quarterly reports now. But it’s why, every time the market rips and somebody notices Tether minted another billion the week before, people get squinty. Bitcoin Maxis have frequently responded to this by saying some variation of, “if the Federal Reserve can print money, why can’t we?” These are supposed to be the adults in the room in the blockchain space?

That era is ending anyway. The GENIUS Act puts stablecoins under real federal rules by January 2027 — dollar-for-dollar reserves and audited books. What happens when Bitcoin’s money printer gets shut off?

This is part of the new arc for Bitcoin. It was the money you didn’t need permission to use. Now its loudest defenders spend their days begging Fortune 500 companies to put it on their balance sheets and are lobbying Washington to stockpile it.

Bitcoin has the earmarks of a brand-name, trillion-dollar pump and dump, and it traces back to its strange origins and the host of shady players acting on its behalf.


Michael Saylor’s pitch boils down to: who cares what it costs today when it’s going to be worth millions later? He’s even put a number on it.

“Every Bitcoin you don’t buy today is going to cost you $13 million.” — Michael Saylor

That isn’t an argument. It’s a forecast, and you’re expected to take his word for it.

Saylor is also not a new character, which is the part nobody brings up. In March of 2000, at the peak of dot-com mania, his company announced it had to restate two years of financials. The stock went from $333 a share to $86 in a single day.

The SEC charged him with accounting fraud that December. He settled and admitted nothing. For a stretch there he was the single biggest loser of the entire bubble — his stake went from roughly $10 billion to $566 million.

Twenty-five years later he runs the same company under a new name and has bet all of it on one asset. Strategy holds roughly 840,000 Bitcoin (4% of the total possible supply) at an average cost around $75,000 a coin. Bitcoin is currently in the low $60Ks.

He also said for six straight years that he would never sell, that anyone who sells is weak. This month’s filing shows him selling Bitcoin to buy back his own preferred stock.

The engine that made the whole thing work was the premium. His stock traded at a big multiple to the Bitcoin behind it, so he could print shares, buy coins, and somehow end up with more Bitcoin per share than he started with. That premium is gone.

And since Saylor has admitted Bitcoin would trade lower without his weekly bid, the biggest buyer on earth flipping into a seller is not a small thing.

Then there’s Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s the name on the whitepaper that started all of this back in 2008. He built the thing, ran it for two years, answered questions on message boards, then stopped writing in 2011 and was never heard from again. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows if he’s one person or several.

He also has about a million coins that he mined himself in the early days, roughly five percent of every Bitcoin that will ever exist. Sixty-some billion dollars. It has not moved in fifteen years. The price has gone through the roof four separate times and he never touched a dime of it.

Three ways to explain that. He lost the keys, he’s dead, or he isn’t a person at all.

In 1996, twelve years before any of this, the NSA published a paper called “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.” It walks through how you’d go about building an untraceable digital currency. They also designed the mathematical lock the whole system still runs on.

That’s not proof of anything. But if you’re asking who could invent a global currency, launch it, walk away and never once get caught, the list is short and they’re on it.

Here’s why that matters beyond being a fun theory. If Satoshi is a man, five percent of the supply is a mystery. If Satoshi is an agency, five percent of the supply is a loaded gun. Sit on it for thirty years while the thing gets baked into pension funds and corporate balance sheets and the national reserve, then wake up the wallet and cash in.

The mother of all rug pulls. And you’d never see it coming, because you never knew who was holding it.

The founder of the world’s most valuable monetary network being permanently and conveniently missing gets filed by his followers as epic mythology, not as the enormous red flag it is.

Along those lines, in 2014 Jeffrey Epstein put about half a million into Blockstream’s seed round, the company employing some of the most influential contributors to Bitcoin’s code. He also cut MIT a check that landed in 2015, right when the Bitcoin Foundation went broke and the developers maintaining the code had no employer. The lab picked up three of them.

“I have spoken to some of the founders of Bitcoin who are very excited.” — Jeffrey Epstein

Nobody involved has been accused of wrongdoing, and none of this means Epstein controlled Bitcoin. But at the most fragile moment in the network’s history — no foundation, no money, a handful of guys with the keys to the codebase — the man paying the bills was Jeffrey Fucking Epstein?

How could a decentralized, borderless currency be an asset to someone running an international human trafficking and blackmail ring?

