🛏️ Tubz Unfiltered - Volume 163
Actual monster under the bed; March Madness + Torpedo bats; Question
Happy Tuesday Wednesday, y’all!
Call me a Boomer, but April Fool’s social media posts are childish and oftentimes are not funny.
🛁 EXTRA BUBBLES 🛁
‘Monster’ under bed in Kansas town leads to arrest
Trauma for life. I don’t think my patented phrase, “holy hell in a handbasket,” does this story justice.
Let’s imagine you’re the babysitter and one of the kids you’re babysitting tells you, “I think there’s a monster under my bed.” You think to yourself, “Yeah, OK, sure thing. What are you going to tell me next? Santa Claus is real?” So you waltz to the kid’s bedroom, play along with the charade to appease the kid, check under the bed for this “monster,” and then BAM SHAZAM, a 27-year-old dude who used to live in the house (but “was barred from being there due to a protection from abuse order”) is lying under the bed. The audible scream I would release from my body would be so loud that the rest of the block, perhaps even the town, would think it was a town-wide alarm being set off.
Chief Criminal Dumb Dumb was booked in a Kansas jail “on suspicion of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary, aggravated battery, child endangerment, felony obstruction of a law enforcement officer, and violation of a protection from abuse order.” If you were the parent of that child, would you advocate for the death penalty? It might be a bit harsh, but that child is going to be scarred for a veryyyyy long time.
In closing, let’s address the elephant in the room: How much do you think the parents tipped the babysitter? Gotta be a hefty amount, right?
🏆 SPORTZ 🏆
2025 MARCH MADNESS RECAP
And then there were four, culminating in what might be the best Final Four we have ever seen. The four squads are the top-four ranked teams in KenPom, and all are in the top ten in terms of Adjusted Offensive Efficiency and Adjusted Defensive Efficiency.
Here are the six highest-rated teams from the last decade of college basketball, per KenPom. 1. 2025 Duke (Final Four) 2. 2025 Houston (Final Four) 3. 2024 UConn 4. 2021 Gonzaga 5. 2025 Florida (Final Four) 6. 2025 Auburn (Final Four)
It is the second time since the Tournament expanded in 1985, and the first since 2008, that all four numero uno seeds have punched their ticket to the Final Four.
Duke will meet Houston on one side of the bracket in what should be the title game. The Blue Devils bulldozed through the Sweet 16 and Elite 8, and frankly, they have bulldozed through their opponents, and put it in reverse to send a message, for the last six weeks. In the Elite 8, Duke held Alabama to 65 points, the Crimson Tide’s second-lowest scoring output of the season, en route to a 20-point victory. Mind you, Alabama scored 113 points against the BYU Super Soakers in the Sweet 16. And during the Blue Devil’s 15-game winning streak, their average margin of victory has been almost 24 points. Duke is just so damn good, but somehow, someway, head coach Jon Scheyer has made this Duke squad not hateable. Will I still be rooting for the team’s downfall? You friggin’ bet your bottom gotdamn dollar I will be.
Houston survived a dogfight with Purdue in the Sweet 16, courtesy of b-e-a-utiful inbound play with seconds remaining, before putting plastic wrap around Tennessee’s entire head and not letting them breathe in the Elite 8. Of Houston’s top eight players in terms of minutes per game this season, five are homegrown, a rarity in today’s game.
Florida and Auburn will meet on the other side of the bracket; the Gators beat Auburn, 90-81, earlier this season in the lone matchup between the two SEC squads.
The Tigers were in complete control for pretty much the entire game against Michigan State in the Elite 8, thanks to the play of All-American Johni Broome (25 PTS, 14 REB), who had a double-double at halftime. He did briefly leave the game in the second half due to injury but returned and nailed a three immediately upon return, prompting HC Bruce Pearl and the Auburn faithful to take a bigger sigh of relief than a dude on Maury who was just told he is NOT the father.
On the other hand, Florida needed every stroke of March magic to advance to its first Final Four since 2014 as the Gators were dead in the water in the Elite 8 until the Texas Tech Red Raiders’ figurative guns ran out of ammo. After Big 12 Player of the Year JT Toppin scored to increase Texas Tech’s lead to nine, 75-66, with 3:15 left, it was the Thomas Haugh and Walter Clayton Show for the Gators from that point forward. They scored the next 12 points for Florida, including a go-ahead, ridiculous three by Clayton to put his squad up one with under a minute left. Texas Tech only mustered two points over that stretch.
TORPEDO BATS
Why spend $700+ million on outfielder Juan Soto when you can employ an MIT-educated physicist (now with the Miami Marlins) to construct a bat that actually helps your trash hitters belt dingers?
The new “torpedo” bat was all the rage throughout MLB’s opening weekend, as the New York Yankees socked a record-breaking 15 home runs in their opening series, including nine in Saturday’s matchup, against the Brewers. The bats, used by Yankee hitters such as Anthony Volpe and Jazz Chisolm (3 HRs over the weekend) in addition to several other hitters around the league (Giancarlo Stanton used the bat last season, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan), are technically legal per MLB standards, as defined in Rule 3.02.
Per Michael Kay of the Yankees broadcast team: “The Yankee front office analytics department did a study on Anthony Volpe, and every single ball it seemed like he hit on the label. (Author’s note: Seems like that’s a fancy way of saying he was bad at hitting baseballs.) He didn’t hit any on the barrel. So they had bats made up where they moved a lot of the wood into the label so the harder part of the bat is going to strike the ball."
As much as I would like to write that these new bats are a cheat code, swinging a glorified Vortex bat from my youth doesn’t necessarily mean the hitter turns into Barry Bonds, at least according to two hitters.
“I think that’s still up for debate,” Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers told The Athletic about the bat’s usefulness. “I don’t think it’s going to be something that’s an end-all, be-all for everybody, that everybody’s going to start swinging these bats and become better hitters. I think this might work for some people and might not for others. For me, I’m giving it a little bit of a trial period [to] see how I like it.”
“I feel like we need a full year of data to see how they play,” Twins shortstop Carlos Correa said, per The Minneapolis Star Tribune. He also added a potential downside to the lower barrels: “Cutters, sweepers, sliders, any pitch running away that you hit further down the bat, those are tougher to hit hard.”
Call me a Boomer (again), but back in my day, some hitters would smash dingers with ease and did not need any special bat to do so. They instead used PEDs — and it was electric. #BringBackPEDs
🤓 BATH TIME PONDERING 🤓
If you chuckled and/or enjoyed it, make sure to forward it to others and/or share it on social. Any corrections, omissions, suggestions, etc., send 'em my way. Much love. -Tubz