gehringer_2

Carpenter throws pretty well, probably the best of the bunch with Perez in Toledo. Vierlings arm may still be good but we'll have to see. OTOH, calling Riley's arm average is a stretch. He's firmly in the noodle category.

well, practically speaking it's only a semantic quibble, but I think Trump actually has a very finely developed personal sense of right and wrong, which when seen from the outside basically goes: I'm right, and what I want is right, and if you don't agree, you are wrong. Of course he doesn't see it that way, to him it's just because the world is a rational place that all choices that happen to be right also redound to his benefit. My impression is that Trump sees the world in very black and white moral terms, it's just that his is a depraved narcissistic morality. That would be opposed to seeing him as Nietzschean sort of character who sees himself as transcending right/wrong as concepts. Opinions will vary, but that is my take if I'm going to do a little amateur pysch.

the bottom line is a trade only helps if your GM actually makes you better in the trade. That means that if he gets back picks, he has to be able to hit on those picks, if gets back players, he has to somehow get more valuable players back than he sends out. Right now how much confidence do we have that Yzerman would be that GM in either circumstance? There is just no free lunch, there is only one route to your team improving, and that is for your management team to outperform other management teams in scouting, drafting, trading, development. Absent that, all the moves for the sake of moves are just deck chairs on the Titanic - or waiting around for lightning to strike your lottery luck.

that was the nail, but I doubt he could have survived the inflation rate even without it. He was an outsider partly because he was cocky and he and his team thought they knew better. Even when that may be true you can't act like it! Later in his life he freely admitted that at that point in his life he wasn't prepared for the job. The contrast to Reagan was so striking. Carter was a very bright guy, but he and he team were not self aware of their weaknesses, Reagan was never the sharpest tool in drawer but he surrounded himself with a large number of the most competent people that have served in a admin in my lifetime: Schultz, Baker, Simon, Volker, Regan et al. (of course there were a few ringers like Meese!)

Holmes had talked about that being an obvious option in the interview.

Unfortunately Carter's economic illiteracy eventually overshadowed his other virtues.

Brent is volatile this morning (there's a bad chemistry pun...). Gap has fallen back closer to $8 right now.

Yeah, but Carter committed a SIN against every GOD lovin' 'MURICAN ideal - worse even than having' a BLACK dude named HUSSEIN in the White House -- He was gonna make us the METRIC SYSTEM!

two point lead and the ball, all Boozer has to do is hold the ball, they have to foul him and he can put it out of reach at the line. Terrible end to a huge performance.

true, but being reversed in real time on broadcast games it a whole 'nother level of exposure to face compared to t some charts on a website somewhere.

I guess a related question is will ABS drive the umpires to be better? To the degree it does, that would have to degrade the value of framing as it would mean umpires are getting harder to fool.

No - I get what you are saying. But everything has its limits. If Iran becomes intransigent enough, there will be boots on the ground to remove the mullahs, possibly Chinese if not ours! Another aspect further out is that Iran can easily over play its hand to where its leverage will turn out to be heavy but short lived. Everything that goes down the Persian Gulf can just as easily go by pipeline (or rail in the case of other products) to somewhere else, and those pipelines are pretty easy to build across the dessert. I imagine they are being sketched out even as we type. In general Iran has been a very bad actor, but until fairly recently not a particularly foolish one. At this point it's hard to know how much less competent the new leadership will now be for having been degraded and additionally radicalized, but in the past I would have expected Iran to have a pretty good sense of how much pressure it could exert without bringing the temple down around themselves.. Who knows if that is still true? We have certainly increased the probability that Iran will be less rational going forward.

A newfie can easily slobber you to death though...

that's a kind of statistical paradox though. The win probability due to a given run is not a constant. A run in the 1st may be adding a small "X" to win probability in the 1st, but if that run is still the margin in the 9th that same run is now adding X * Y - a lot more to win probability. But it's the same run. It's not when you scored it that mattered.

The way technology revolutions work is a little counter intuitive. It's a little bit like trying to light a fire. You have to work hard initially to light the fire, but once lit you get back a ton more out than you put in. So we have been operating on a fire based energy economy, and that worked pretty well for a long time and as long as fire was cheap (both in explicit and external costs), there was no motivation to find anything better. But the fire based economy has become both toxic and expensive, enough to finally motivate a technological push into a different paradigm - which is direct generation of electricity from renewable sources. But once you get over the cost hump to get the new system off the ground, it's going to turn out be cheaper than the old system ever was, we just had no way to know that in advance and no reason to try to find out, but that is how technology usually works.

agree. ABS will just act as a limit to how bad a pitch you are likely to be able to 'promote'

that's the thing about a baseball game though - runs in the 1st count just as much as runs later and any pitcher can end up on the ropes at any point in a game, so I guess I'd just as soon press any advantage at any point. But I will admit there is a difference between burning your 1st and your last challenge. If a game looks like it's going to stay close I'm more on board with trying to keep the last challenge in your back pocket.

The other aspect that is going to evolve is that ABS gives a player his own, custom, consistent zone in the up and down direction. Hopefully you have players who gain confidence in their own judgement in the vertical direction as they only have one standard to internalize rather than every umpire's estimate of their zone. I think there are other things that should evolve as well. I would guess players will figure out that in and down are the places they see as well or better than the ump, while they probably want to feel more certain before challenging an outside call.

I hope it does force them to move on from Umpires that aren't very good. There are an enough guys who call a good game behind the plate, MLB has had no real need to keep the guys who don't. It's just been habit, but now it's a habit they have more motivation to fix.

It is exactly set up so no one get to see video before the challenge is made - it has to be a player's live judgment vs the Ump's live judgement. I'm actually OK with that.

the old saying is that the Stone Age didn't end because they ran out of stones. If the US ties itself to oil, industrial efficiency in the rest of the world will just continue to pass us by as they operate on an energy economy that is not only cleaner, but CHEAPER. A lot of oil is going to get left in the ground around the world because it will have no economic value at its cost of recovery.

And it shows up in March because when the stakes are higher and other teams play a little harder, the Wings have no reserve, no margin to raise their own game. Maybe McLellan is too good a regular season coach 🙄

Not a very entertaining game, but I can still thank the Tigers for a much less frustrating evening than watching the Wings would have been.

Keith needs a little work on the throws

McGonigle needed to have challenged the 1st one, which was a ball.