Then there’s the quantum problem. Google researchers put out estimates this year suggesting a quantum computer could crack Bitcoin’s security faster than the network can produce a single block. Roughly a third of all coins are sitting in the kind of accounts where that’s a live concern, ‘Satoshi’s’ included.

So a proposal went up in April to phase out the vulnerable accounts and eventually freeze the coins of anyone who doesn’t move theirs in time.

Freeze the accounts. The unchangeable ledger with the rules nobody can touch is now having a public argument about icing out a third of the supply. They have once again lost the plot.

So where does this land? Two of BTC’s biggest problems, transaction cost and speed, are already solved. Just not by Bitcoin.

Wrap it, or tokenize it, and settle it on a distributed ledger built for payments and it clears in seconds for a fraction of a penny. The XRP Ledger does it, Stellar does it, and DTCC has already named both in its tokenization patent.

Bitcoin Maxis prefer to position it as the only crypto that will be left standing, keeping the blinders up is key, because the world realizing its limitations is a pitfall that shatters the illusion.

And when it happens, the price of Bitcoin will no longer be what drives the asset class at large.

Bitcoin being decoupled from the rest of the cryptocurrency space as the real-world adoption of utility coins (things that actually solve trillion-dollar problems) leads the way will spark one of the largest mass-hysteria events we’ve seen as Bitcoin Maxis attempt to rationalize what has come to pass.

Bitcoin has been a mainstream media marketing campaign. It has been a successful red herring designed to avert the attention of the masses while the rails of a new financial system using distributed ledger, smart contract and blockchain technology are being built with little fanfare outside of the crypto sphere. (Make no mistake, the smart money is not going to miss the boat on this.)

It’ll most likely always be around. As I stated, it may shatter through all-time-highs in the interim, but there will be a paradigm shift.

There is serious institutional, political, and potentially dark-money pressure to continue propping up the mirage. But in the end, I do believe Bitcoin will be remembered at best as the VCR of cryptocurrency, at worst as a multi-trillion dollar capital extraction conspiracy.

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0

Veloci-rapture

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Paul Skenes’ pitch velocity has fallen off an absolute cliff in his third year in the Major Leagues.

Hall of Famer (in my book) Curt Schilling has weighed in on the regression on X:

Schilling’s issue is mechanical. Skenes’ arm drifts behind him toward third base instead of coming straight back, which strains everything from the shoulder down. He’s been calling Skenes a max-effort thrower since 2025 and said the delivery wouldn’t hold up under a starter’s workload. He also says he called this before the WBC.

The numbers back the alarm. Skenes threw 404 pitches at 99+ mph as a rookie in 2024. He threw 223 last season. This year he has thrown only three. You read that correctly, three pitches over 99 mph this year for Mr. Gas.

Theories range from being too fat, intentionally scaling back to save his arm for the big market teams (nonsensical, how would he get a big-money contract like this), or having his aura drained by his gymnast girlfriend. Also absurd, everyone in the show has a hot girlfriend, Skenes’ just happens to be the most visible.

Fat pitcher slander will not be tolerated on this platform. For one thing, Skenes isn’t actually fat. And if you think being fat as a pitcher means you won’t be successful, CC Sabathia, Bartolo Colon, David Wells, and George Herman Ruth would all like to have a word with you.

Personally, I’m inclined to agree more with Schilling’s analysis, along with the possibility of an undisclosed injury that is plaguing his current season.

On August 11 in Miami he was pulled after 65 pitches. His fastball averaged a career-low 95.7 and never touched 97. He got four whiffs on 34 swings, the worst rate of his career. Manager Don Kelly insisted it wasn’t injury-related. Though the denial doesn’t have me convinced.

Tim Lincecum’s body broke down after a few early dominant seasons, but Timmy the Kid did not have the powerful frame Skenes possesses.

Whatever the case may be, Skenes needs a significant reset to address the issue and protect his long term future in the league. It’s imperative he and the Pirates figure it out sooner than later, the franchise has three more years of contractual control for their ace, and Skenes has yet to even hit his arbitration money years. For a guy approaching his prime earning window, this becomes a potential $300m question for him.

Photo: Johnmaxmena2 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Disney’s Purple Kush

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The Los Angeles Lakers have agreed to be sold for the second time in ten months.

