As it turns out, the Brewers should be about the same as the Cardinals in ‘25
The Brewers are about as unexciting team on paper as I could probably find. Outside of William Contreras that is, who should be really good. Check out the projections for the Brewers to see what I’m talking about.
Jackson Chourio will also be exciting to watch for Brewers fans, but I just cannot get too worked up about this team. On paper they have plenty of quality players to make them be competitive, and they should win one or two more games than the Cardinals going by the projection systems, but somehow they don’t even seem as exciting as our team. Sure, I’m biased a little bit, but I think I’d rather watch for the upside in St Louis than be stuck a Brewers fan. I think last year was their chance.
That said, if forced to bet, I think I’d have to choose Milwaukee over St Louis. It is the more conservative pick, but the Cardinals have too many question marks. Or, I could pick the Cardinals as the underdog to overachieve. Yeah, I think I’m going to do that.
But maybe I should just say this: the Cardinals tied the Cubs last year in the standings... this year, I predict the Cardinals tie the Brewers in the standings, both teams behind the Cubs, unfortunately. Of course, my inner hardcore fan thinks the Cardinals will somehow be able to beat the Cubs (y’know, Cubs gonna Cub), but if we are just looking at projections, you can’t really argue... the Cubs just have more difference makers.
As for the Brewers, outside of Contreras and Chourio (who, sure, could have amazing seasons and outdo their projections) you have Freddy Peralta still the ace of their starting pitching staff; Brandon Woodruff a solid #2 pitcher (like their Fedde I guess?); Christian Yelich who is likely to be one of the better DHs in MLB; and a couple of solid players in Brice Turang and Joey Ortiz. They are in aggregate a pretty dang good team. But I don’t see them being able to repeat what they did last year. Maybe they’ll prove me wrong again. I hope not. The Cardinals have enough to worry about with Chicago.
Spreadsheets
Cardinals
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uITya_Wd2DZ
6qnym8y5O-Cz5bTifgsfnbBrjywymgCw/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Brewers
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NHhoqlwVSRdKASqKPrM-eUPCUniJ-Qm3UBx73Ao_j9I/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Cubs
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d3woQ-WHEY5Dd67CISIFMMmdp9mgkR5Yd4Ed5RZ4aeA/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Album Hall of Fame
One commenter a couple of weeks ago didn’t like my hall of fame induction, Mo Dotti - ‘Opaque’ (which I’m going to double down on and remind everyone how good of an album that is) which maybe left some of you wondering, just who is this guy and why is he talking about music? That goes for both myself and the commenter, who apparently had no music tastes, or didn’t want to talk about it.
So, a little about my music background. I am self taught, either a savant or just should have quit music years ago. Just kidding, I’ll never quit playing. I play by ear, and am a student of listening to other musicians work, both studio and live. As early as I can remember, I always liked more current sounds as opposed to old fashioned songs (although I did have a soft spot for the golden oldies as a kid, which for me was stuff like the Beach Boys and the Beatles, there was a classic hits radio station, which in the early 80s was bigger than what would become the classic rock station.
I mostly enjoyed 80s pop as a kid, Michael Jackson, Cindy Lauper, Prince were my favorites. My older sister would make me mix tapes of all those artists, also Madonna of course, cannot forget her. In the 80s this stuff was just absolutely a part of daily life. You could turn on the radio at any time and hear Hall & Oates, maybe the biggest 80s band of all, at least from the amount I would hear of them on the radio. Tears For Fears! were later my favorite, for a kid with quickly evolving tastes. Duran Duran were also a band that I liked.
My sister’s music tastes had a wide variety of more popular artists as mentioned before, but they also included all kinds of more underground 80s pop, one hit wonders, and similar. I wish I still had her mix tapes but they’ve been gone for a long while now. No idea what ever happened to them. She would show me audio and video gear from the college she went to, so I had an early exposure to the A/V world and some knowledge of recording. I would use my father’s dual dubbing tape cassette deck to make weird audio collages, which I would later learn in college were akin to the musique concrete movement of the 50’s and 60’s, which I of course had absolutely no knowledge of.
