gehringer_2

Drats! Foiled again.

well, that worked.

Lets see if Malloy can work another BB off the righty. Wait, what, another LHP?

Jeez AJ, stop asking Parker to bunt, he can't, OK?

If an election goes to House, each state gets one vote. An individual House seat only matters if it swings the majority of the delegation of a state from one party to the other - so a house seat in a lopsided delegation like CA would not make any difference.

the SO has become a bit of an Aurora tracker. It's been active on and off most of the month but can't see much during the fuller phases of the moon (or cloudy weather of course!). Monday night there was visible aurora just west of town in Ann Arbor, but at least where we were there was no pattern, it was just sort of uniform background glow so not very exciting. I took a photo and there was decent red/green in it so no question is was aurora.

unfortunately probably mostly this.

Islam does present unique issues. If as an immigrant a Muslim continues to see themselves as Dar al-Islam in the midst of Dar al-Harb, it's going to be a problem for the US body politic just as Christian nationalism has become.

There has always been a theory that Trump's popularity actually falls when people see him more, so maybe it's in his interest to hide from the places where he's going to get his votes. 🤷‍♀️

So one of the factors in play is that eye dominance and handedness do not match one to one. Fewer lefties are left eye dominant than righties are right eye dominant, so indeed your lefties and righties don't necessarily see pitches the same way. On top of that many - maybe most MLB LHH are not left side dominant, they are right handers who learned to hit left handed, so within the group of LH hitters you have two different sub classes. There has also always been conventional wisdom that LH hitters and RH hitters hit better on pitches in different areas of the K zone. With heat maps available today it seems that could be verified or debunked either way if anyone cared to. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15513112/#:~:text=Abstract,handers being left eye dominant.

I would suggest that immigrants from the old world fall into two categories once they come to the US. Ones that continue to be captured by their old lives and history, and those that want nothing more than to leave what they left behind behind. When a reporter goes to do a story like this it is guaranteed he is only going to see people from the 1st group, but politically an important question is what percentage of a given immigrant population is in either group. In the Arab Muslim community it would be interesting to look at what proportion actually attend at the local mosques vs the total population.

the question will be how big a cut from the current rights value Diamond wants vs what Ilitch will accept. With the team on an upswing the Tigers may not be in a mood to rebate much.

so if the court approves Diamond's move to void the Tiger's deal then the Tigers either: a)work a new deal with what's left of Diamond at a lower payout for the Tigers, b) send the rights back to MLB like the teams whose deals were up - if Diamond's offer is worth less than than MLBs, c) go independent if they think they can do better themselves. The complication for Detroit is that both the the Tigers and the Wings (and FTM the Pistons) need homes. If there are advantages to Ilitch to having both teams on the same carrier, that argues against the Tigers going back to MLB.

I've seen estimates that the Clinton increases were about 80B/yr. We can't actually compare the relative scale to Bush's rate increases because the economy went into recession and revenues actually fell at first. Today totally federal taxes as a % of GDP are lower today than under Clinton. They reached ~19% under Clinton, we are sitting somewhere around 16% today. Since the economy boomed under Clinton, you can't very well argue increasing the total take back to closer to 19% would tank the economy, and 3% of GDP today raises an additional raises $750B, so you'd cut the annual deficit growth about in half. Not sure how fast the Biden infrastructure spending will start rolling off the books, but that should reduce another big chunk a few years out. It's not the economics that are broken, just the politics. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

you may get the VR view - I'm willing to bet it will still come with commercials!

And really not sure if you can call it Clinton's doing, GHWB passed the tax increase that cost him the election but set Clinton up to achieve that balanced budget.

the GOP weakness in special elections is one incontrovertible fact that forces one to wonder if the polls are going to end up missing by a mile, or maybe it's just that GOP voters refuse to go to the polls more than once every 4 yrs. If that is true now, it certainly didn't used to be.

I think it's hard to learn to handle a breaking ball away period whether you are LH or RH. But maybe a difference is that RHHs who can't manage the breaking ball away are never going to get to (or stay long in) the majors at all, whereas a LHH who can't hit good LHP can still be plenty useful on a major league roster. The other thing that is funny about platoon splits is that the two best LHP in baseball this year both have pretty small platoon splits against. Skubal is only 85 OPS pts, Sale is less than that - about 50. But neither of them depend that much on horizontal break. Skubal is mostly fastball change, Sale throws a lot of 'sliders' but his slider is more like a 12-6 curve ball - slow and mostly vertical.

the social/economic cost also depends a lot on what it gets spent on. Spend money on good infrastructure and education, you aren't going to miss that that money was spent. Buy millionz of 80MM artillery shells to blow up somewhere (or maybe even worse, never blow up) or to add the 10th lane to a 9 lane highway, maybe not so much.

but if that was before the big changes he made in approach it may not be transferable. A hitter has some choice in how much he is willing to tailor his approach. A left hander may be able to give up coverage against RHP to hit LHP better, but is that necessarily his best strategy? If he believes (or knows) he's likely to be platooned anyway, then he should probably sell-out on a approach to hit RHP and if his splits get worse, so be it. to answer the initial question, last year Kerrys platoon split was about 180 OPS pits. This year it is off the charts (>400 OPS points) but it's on a tiny sample size (30PA) because Hinch hasn't let him face LHP. So egg, meet chicken.

I think a lot of it is just how much experience is available. Riley's father pitched to him left handed constantly as he was learning to play. For most lefties, they just aren't going to see enough LHP to hone their skill on the ball breaking away as much as right handers will get the chance to see RHP throw them breaking balls away. OTOH, right handers don't suffer all that much from not seeing a lot of left handers because most left handers can't throw them anything that breaks away from them.

so far he definitely does. The dilemma for a manager is winning now versus developing his players. If a manager has a reasonable platoon pair for a player there just isn't much incentive for him to embark on a 'learn on the fly' program with his player at the MLB level. If a left hand hitter comes up who has already shown a reasonably small platoon split like Riley or Keith, they may get the chance to stick as everyday players, but otherwise they are probably out of luck.

but how can you blame anyone in DC? People generally respond rationally to the incentives they face. I have highlighted the dishonesty of the GOP in particular but both parties absolutely demagogue on debt control strictly when it's the other party's priorities they want to see cut - so there is no honesty or good faith available in the debate, so no-one sees any profit in going there, and with a media environment where there are no voices of enough authority to hold the sides accountable across the whole body politic to where the game playing has political cost, there you are. again, in the real world, since the Dems want to spend program money, they actually have a higher level of consciousness about what the cost of debt service does to their ability to spend on their program priorities, so as practical matter, I think that is one of the reasons Dem admins have been more the more responsible in recent years.

two observations: -regardless of whether it's likely that proposals end up enacted, it's still useful to know in which directions a candidates aspirations lie. -many things that are too big a lift to institute in whole can be started in-part or pilot to find out what costs and logistics will be. ACA would never have been passed if RomneyCare in MA hadn't provided the small working model. Communication in a campaign takes many forms and a lot gets said for the sake of their symbolism or attitude value.

I don't know if he needs to make swing changes to do it or just pitch selection change, but Torks's biggest issue in my reading was that he was only doing damage on cookies - his hot zone just a tiny middle middle spec.