“Mark Walter … is selling it to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion.”
— CBS Sports

While most people’s initial reaction to the sale was in regard to LeBron leaving leading to a 25% increase in the value of the Lakers, or the connection to Disney’s deconstructionist woke era in Iger taking over, or the new connection the Lakers have to President Trump in Josh Kushner — the first person that came to my mind was Jay Mohr.

Mohr is a comedian I grew up enjoying that got into sports and podcasting, he hosted Jay Mohr Sports and Mohr Stories. The reason he came into my mind is that he is married to Jeanie Buss, former Lakers majority owner, who sold controlling interest to Mark Walter in June of 2025. Mohr was previously married to one of my childhood crushes, Nikki Cox, the comedy it-girl for a good chunk of the nineties. A series of plastic surgery misfortunes would in large part end her public-facing career. Mohr wrote one of the more surreal articles I’ve read during his time with Fox Sports, about being dosed with LSD at a restaurant while he was married to Nikki. The line I have never forgotten: “When you’re on acid and you’re playing Madden, your fingers are your coaches.” Then after his divorce from Nikki he ended up with Jeanie and became married into Lakers ownership. I say none of this out of envy for the man, but I have always found him funny and interesting so it’s more from a place of fraternal appreciation. He provides a human lens for me into the numbers and names of this story.  

As for Kushner, this comes less than two weeks after FIFA scrapped his attempt to buy a private equity stake in the World Cup, a plan UEFA threatened to boycott the tournament over. He’ll also have to sell his current piece of the Miami Heat before this deal can be approved.

These new sports team sale prices and valuations are often used as talking points for whatever someone’s personal ideology is. People typically see this event through whatever their worldview happens to be: corruption in the Trump Administration, the league getting more woke, Jews continuing to take over the world, billionaires being unrestrained oligarchs that are destroying society — usually people’s initial baseline worldview comes out in how these type of events are colored in their minds.

For me, I’m sure that is still true to some degree. Yet the exorbitant valuations of sports franchises today are telling for a few reasons. First, enormous increases in company valuations have taken place over the last decade, and franchise values rose right alongside them. Second, sports are one of the last bastions of attention in a hyper-fractured, niched down marketplace where it’s easier than ever for people to exist in their own bubbles. Sports still unites people across otherwise scattered interests. 

Another topic of discussion is the Lakers’ current owner, Mark Walter, who had purchased the team for $10 billion ten months ago, he makes a 25% return on that investment. Walter is the head of Guggenheim Baseball management, owners of the Dodgers since 2012, where he now turns his full attention to, aside from his reported federal investigation. So in a round about way, this one ups the Yankees’ big news of their minority share of Yankee Global to Apollo. That’s not how you make Mona Lisa smile. 

These franchises are ultimately worth whatever people are willing to pay for them. Fans should be reminded that their beloved teams are often simply someone’s investment widget to be milked for cash and flipped when the right offer comes. It may be their owner’s hobby or status symbol, or best case scenario: their passion, where they seek to show mastery of leadership, competition, and detail to put the skills that have made them titans of industry on display within the sporting world. The latter describes franchises that are actually worthy of our time and attention. Seeing fans be emotionally decimated by incompetent organizations is like seeing a brand loyalist defend a defective product. 

I understand Bob Iger does not equal Disney in this transaction, but he is still the most recognizable public figure from their executive leadership this century. Aside from Kathleen Kennedy and her brand-destroying reign as the head of Star Wars. My hope for the return of Disney to Los Angeles professional sports was always them reacquiring the Anaheim Ducks and bringing back the green and purple uniforms full time. Disney had an incredible setup with the Ducks and incorporated their IP into the live arena experience for fans. While we may not see that with the Lakers, I don’t expect to see any courtside shots of Goofy at Crypto.com arena, should they falter in the postseason, I will happily refer to them as a Mickey Mouse organization.

Photo: Erik Drost / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Evil Equity Empire

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George Steinbrenner famously said he wouldn’t sell the Yankees for anything, that “owning the Yankees is like owning the Mona Lisa. You don’t sell it.” It appears Apollo Sports Capital have finally cracked the da Vinci code.

The $2.6 billion from Apollo Sports Capital buys an undisclosed minority stake in Yankee Global Enterprises and refinances the franchise’s existing debt. Apollo Sports Capital CEO Al Tylis takes a newly created seat on the YGE board. Hal Steinbrenner and the Steinbrenner family retain full control, with Steinbrenner saying the partnership “allows us to explore pursuing strategic opportunities.”