My tapes often were structured around making fun of my dad’s musical taste, slowing down sections of certain songs, speeding up other parts to sound like chipmunks, playing chunks of songs backwards, just having fun playing with the tape deck and listening to results. I often had to make up my own entertainment as a kid but I was lucky enough to have a lot at my fingertips. But not as much as some of the kids.
The what I would call upper middle class kids would make me mix tapes to get me into what they liked and this was my second mixtape experience after my sister made me a few. To play these tapes I was given her Japanese walkman which was twice as loud as the American ones at the time. It was the color pink but I didn’t care because it was so clear and loud sounding. I did have another walkman to use but it just didn’t sound as good.
The mixtapes I acquired on the school bus (I took the rural bus so these were kids from the bigger farms usually) while going down a dirt road listening to a loud as hell pink Japanese walkman were the Beastie Boys, the Dead Milkmen, Run DMC, Guns n Roses, and AC/DC. These tapes would shape my music taste for decades. Thanks, other families making copies of tapes! I didn’t have cable tv where I lived and would watch MTV at my grandma’s house or my older sister’s place with her mother. My family was complicated and had a venn diagram overlap with other households. My brother and I were from the same people, one of my sisters was from my mother’s previous marriage, and two of my sister’s were my father’s. Only the sister from my mother’s side stayed with us until she just moved in with her boyfriend as a teenager. My parents had my brother and I when they were older.
Somehow all this great music I had been exposed to (Van Halen when I could see MTV) turned into a love for power pop and cheesy stuff when I was in junior high. Yes I do have bad music taste, because I briefly liked New Kids On The Block and Tone Loc. And all that kind of garbage fun bubblegum pop. But I think the 80s and early 90s were also most definitely a time of trends, and many kids had a wide exposure to many different evolving sounds. I was probably hitting puberty as well.
All this became a subscription to Columbia House, first for tapes then for CDs. I only owned a few records, including the Ghostbusters soundtrack and a Village People album. Records were on the way out by the time I was 11 or 12. I won a Magnavox portable CD player at after prom (didn’t go to prom I just wanted to bowl and enter the raffle). Us music nerd kids had some kind of party somewhere or maybe just a listening session, instead of prom. By the time I was in high school music had become a big part of my identity. I learned some piano in grade school but as an early teen I was being forced into playing trombone, an instrument I was not really interested in. It was more cool and weird than I had imagined, but it still didn’t pique my interest. For a couple years I just kind of quit music and wasn’t as into it.
But, rock music had started to take its hold on my soul. I would see all the heavy metal shirts at school and be wowed by the artwork and design. Eventually these shirts would lure me in, and I was ordering something beyond Guns n Roses and AC/DC through Columbia House. I received what would become some of the most important albums to me: ‘And Justice For All’ by Metallica, ‘Rust In Peace’ by Megadeth, ‘Cowboys from Hell’ and ‘Vulgar Display of Power’ by Pantera, the self titled Mr. Bungle album, ‘Seas of Cheese’ by Primus. These would all become foundational and influential to me.
Then I caught a lot of music on Headbanger’s Ball and 120 Minutes when I got a car at 16. My mother didn’t want us to have cable or even drive, but my father won out in getting me a cheap car, which my mom hated because it didn’t work very well, but anyway. I could go on and on about this time of life, eventually discovering Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, all of the grunge bands... Rage Against the Machine, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins. NIN, Ministry, Skinny Puppy. Those were the times!
Many more bands. I am surprised how much music I heard even with no MTV. In some ways, the world was more free back then, even though we had to do many workarounds. Buying an album was a gamble. But we had more disposable income back then. My music passion and interest just kept growing to the point where I was going to a bunch of concerts, since I had a job (when I should’ve been saving for college). I was in one of the only industrial bands in western Illinois during the mid 90s. My very first band had our tape eaten in the cassette recorder. And I tried to start another band on my parents porch, that never panned out. My military veteran party animal uncle thought we were trying to cover Black Sabbath so it couldn’t have been that bad.
