gehringer_2

Sweeney looking like quite the pick-up so far. A LH shortstop you don't have to platoon for is quite the luxury.

I think another RH bat behind Tork might have been a good idea today - or maybe Perez behind him.

jeez, Skubal didn't even get loose.

wrong

just doing my bit to deny Elon more clicks.....

True - the present tense is probably even more important in Football than Baseball, which my usual frame for thinking about analytics. Once a football game starts you are watching 20-30 individual one-on-one contests going on plus how your QB is doing and how those match-ups are playing out in real time, plus what the opposing coach does or what you believe he will do, will supersede most of what history can tell you.

If I'm playing arm chair manager I'd swap Malloy and Perez. We'll see.

To me, the issue is not the analytics, it failing to use intelligence when applying them. Knowing baseline probabilities of various outcomes to increasingly fine grain and to be able to drill into data to find specific scenarios is a necessity to make intelligent decisions, but it's never enough by itself to get past average outcomes - every event in the real world is a singularity that is going to have its own unique features. When you have the insight to analyze those features and add that to what baseline probabilities tell you, then you get to winning outcomes.

especially by comparison in Det, which was a very racist town. I don't know how commonly it's remembered that '67 was the 3rd race riot in Detroit history. There were predecessors in 1863 and 1943. Maybe not quite as bad as Boston with respect to its sports teams but Briggs was certainly a real racist POS.

I'll be watching to see if today's playoff game blows by the "most online" number from 9/12.

Anzalone missed a few - hopefully just because he's not 100% yet

Add Vest, Vierling, Torkelson and Sweeney who got cut off in the cut and paste.... so 12 arms makes room for both Mize and Madden.

Maeda was not very much in doubt. Montero has certainly been trending in the wrong direction. I suppose in the end, when in doubt, go with Velo - which of the guys on the bubble would be Mize.

And it depends on what one means by 'never played.' There have always been pro coaches who got into coaching - usually after the college game, who never played pro in their sport.

But the coach doesn't have an average kicker, he has *his* kicker, and he doesn't have average offensive efficiency, he has what he is getting right now. Those are what have to factor in his decision. League average values should only be a baseline for a coach to judge "this situation is going to be x amount better or worse than the average odds right now."

exactly. Last night the Lions needed more DT play that contained/collapsed the middle of the pocket and they weren't getting it, so Geno was able to step up and out to get clear of the edge pressure all night.

It was a risk but I thought it was reasonable. They were going to have to do something to get a step ahead even if they got another stop on D and matched the Lions TD total, and they were really clicking at that point and had Lion defense on its heels, so it was as good a time to take advantage of their momentum and try to get the tie breaking point. And to be fair, it looked like the play was there and Geno missed the throw, one of the few he missed all night.

Does the AMA know that someone gave a union a medical license?

The back and forth did make it feel like it was closer than it was.

That was a pretty silly FB game. Best line of the night by Aikman: "Put Arnold in mittens in practice."

No question about that.

IDK - He was an awful person on the field as well. I never liked guys like Rose that was willing to hurt people on the field to win. A clean slide is one thing, but barreling guys over never belonging in the game in the first place and the game is better for it being removed. Always bothered me about Gibson as well. At least Kirk has grown enough to admit today that he was wrong then. I don't know that Rose ever did.

I have no dog in this particular argument, except to say I don't think the two things (Larkin's status and the presence of a White Hope undercurrent) are necessarily contradictory. For one, it may be different factions of the population espousing the particular views, but beyond that, I don't think it's hard to envision a person attached to the team enough to cheer the team's black stars, while the fact that he finds himself in that position making him even more resentful as a white dead-ender.

LOL. And the next step....you push the school completely out of the equation? Sort of an inverse NIL were a school collects a royalty on the use of their name and logos and collects rental on the facilities they've built? IDK - I used to think the first step to any rationalization had to be to separate revenue and non-revenue athletics but it's getting to where you can't even make clear distinctions there anymore.

actually if you study the history of warfare, it pretty much does. The allies (i.e. good guys) firebombed cities in WWII. The US killed all kinds of people as 'collateral damage' in so-called precision strikes. Consider the hell we unleashed in the ME over 9/11. You can make an argument that it was only decades of a unique level of Israeli forbearance to wage war the way it's always been waged that allowed organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah to successfully hide behind their captive populations for so long. Now Israeli's enemies have pushed it to where the necessity of protecting its own people requires them to end that forbearance. Every state has that right. It's a terrible thing to witness, but the craven nature of the societies around them is fundamentally not Israel's responsibility. If you start killing another nation's people, you can expect to get back hell without reservation until you stop. And Hezbollah and Hamas have made no move to stop. All you can do is call Israel's enemies fools if they deluded themselves into ignoring the inevitable outcome of their own actions, and weep for the people of their own populations they have put in harm's way.