—Sportico

Is this the Yankees finally capitulating to the Dodgers’ dominance and deciding the equitization route is the only way to level the playing field?

For all my grievances with the Yankees, I have respected that they have not been as willing to bend to modernity as the rest of the league. Abstaining from a City Connect uniform, and until recently holding to a rigid facial hair policy. But it looks like the times may have finally caught up with the Bronx Bombers.

What does this foreshadow about the likelihood of a salary cap being instituted, one the MLBPA has already said they will never accept?

Would the Yankees have still made this move if they truly thought a hard salary cap was a inevitable? A change expected to raise franchise valuations even higher.

Debt restructuring is one of the key reasons listed by New York for the move. Though the remaining debt on Yankee Stadium is reportedly under $100 million, which makes $2.6 billion an awfully large hammer for that particular nail. It could also signal Hal Steinbrenner is anticipating the top of the market is approaching, and is cashing out serious profits on what he views as an acceptable valuation of his franchise.

Most importantly, it could be the Yankees getting much needed liquidity to survive a long work stoppage that looms after the CBA ends on December 1st. If that is in fact their primary motivation, it’s another sign we could be in for a long and bloody battle between the owners and players over the next 18 months.

This sort of deal rescued FC Barcelona from falling behind, and it looks like the Yankees have it in mind to follow that blueprint. But whereas Barca sold a 25% stake in future media rights, the Yankees have sold a minority stake in Yankee Global Enterprises — not just the ballclub, but the holding company that also owns 26% of the YES Network, roughly 16% of Legends Hospitality, and 10% apiece of AC Milan and New York City FC. MLB rules cap a single private capital fund at 15% of a franchise, so there is a ceiling on how much of the Bronx is actually for sale.

On the other side of the rivalry, Red Sox ownership Fenway Sports Group is closing in on selling a minority stake in Liverpool FC to a consortium that includes Jeff Bezos. Fenway Sports Group have made enormous gains on their Liverpool acquisition — they bought the club for £300 million in October of 2010, and the reported deal values it at roughly £4.4 billion today, with the consortium’s one-third stake going for somewhere around £1.4 billion. I’d love to imagine John Henry is willing to sell the Red Sox, preferably in their entirety, as well.

The Yankees now have the capital to keep pace financially with the Mets and Dodgers, at least for a while. Those two franchises may also exhibit their new ceiling, and in the LOL Mets case, their new floor.

Photo: Matt Bolton / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 2.0

Where the Buffalo Roam

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The Buffalo Bills opened their new stadium to season ticket holders on Saturday night for the Return of the Blue and Red Scrimmage.

“The Buffalo Bills welcomed 51,807 fans to the 2026 Return of Blue & Red.”
— Buffalo Bills

The new stadium has continued to be the talk of Bills Twitter two days after the game, the main point of contention being obstructed view seats and smaller than expected video screens. As well as less than appetizing food offerings. 

I’ve been following the construction of the stadium from the initial rendering released to the public. I have a few thoughts.

First, people complaining about the $2.2 billion price tag. $250 million from Erie County, $600 million from New York State, and Terry Pegula responsible for every dollar of the overruns. Those complaining about the public funds being used, I want to say I hear you, but this is New York state we’re talking about. Literally all they do is piss away taxpayer funds, for the most part it’s on things that offer me little to no utility. This stadium is not that. This is one of the best decisions Kathy Hochul has made as Governor. I know that’s not saying much, but I stand behind it.

Second, remember the American sports stadium dark ages? The era of multi-purpose stadiums. Where NFL and MLB teams shared venues, and the baseball games were played on astro turf or in stadiums with literally no view beyond the outfield? And the first half of the football season for teams like the Raiders and Dolphins were played with baseball infield dirt in the playing field? We survived that hellish period, it’s initial downfall marked by the construction of Camden Yards, and we entered a golden age of original ballparks with Oracle Park, PNC Park, Busch Stadium all being built after that. Buffalo’s new stadium is unique, which itself is becoming a rarity.