Eventually my music frenzy got to the point where I knew it was going to even influence my college educational journey. I checked out several art colleges since I wanted to be a designer. But it was the one college that also had an insanely cool sound studio, that caught my eye. I ended up moving to Chicago in 1997 to attend the college affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago museum. It was the best and worst choice I could possibly have made. Don’t get me wrong their design school was good, and their Sound Dept is and was one of a kind. I don’t regret it. But it was a very freeform and unstructured place. You had so much freedom that it was a bit much. It taught me how to record my own work though, and I studied the history of recording, sound art, production, computer sampling, manipulation, studio techniques, everything sound related.
Steve Albini would give speeches to a small classroom in one class, debating my pro digital recording professor (Steve was of course, pro analog, and Mr Archivist). My intro to Sound teacher interviewed Sun Ra, the free jazz astronaut of keyboard and synthesizer notoriety. We had a wall sized Emu analog synthesizer with giant patch bays and full sized cords. There were time machines everywhere. Everyone was their own musical encyclopedia. I was the sponge from the country absorbing everything. Cutting edge European jazz players would play right in front of us. Chicago blowhard jazzman Ken Vandermark would come hang out with us.
I was already kind of a weirdo before moving to Chicago but being around a bunch of other weirdos in art school, along with teachers teaching things that few colleges would bother teaching, I pretty much have an off the deep end knowledge of music and music production. I was always a bit of a writer though, writing short stories about the undead as a child, and short form fantasy novels, and lots of papers and essays. In college I would write about statues and paintings, and about why I was into music and sound. I brought up how my father was a race car driver and would take me to the World Series of Drag Racing several years. Those racing experiences got me used to very loud sounds and the feeling of waves through your chest.
So there you have it, I have a broad scope when it comes to hearing things. I have some of that musical background, but I also have training in hearing things as frequencies and doing sound design and I can analyze production, mixing, EQ techniques, analog vs digital, you name it. I see western vs eastern and world music scales both as scientific artifacts and as just portions of the audible frequency spectrum which ranges from 30-40 hz all the way up to 20,000 khz, if memory serves. That leaves out a lot of other frequencies some animals can hear. But we can hear a lot of range. Low tones do much different things to me than those crisp highs. Seeing music within a frequency spectrum with knowledge of music from around the world is a game changer. From singing in choir to playing piano, trombone, then saving up to buy my own guitar, amp, bass, (my “friend” smashed the acoustic), synthesizer(s), laptop, drumkit, percussion, Brazilian drum corps, box harp, backing vocals, and more. I have played all of those live before small crowds (except piano) and even midsized crowds. I have played at the Double Door (where the Rolling Stones and Smashing Pumpkins, Melvins, and many more have played), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, many underground and DIY venue, punk dive bars, heavy metal clubs, basements, farm fields, you name it. I have opened for one of my favorite bands in the world (Cheer Accident) and lived much of my music dream.
Now I just need a studio and people to pay me money to record them. I would love to make a living off of this stuff. But I have never quite broke past that surface level of playing many shows (that didn’t pay well or at all), I have done some live sound for shows but wasn’t being paid well for that either. I’ve spent the last (nearly) twenty years working part time or full time as an accounting assistant. I never quite got that full fledged accounting job. And I would rather do art and music. But here I am, writing about baseball and wondering how my team will do.
Currently I’m listening to Mark Lanegan, who I am just going to go ahead and focus on. A true American vocal great. He should and hopefully will be remembered by history as one of the great American vocalists. He will mostly be remembered as a rock n roll junkie by many, but his hoarse whiskey soaked, cigarette burned voice is second to none. He had a lot of control over such a damaged voice, and was a career musician. I think his voice should be in the rock n roll hall of fame.
Many of you will know Mark Lanegan as the mainman of the Screaming Trees... or know him from Queens of the Stone, where he was more of a part time vocalist. I’m focusing on Mark Lanegan Band today. ‘Field Songs’ was the album of his I bought, and it’s still my favorite. If you can track down any Mark Lanegan Band live recordings from 20-25 years ago, send them my way. They’re the best. Today I induct ‘Field Songs’ into the album hall of fame, dedicating it to baseball and more personally, to the midwest where I grew up. I lived in the northwest where Lanegan was from, as well. But midwest feels like home. Lanegan passed away several years back now but he’s worth a deep dive discography wise.