gehringer_2

No good info on how much of the refinery Whiting has back up and running and they still have the employees locked out so management/engineering staff is doing operations. That might mean no maintenance is being done because even if the engineers know how to operate the plant, they don't have the skills to fix stuff that breaks, not to mention no engineering work is getting done. They are probably also double shifted so the question is how long they go before they start making mistakes. OTOH, they might already have a non-union maintenance staff. Not uncommon for operators to have gotten operations and maintenance split into union/non-union.

You look at Flaherty's pitch charts and not much jumps out, velo and break on his pitches are all similar to last season, but the pitch value of his FB is way down. The only thing I noticed is that he is throwing the curve less, probably because he's landing it for strikes less, which I suppose reduces the amount of change of speed that batters are seeing. It is the only pitch he throws that gets him to a 10mph delta from his FB. Without good change of speed life is gonna be harder.

speaking of 5' 8", McGonigle's load up is pretty similar (mirror image of course) to Altuve's. He doesn't pick up his front foot quite to the same extreme but overall the step is pretty similar, maybe even a bit longer.

If they manage to hang on and get to the playoffs this season after these pitching losses it should go down as one of the most unlikely seasons ever. The starting staff that won 87 games last season has now had injuries to Jobe, Skubal, Mize, Olson and a potential starter in Melton while adding Valdez and Verlander, with the latter being a non-factor. To that add that Flaherty has been bad. Valdez was a great add but it's still +1 against -5, which isn't good math.

The offense always feels worse when you are behind and/or especially when you don't trust your bullpen so failure to add runs feels like it's courting impending doom.

The report is that Iran hit the terminus of UAE's pipeline bypassing Hormuz - if true that's maybe another million BBL/day taken off the market.

if Melton is back quick and is good, and Flaherty straightens out, they *might* stay in it, but this is pretty much turning out to be a season from HeII

I wouldn't bet against the explanation of the epidemic of achilles raptures in the NBA being drug induced tendinopathy.

the other thing is that the single biggest reform that could be made, which is to stop corporate campaign funding, will 100% hit the television industry-since that is where 95% of those $ are spent. So the video press, who all work for the entertainment industry, and who might otherwise be at least somewhat positively disposed to reform, stay away from this issue like it's the plague.

maybe the Dems are learning that if you are going to be a 'reform' party, you actually have to be in favor of reform.

In anticipation of meeting with Trump later this month, the Chinese have promulgated a series of rules aiming to nullify US sanctions on Chinese refiners. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-rare-defiance-of-us-sanctions-sparks-showdown-over-banks-021410787.html

a number of conflicting reports about doings in the Persian Gulf this AM. The USN may or may not be trying to get ships past Hormuz. Of course the Navy doesn't have nearly enough ship to escort all the traffic waiting in the gulf even if they wanted to, and I doubt they want to.

It was such a different era. Today it would be like: "Oh- someone shot the President? Hmmm. Well, on to lesson II" The other funny thing to contemplate is whether anyone would be crying in the hall if it had been Nixon. Even if you had voted for RMN, it's hard to imagine having much emotional investment in him! 🤷‍♂️

The only problem (OK - not the *only* problem) with MTGs epiphany is that if she were a more serious person she would have stayed in the House and kept up the opposition. But it points up how hard it is for the blue side to actually move these people to their side. Trump is losing support among people like Green who have come to oppose him on an issue, e.g. Green on Epstein, Carlson on Iran, but who still support too much of the remaining RW agenda to ever actually vote on the blue side. A couple of generations ago, when political difference weren't so culturally conditioned, it was a lot easier to get people to change parties over policy issues. Today getting a person across the divide is tied up in personal identity issues as well as policy preferences.

Was listening to this game and was wondering how McGonigle got to 2nd. Dan and Dirks talked about Rogers sort of fooling the Rangers about which way he was going, but the key for McGonigle was that Burger just completely abandoned 1st base to run at Rogers instead of throwing the ball. Burger had gone so far across the diamond that KM could go most the way to 2nd safe in the knowledge he could beat Burger back to 1st if a throw did go to 2nd. Bad play for the Rangers all around.

Rico played 848 games over 9 seasons and managed to amass a whopping -1.1 WAR. Much like left handed relief pitchers, if you can hit 20 hr you keep getting chances. Zinter spent 13 yrs in AAA with an overall 838 OPS. A worthy nominee for the Mike Hessman association.

summer of 46 he would have been a returning war hero campaigning for his 1st House seat in Boston.

That's crappy. It ought to be a DQ when a team brings an illegal bat.

I've been using Fedora for more than 15 yrs. It's the opposite of an LTS, releases come 2'ce/yr and updates every day. But Linux updates so painlessly, even the full release updates take less than maybe 1/2 hr. TBH, I probably still wouldn't advise someone to use linux if they are not open to learning how to maintain it. It's not particularly hard but you have be willing to do a searching when you have an issue and a little typing to fix it. OTOH, when stuff is broke, linux developers fix it FAST - usually a day or two.

Before I even gave up playing, our league had gone to the lower flight ball - the diamonds we played on weren't big enough the high travel balls.

Pitching Kaos for the win.

Burch Smith will be trying to leaf the Rangers behind.

https://kubuntu.org/download/

Shades of Javy against Will Craig.

and how many plus players has Yzerman scored by trade? Debrincat, Gibson....Faulk maybe..?