The NFL is now entering a new age of cookie cutter stadiums, we’re losing the tradition of football being played outside in the elements on grass. The Raiders, Falcons, Rams have all built impressive new enclosed stadiums in recent years, and the spectacle of Jerry World in Arlington still looms large, but with new stadium developments in Nashville, Kansas City, Chicago by way of Hammond, Indiana, Denver, and Cleveland, (Jacksonville is currently in the midst of a drastic remodel that will see a canopy added to the stadium while keeping it technically al fresco) nearly all of these stadiums will look like some xerox version of Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

Team owners and cities are focused on a few key factors with a new stadium — a new place to host games that drives revenue to the area, to have an enclosed roof for the opportunity to host a future Super Bowl, and other major events, like Taylor Swift concerts, WrestleMania, the Final Four, etcetera, and they want to keep the team in the area for decades to come by getting them to sign a lease for the new digs. 

While the obstructed view seats are a bit baffling to see in a brand new 2026 state-of-the-art facility, what the Bills got right is they stayed outdoors, they moved to a natural grass surface, and they created an environment that will be extremely loud. All of which play to their strengths, and in terms of being outdoors on natural grass, those are aspects that have been going extinct in this new wave of stadium construction. 

The architect, Populous, has designed the majority of new stadium builds, and the inspiration for this one is born from European football, the design moves the spectators closer to the field and rids the surface area around the field of wasted space. The bowl is modeled in part on Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where the geometry traps the crowd noise and compresses it back down toward the field, and the upper deck here is reportedly the closest to the field in the league. These positives are deserving of praise and feel like a natural fit for Buffalo’s team.

But even in the initial renderings, man those video boards looked small.

Now factor in teams using half their video screens for scoreboard and stats displays— My hope is, atleast for key replays, they project the action across the entire board, or as fans have already dubbed it, the MiniTron.

Finally, and most importantly, this new stadium keeps the Bills in Buffalo on a 30-year lease.

I’ll reserve judgment on the execution of the new stadium until I see it for myself. I think the knee-jerk reaction from many Bills fans comes from our conditioning as almost getting things right time and time again.

Being the almost franchise for decades can have a traumatic effect on people. Mafia life isn’t for everyone.

Photo: Dekema / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Womanizer

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Two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, have announced they intend to identify as female to be eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft. Kanter Freedom said he and his team had carefully examined the league’s eligibility criteria and governing framework surrounding self-identification and inclusion, and that he qualifies. White followed hours later and added that his wig is in the mail.

The reason they can do this is that the WNBA has no transgender eligibility policy. None. The collective bargaining agreement signed in March says only that players who are women are eligible, and never defines the word. Into that silence stepped a parade of coaches and players — Cheryl Reeve, Stephanie White, Gabby Williams — all volunteering that a trans athlete would be welcome.

“I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime. I don’t think it’s a problem in the world. It’s just another way to kind of attack trans people.”

— Gabby Williams, Golden State Valkyries

Then the players’ union issued this:

“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”

— Women’s National Basketball Players Association

The WNBA is a Marxist community garden. It has always been an ideological experiment funded by the NBA, Nike, ESPN, etc. to platform their left-leaning, feminist and social and racial justice philosophy. The league is quite literally, a political pawn.

It actually serves as a wonderful microcosm of the shortcomings of these theories, as when gifted two mainstream stars on a team together in Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham, the league has sought to suppress their popularity and elevate those who fit the racial and political agenda the league exists to serve. They are not interested in making money, they feel entitled to do and say what they want, and the concept of being profitable has absolutely no bearing on their actions.

Similar to how Mamdani’s New York City is giving everyone a little free preview of the inability for Marxist ideologues to handle the primary responsibilities of the positions they hold, in Mamdani’s case that being maintaining order and carrying out basic government functions, the league shows how the abundant fallacies in the views of those running it prevent it from ever growing into a respected and commercially viable sports product. If anyone can be a woman in their worldview, then they must dispel their bigoted ways and embrace the stunning and brave Enes and Royce as champions of the very diversity and inclusion they so virtuously espouse.

Update: In response to all this, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert sent a memo to the teams that declines to define who’s eligible, noting instead that WNBA eligibility rules are collectively bargained. Translation: the league can’t settle the transgender question without the union, and the union just told you exactly where it stands.

Update 2: Hours after this post, Sophie Cunningham was clubbed in the head on a fast break layup by Chicago’s DiJonai Carrington, who was ejected on a Flagrant 2 and then posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” from the locker room and tagged the Fever.

