The Chiefs won the Super Bowl and baseball is starting. Happy Friday!
Every week over on Twitter, I take your questions and weave them into a beautiful tapestry here on 810whb.com in my Friday AMA. Ask questions, get answers.
Unless the Royals are in the playoff race, the city will begin to fully tune out as Chiefs training camp begins. Until then, the answer to this is determined by either the Royals’ ability to develop young talent or your personal addiction to baseball. I’ve already accidentally made a taser-based bet based on the playoff run not happening, so it really depends on who is called up and when. If we get a peek at the future of the pitching staff twice a week, plus (hopefully) progress from Brad Keller and Jake Junis, they’ll stay interesting until darn near the end of the year. If they don’t get some developmental positives out of the pitching staff, they’ll be in danger of becoming background noise pretty quickly.
There are a lot of factors here. If you have a large, well-cared-for fish tank, you could have a dozen fish and it wouldn’t be too many. If you have twelve dogs, you don’t live in a house. You live in a zoo. We will attempt to solve this problem today.
I generally like animals. I haven’t had a pet of my own since I moved out of my parents’ house, but we always had at least one dog and I once had an obese gerbil. I also have a stern, controversial belief: I don’t want to live with anything that sheds or makes my living space smell bad. With that caveat, I’m willing to let everyone else live their own lives.
Here is Joshua Brisco’s Patented PetMath™.
Dogs are the base unit, equaling a full unit (1). Cats are a .75 because the good ones can take care of themselves about 75% of the time but still shed on everything you own. Small mammals are .5, from rabbits to rodents, with possible adjustments on the degree of stink. Large reptiles and amphibians are .5, small ones are .25. Fish are .1.
You have a maximum of 3.5 points to work with. Four dogs are too many. Two dogs and two cats are fine. A dog, a cat, a small mammal, a large reptile, a small one, and five fish? You’re doing a lot, but you’re not a hoarder. Want 35 fish? Fine. Four cats? Don’t let them have kittens, or you’re going to be over-budget.
Now, there’s probably a diminishing cost if you’re adding, say, your fourth lizard in the same habitat or your third hamster in the same cage, but I’m not a mathematician. I’m here to begin the PetMath™ science, not end it.
Oh, and birds are 100 points each. Nobody should own a bird.
This is going to be such a weird quarterback offseason. I’d bet against the specifics of Matt Stafford going to the Chargers just like I’d be against the specifics of just about any QB change — not because it won’t happen, but because there are just so many options.
Specifically to the two parts of this question: my hunch is that the Chargers look for a more reserved option to follow Philip Rivers. That could be Teddy Bridgewater, Tom Brady, Marcus Mariota or, honestly, several others. That’s just a hunch based on the idea that generally you follow one method that didn’t work with a drastically opposite one. However, I’d actually be pretty interested in Stafford if I was LA or any other QB-needy team. Stafford has always seemed like the guy who will be among the most mischaracterized and underappreciated quarterbacks of this generation. I kind of hope he gets a chance to outperform those preconceptions elsewhere.
The XFL’s entire soul is based on the existence of football fans with NFL withdrawals. I didn’t even know that Fantasy XFL was a thing, but now I’m pretty upset that I’m not playing in a league. Golf prop bets seem like a more sure path to financial ruin, so I’ll say that one.
Honestly? …Not much. My weather sweet-spot is probably in the low 60s, and I dread the sweltering heat much more than I dread even the single-digit winter days. I can always put on a coat. In the summer, I’m sweating within 0.2 seconds of stepping outside.
Thanks for reading. This was an exceptionally fun week on (Almost) Entirely Sports — you can catch that by subscribing to the show wherever you get your podcasts.