Has anyone asked Billy Burns why he's so dour all the time?

I'm glad Yoenis Cespedes is a Met. Going to law school in New York, a number of my closest friends being Mets fans, and marrying into a Mets family have conspired to make them my second team. I don't watch them that much (who has time for six hours of baseball in a night?) but I follow their goings-on a tiny bit closer than I do other teams and I'm a lot happier about their successful 2015 than I would otherwise be -- certainly I don't spend a lot of energy rooting for teams owned by people like the Wilpons unless I have a very good reason to do so.

But it's a little weird that Cespedes is already on his fourth team, right? He's a special case because he came into the league making market-rate money rather than being salary-suppressed for six years, but I can't think of a comparably good player who's been on as many teams as he has in as short a time. Moving around this much usually means you're waiver-bait.

I would like to have a thought about this trade deadline having the most trades in at least 18 years but I don't really. There are more tradeable assets than there used to be (slot money, competitive-balance picks) but all the slot money got traded around the time of the IFA signings and as I recall only one competitive-balance pick got moved (from the Marlins, who have now done that three times). The two Wild Cards thing makes more teams buyers, but it also makes fewer teams sellers, so it isn't clear how that moves the trade needle.

I'd like to say something about sabermetrics/Wall Street thinking pervading the game and turning players into assets to be moved about willy-nilly, but that has been increasingly true for a decade now; it's probably not something that hit a tipping point this year.

In all, until I hear a better idea, I'm chalking up the large number of trades to happenstance. A blip.

If you don't miss Bobby Kielty, I don't know who you are.

Madison Bumgarner may be a manly man who chops down trees and rides horses, but he could at least have dressed a little nicer to get married. If you can't put on a tie for your wedding, what'll it be for? They look nice! They're nice!

Same, kind of, for Mark Zuckerberg.

"Tact" is like social graces. "Tack" is like your course. If you've decided to go in a new direction on a project, you're trying a new tack, not a new tact.