Yeah, this league isn’t a completely racist trainwreck or anything like that. While it’s mildly funny when it’s a women’s basketball league, this is the same rotten ideology that’s infected large swaths of government. 

Update 3: In the third quarter of that same game, Caitlin Clark was assessed her eighth technical of the season for accidentally bumping into a black female referee after being knocked out of bounds on a pass along the baseline. She simply looked at the official, turned away, and got teed up.

If your only access to the outside world was following the WNBA, you’d have a pretty strong inclination that America was on the verge of a race war.

Coup BS

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In my article last week, The Player-Announcer Paradox, I examined the often divergent relationship between liking a player on the field, and liking him when he moves into the broadcast booth. It was heavily focused on Tony Romo in the aftermath of his DUI, a first offense that in Wisconsin isn’t even technically a crime — it’s a civil forfeiture. Now there’s no excuse for Tony Romo to be drinking and driving, but this was miles away from a scandal in NFL terms.

Romo has already been suspended by the network, and CBS intends to use this as a pretext for replacing Romo from the A-side of their broadcast lineup with J.J. Watt, at least temporarily. Watt boasts a much more “aw shucks” corporate friendly persona. A move that the network may have already been itching to make.

“It’s possible CBS Sports uses Romo’s slip-up as an excuse to move on” — Pro Football Network

The record-setting contract Romo signed in 2020 also appears to be part of the calculus for the move. The high-value deal made headlines at the time, but has since been dwarfed by contracts that followed it, including the $375m mega deal signed by Tom Brady to join Fox’s top-pairing Sunday broadcast.

“He squeezed them for every nickel” — Colin Cowherd on Romo’s 2020 negotiation, via Fox News

Romo has four years and $72 million left on that deal, and it’s left a sour taste in CBS’ mouth ever since. They could attempt to use a morality clause in the terms of the agreement to void the remaining salary.

“the worst contract in media history” — a top sports media executive on Romo’s deal, via Andrew Marchand of The Athletic Pro Football Network

The upside is that Tony Romo as a free agent with nothing to lose would once again be able to impart his actual football wisdom, something that has been greatly missing since CBS called for him to tone down his color commentary style.

It is nevertheless still shocking to see things play out this way. A non-incidental, first offense DUI is now a reason to end a man’s sports broadcasting career? I grew up in a time when it would to take perverted sexual fetishes to do such a thing.

Tony Romo photo by Keith Allison, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Gen X George Carlin

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The long, and agonizing to witness, fall of Bill Burr has entered new depths.

The transformation reminds me of another once lethal comedian who became unfunny in his life’s third act.

George Carlin grew into a bitter, cynical, and nihilistic comic. It was a serious falloff from his humor in the 70’s and 80’s, which I admit still wasn’t for everyone.

I remember watching Carlin’s early specials replayed on HBO as a kid. His facial expressions, verbal cues, sound effects, oddities and writing were brilliant, and genuinely made me laugh.

I even recall where I was the day I learned he had died, June 22, 2008. Sitting in a local bar & grill with my aunt eating chicken wings. How many comedians can you say you recall such details about? For me, the only other one is Norm Macdonald’s passing.

Carlin allowed his growing cynicism to infect his act, that may be understating what has gone on with Bill Burr.

To be clear, this isn’t coming from someone who has never appreciated Burr’s work. I saw him live in a mid-sized theater about a decade ago. He did an hour and a half and it was fine, but still much softer than his specials from a decade prior to that, and he seemed to be sorting his way through the material as he went.

This was a man who once did a bit on stage about domestic violence. “They say every time after it happens, how there’s no reason to hit a woman. Now, I’m not saying you should ever do it. But no reason? There’s no reason??” It was darkly hilarious and acted out with passion and charm.

Contrast that with Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill, the Netflix showcase where he MC’s and just shits on “Karens”, and by that he simply means white women. I got enough of a sense of what it was from Gavin McInnes and Anthony Cumia covering it rather than having to subject myself to the full experience. That was June of 2022. This collapse has been an ongoing thing, when was the turn? Covid seems to be the underlying inflection point. Yet, Burr is not simply a Covidiot.

