gehringer_2

In the depression you had a stock value crash, which coupled with tariff increases, slowed economic activity and threw people out of work. Since stock prices had cratered, it was difficult for business to raise investment funds to put people back to work - it was an unrighteous feedback loop - and pretty much directionally exactly where Trumps policies point. I think a difference today is the investment class actually has so much political power and is so much better politically organized, that if it comes to it, they will likely find a way to be rid of Trump before he can crash the market in anything like '29. But the other place even working class folks are affected by a market crash is that even if they've never bought a stock, if they have IRAs or 401 or even old style pensions, they are likely invested somewhere that will be affected.

Regression in the BP performance may turn out to be the soft underbelly of this team. A lot of guys probably were pitching better than their expected values last season. Also doesn't hope that we are getting zero from Lange and Foley, who as recently as a year ago were our expected 1 and 2 BP arms.

one for a bazillion with RISP didn't help either.

Does Michelin know that Bib is moonlighting as the Pope?

Not the guy I expected to struggle out of the gate.

Maybe if things go sour fast in April, it will at least be the end of Maeda and Baez.

when you have Kreidler, Jake, McKinstry, Margot and Sweeney in the line-up, Tork, Riley, Keith, Carp just cant be making many outs.

that *would* explain it

that was one of the weirder plays you'll see

if we can do anything with it.

they are going to overrule this. he took a couple of steps.

Tiger pitchers throwing OK - not getting beat up all that much, but too many mistake pitches

Middle/Middle hanging change. Goodbye baseball...

McKinstry got a glove on it, slowed it down which ended up hurting. Of course, every time this happens this year the question will be: Would Bregman have made that play?

Fast charging is a difficult subject to say anything absolute about, and the tech there is a rapidly moving target. As general principle, it's a higher risk to the life expectancy to fast charge any battery but the devil is in the details of each manufacturers battery architecture, instrumentation, charge controller and what you find at the place you stop to charge it, even the ambient temperature can be a factor. But if you are commuting everyday and have charging available at night, fast charging at least won't be a concern for the car's work day utility as your range is much longer than your commute. So fast charging is more a matter trying to use the car for long trips. My Sister recently got an EV and ended up less than impressed with how long it actually took it to 'fast' charge it the first time she decided to take a longer trip with it in CA. That is to say while the car performs as warranted, that didn't turn out to be quite as convenient as is implied. I've been doing homework on EVs also, but since we are a 2 car house with reasonably efficient late model SUV, I don't envision the need to use a new EV for long distance travel any time soon. So far the IONIQ seems impressive, and I like the Mustang just for itself. A hold up for me is that installing a charger is the pivot for doing a bunch of other electrical upgrades on the house I haven't completely sorted out yet.

As far as I understand it, the total value of the contract - as everything, has to be amortized over the playing years of the contract for lux tax purposes. Deferrals are discounted at some percentage that represents somebody's guess about future inflation (MLBPA and owners negotiate this number I assume.....?). I don't know what the forumula is for dividing up a front bonus but I'd bet it's in there. Looking at Snells deal, the both the deferred money and the bonus are in the total, which is then divided into the 6 playing years of the deal for an annual lux tax charge of 31.3 M. So they get to spread out the charge on the bonus but all the dollars in the contract end up in the tax charge somewhere.

I actually thought there was rule against inverse taper on a bat - maybe that was just ASA as some point when I was playing....

The Tiger front office complained that once you discounted the present value of Max's deferrals their offer was just as good, but if that was the case they should have structured their offer with the deferrals too. There is a lot of ego at play and those numbers reported with the deferrals undiscounted are what make the news and how players see themselves in the pecking order, and any player likes that kind of reporting. I guess teams count on a lot of inflation driving the eventual real cost of those deferrals down. And you get a sort of double whammy if you are above the (non)cap, a team like the Dodgers has to play lux tax on Ohtani's deferrals now and then still has to actually pay them later after he's done playing.

Or even 116.6%

counter point to the counter point: the NFL Football has been eating baseball'slunch for decades. Is it because there is so much parity almost all fans have recent memories of championships/near championships and rebuilds are 2 or 3 seasons instead of 8 or 9? Is parity the reason? I don't know - but it's the first argument to make.

It's probably inter-cut too fast to mistake the video for 1989, but chord progression and rhythm reminded me immediately of Sheila E "Glamorous Life"

this sort of makes sense. If you assume non-payroll expenses for operating a team don't vary *that* much across teams, then as total budgets go down, the % of non-payroll expense goes up, thus the % of total revenue to payroll is going to drop as well. Looking at the chart, it appears a lot of team have non-payroll budgets in the range of 150M-180M - which might include any money ownership was taking out of the team as well.

so is it my display settings or has MLB gameday dropped the HR column from their box scores?

IDK, if you bring the highest spending teams "back to the pack" then that is going to lower the cost of FA's and a team like Detroit would have that much higher chance of having landed Bregman for example, who certainly would have made us more competitive. Which is why the MLBPA is just as responsible for the competitive mess the league is in. The players won't do anything that might limit the top end biggest contracts. But the reality is that more players would share in more of the revenue if 10 players got 50M instead of 1 getting 500M. The MLBPA has never seen it that way though so there is an effective alliance between ownership in the union in a system that sucks.

LOL - perfect.