gehringer_2

Rangers almost as bad as the Tigers.

That was another pretty decent AB by Javy. He did not swing out of the zone, got the ball in play on a tough pitch.

Keith and Greene both going to LF with intent today. Very good.

Could we try throwing a bucket of water on him just to check? I mean nothing ventured nothing gained....

OK - Today Hinch has his genius hat on.

Lange with the bases loaded? Hinch determined to shake it all out early.

Have you been to Australia? They run what they call 'road trains' because there isn't much rail as you get to the interior. It's a over size semi tractor with three drive axles pulling three trailers - each around maybe ~80ft. Mostly on two lane roads. When one passes you in the oncoming you just hope you spent enough on your rental upgrade to have sufficient rubber on the road to keep you in your lane.

Colt living dangerously - going to replay. make that E4

Faedo up

Dirks says right now Maeda's FB is trash and the slider is trash. Doesn't leave much.

AJ? AJ? Let not let this get out of hand again...please....

hope Hinch doesn't get greedy and try to get too much out of him. Too demoralizing to waste a comeback.

it's 1:30 pm down 4-0. Do you know where your Matt Manning is?

I may be confusing this with another player, but IIRC, it eventually emerged they 'nicked' a nerve doing Bonderman's surgery. It can take a couple of years for nerves to regrow back all the way down your arm, assuming they even will, which they don't necessarily. (I once injured a nerve in my forearm - took about 6 mo for it to repair itself back down to the tip of my thumb but I was lucky and feeling did come back.) In the meantime Bonderman got tired of the rehab merry-go-round when he preferred to be fishing.

there is a lot of energy around fixed wing VTOL electric commuter airplanes. Very complex mechanical system to achieve a high enough level of safety. I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Not sure which paper, but a reporter took Amtrak from NY to SF and of course the fuel use by the train per passenger mile was far higher than a plane would have been. By his numbers (which he didn't provide) 700 miles was the crossover where air was more fuel efficient than rail. With planes you minimize fuel use by minimizing takeoffs, thus efficiency goes up with trip length. The great unknown in the story was how full his train was for that calc. A SRO Acela on the east coast is probably very fuel efficient. A mostly empty cross country Amtrak not so much. The primary virtue of rail is it's scalability. Once you have a track you can move an almost arbitrarily large number of people on it at low marginal cost. Airports run out of gates and landing slots and those are very hard constraints. But rails need your entire urban geography to be conformed to where the tracks are, and unlike Europe, for the last 100 yrs in the US our urban geography was evolved in almost exactly the opposite direction. Big lift to change that! But urban light rail still seems to be the tech that can move the most people intra urban distances for the least cost and least congestion. I've always been partial to electric buses/trolleys. We still had them in Det when I was young.

True, but there is also a method to Hinch's madness. If you want players to believe that they don't have to worry about the outcome of their individual ABs, that they just need to stay with their plans, then for them to believe you, you have to commit to not sitting them every time their outcomes are bad, but the necessary flipside of that is you don't change your line-up plans just because someone has a good outcome day either. Now one can certainly say the whole idea is wrong and that riding hot hands is a better management strategy overall. But that's a broader discussion. I think Hinch is being consistent within the system he is implementing. IIRC, Sparky was big on giving guys off when they were on hot streaks. I was never really on board with that, but then again, I always thought Sparky was over rated as a manager. Not saying he was bad or anything, and he a huge personality, but a lot of guys could have won with the talent he had.

Bad metrics, bad outcomes. ChemE's used to get tasked with doing most of the cost accounting around their units because no-one else would understood how and I've seen bad cost accounting systems sink profitable enterprises. Too many managers never learn to bring the same kind of skepticism to data placed in front of them that engineers have to learn about data put in front of them (though many Engr fail that test as well).

and here I thought Pointillism might be making a comeback.

technically true, but the sum total of that raking at every level was 61 AB above A ball. He now has 67 AB in the majors with an 83 OPS+ so that sample is just as determinative, in fact more determinative than his MiLB career so far. Considering that most rookies see their performance drop in the course of their first season as the league learns their weaknesses, I don't see Langford as having a uniquely positive predictor right now. He may meet the challenge, he may not, time will tell. But that doesn't change that TX bringing him up this fast was more stunt than solid justification. But that's fine, sport is in the end entertainment, and stuff like that is entertaining even if it turns out not to have been in the best interest of the player. The ROY bonus pick setup will probably lead to more of this though.

I agree. The Dems need to game out strategy for all the possible, but remain in a reactive position because the inputs on the GOP are chaotic in the true statistical sense - random and unpredictable. And Johnson has some of the same problem that McCarthy had but for a different reason. McCarthy was just a liar, no-one trusted him, so no-one would risk anything for him because nothing he said was reliable. Johnson doesn't have McCarthy's rep as a liar, but he has some of the same trust problem because he keeps changing his mind, which still puts potential supporters out to dry in the same way if even for different reasons.

Jeremy Bondermam fit the latter description.

and he was right. Problem was there weren't enough of them (good seats that is)

Just by the numbers, I don't see them being a 95+ point team without improving their goal differential over this season's, so the challenge will be to make up Kane's scoring if Yzerman declines to bid for his services or if Kane simply decides he prefers to go to a better team. His 20 goals are half the improvement from last season. Otherwise they have to hope they can get the improvement on the goals against side.