A review of his 2025 Hulu special Drop Dead Years called him a therapeutic work in progress, figuring himself out in public. That was meant as a compliment. Burr agrees with the premise — he told Variety the special was the result of reevaluating his own past work, and described himself as a recovering meathead doing the best he can. So it wasn’t just the theater tour. He’s working material out in the specials too, on the eighth hour-long feature of his career, at 56 years old.

In September 2025 he went to the Riyadh Comedy Festival , which is the funniest thing I’ve seen him do in quite some time. Not that I have any issue with people taking Saudi money, I think it’s more admirable than taking Hollywood’s, but because it infuriated the very people he has been aligning himself with for roughly a decade. Top acts were reportedly paid as much as $1.6 million, according to Tim Dillon. Burr trying to reconcile his remaining fans’ anger with his willingness to forgo his new allegiances for a payday was fun to witness. 

He’s always played up the angry red-head comic, but now he’s far less coherent. He recently exhibited an inability to formulate even a basic question when interviewing The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas on his podcast. Casablancas is no Captain Charisma himself these days, but the interview only got back on track when the singer began asking Burr questions about himself. Burr’s mind literally seems to have ceased its most basic functions in favor of distilling everything through his own self-loathing narcissistic impulses, at least from what can be gleaned on the surface. It’s a sure fire recipe for getting your wires crossed.

He also feels he can write off all criticism of his comedy as racist because he is in an interracial marriage. Which is, of course, preposterous. His comedy doesn’t fail to make me laugh because of who his wife is. It’s his constant mental gymnastics that seek to position himself as the counter-cultural voice of reason that fail to make him relatable to the people who once appreciated him. This negative feedback loop creates further cognitive dissonance that struggles to process how he became the one being labeled out-of-touch.

Bill Burr was never a comedic genius that rivaled the all-time greats. But he was funny. That’s no longer the case. Comedy comes from honesty, and when you can’t be honest about the world, you can’t satirize, mock, or lampoon its inconsistencies in a genuine way.

George Carlin stopped being funny and started being a very well paid doomer, more interested in showing the audience how smart he was for figuring the grand mysteries of the universe out on his own. Bill Burr has descended beyond that. The cringy content he is putting out today does however make for its own form of entertainment.

You won’t be seeing me at any of his shows in the future, but we’ll always have the Red Sox.

Trade Winds

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The 2026 Major League Baseball trade deadline has come to pass. There was a flurry of activity Monday afternoon that provided some surprising moves, none of which were exceedingly shocking.

The big news of the trade deadline actually broke late Saturday evening when it was announced that the Los Angeles Dodgers have come to terms on a trade with the Detroit Tigers to acquire ace lefty Tarik Skubal.

Skubal is the back-to-back reigning American League Cy Young winner, and the first reigning winner to be traded in-season since Justin Verlander in 2023 — only the sixth ever. He led all of baseball in WAR and strikeouts in 2024 and went a combined 31-10 with 469 punchouts across 2024 and 2025. There was talk he may not be traded at all this year after he had loose bodies removed from his elbow in May and was back on a mound 38 days later. The Dodgers are now the first team in league history to have a reigning two-time MVP and a reigning two-time Cy Young winner on the roster together in the same season.

Unlike most baseball fans, I was happy to hear the news. The most important reason for that is my hope was that he would not end up on the New York Yankees. The Yankees had a rather quiet deadline, but they did acquire Luis Garcia Jr. from the Nats, he leads the NL in slugging percentage. GM Brian Cashman seems to like his team’s chances should they get Judge, Stanton and Bellinger back healthy before the end of the season. 

Failing to acquire Skubal hasn’t cost the Yankees much in the way of championship odds with only a slight drop from +550 Sunday afternoon to +600 Tuesday afternoon.

I screencapped two sets of odds to track the movement on FanDuel, giving a wide enough birth from the deadline itself to still get a reasonable picture of the changes it brought: 

Sunday at 5 PM: 


Tuesday at Noon: 


The question that I have for the Yanks is— what would their odds currently be had they acquired Skubal?

What would the third most favored team, the Milwaukee Brewers (+950 odds) odds be if they’d acquired Skubal?

A key reason to ask, is that the Dodgers didn’t give up a whole helluva lot to get the superstar pitcher — outfielder Zyhir Hope, the No. 5 prospect in their system and No. 25 in all of baseball, right-hander River Ryan at No. 7 in the system and No. 68 overall, and right-hander Brady Smith at No. 17, per MLB Pipeline. Los Angeles managed to hold onto their top four prospects and still get a nuclear arm added to their arsenal. 

The Dodgers sit at an unprecedented +155 to win the World Series in early August. That speaks to the incredible team they have constructed, and also the weaknesses of the rest of the field.

A three-peat would give them the first one since 1998-2000, when the Yankees pulled it off, it would also elevate the cries of the Salary Cap hungry owners and the majority of MLB fans who support such a measure.

Seeing a cap and floor model in the vein of the NFL would give fans a sense that any team could win it all. Just don’t tell that to Cleveland Browns fans, hell, don’t even mention it to Bills fans. Teams that scout, draft, recruit, sign, develop and take care of their players will still have an enormous advantage, and those in low-tax, high-revenue, nice-to-live locations will have built in advantages that will become more stark in a hard capped league. 

Point being, don’t expect a salary cap to fix all your franchises woes overnight, but I do understand the appeal and would love to see what America’s pastime looked like with a more level playing field.

Other noteworthy items from the deadline:

The Boston Red Sox basically dumped one of the members of their golden age of prospects they’ve been championing for the last several years. The oft-injured Marcelo Mayer never found his groove in the big leagues, and made more headlines for his attitude and alleged off-the-diamond issues. Word is the organization felt he was detrimental to the prospect they just locked up for nine-figures last summer in Roman Anthony. Mayer was said to be a regular fixture of the New England late night scene (according to 98.5 The Sports Hub of Boston), which fed into questions about his motivations and maturity. He was shipped to the San Francisco Giants for lefty reliever Erik Miller and minor-league outfielder Carlos Gutierrez.

The Red Sox also paid a pretty heavy price to nab Adley Rutschman from the Baltimore Orioles. The switch hitting catcher is currently injured, but could provide a valuable dynamic to the Red Sox lineup heading into the final stretch of the season, and the postseason should they land a spot. I quipped that the Red Sox are now going after players who are “pre-injured”, as another key acquisition before the deadline was Curtis Mead, the former Nationals second-baseman who has some serious pop in his bat right now and could provide much needed defensive stability to the Red Sox middle infield, was injured in his first game with the Sox. A pitch struck and broke his wrist. He now heads to the infirmary with ace Garrett Crochet, who hasn’t pitched since April 25 and still hasn’t picked up a baseball after shoulder inflammation turned into a lat strain, Roman Anthony, out since May 5 with a torn ligament in his hand and no timetable, shortstop Trevor Story, on the 60-day list since sports hernia surgery in late May and only now aiming at a rehab assignment. Rutschman officially begins his Boston tenure on the 10-day list with left wrist inflammation. Which when you compare it to the medical report I just got done delivering, is actually pretty healthy! 

Boston moved from +3500 odds on July 13, to +1800 on Sunday afternoon, climbing as high as +1500 after the acquisition of Rutschman before settling to their current line at +1600. Still a dark horse by those odds, but third behind division rivals Tampa and New York in American League team odds to win it all.

The Atlanta Braves were quiet at the deadline, their odds have dropped slightly as a result. But Chris Sale did win July’s NL Pitcher of the month, and the Bravos still have big October aspirations.

My recent article, The Dead Tradeline, discussed how the expanded Wild Card slots (and the longstanding inability to trade future draft picks) makes for less excitement at the trade deadline. Far more teams being “buyers” now than sellers limits the amount of top end players who are available to be moved, and not trading future picks limits the amount of resources teams have to acquire them. I discussed how the Red Sox could greatly benefit by being deadline sellers, but their improbable win streak, and Breslow’s desire to save his General Manager job, had made that highly unlikely. The Red Hot Sox haven’t slowed down yet, having just completed a sweep of the Dodgers this past weekend, placing them at a mind-blowing 28-5 since June 24. 

The last few weeks have felt like a holding pattern as we waited for the deadline to come and lock in the rosters. Now that we’ve seen its fruits come to bear, the headline that remains: the rich get richer in LA, the Yankees don’t make major waves, and the odds of a serious labor stoppage that puts the 2027 season at risk have grown ever higher as the owners will seek to use the Dodger’s success as the smoking gun that demands a salary cap at all costs. 

So enjoy this postseason run, it may be the last one we get for a while.