gehringer_2

You don't park your humanity at the door when you become an elected official either. It doesn't serve anyone's citizens to take joy in the discomfiture or others. The de-humanization is simply the precondition to excuse acting in ways that would otherwise be morally unacceptable - own it for what it is.

they put up 7 runs today, that's good trend to keep up.

yeah - they have a reasonable number of decent defenders, the question is whether those players can hit enough to stay in the lineup. Keith is a question mark but I'm moderately optimistic he'll be OK at 3rd.

Jefferson didn't say "some" men are created equal, and he was just channelling St. Paul who said "all are one". So whether you fancy yourself an American or a Christian, there is your fundamental value staring you in the face whether you like it or not. Too many today want to claim either title without accepting the responsibility to be what it demands.

At heart it's both childish and craven to compare the worth of one human being to another and you should know that. There may be policies that are better or worse but not because the people they affect have more or less human dignity or worth. Anyone who believes otherwise is a sorry soul.

The thing with Riley is that it's not asking him to do something he hadn't already done before. He was at a 26.7% K rate/11% BB a year earlier. He basically just has to undo the move to the extreme loft swing he had only added last year, and his natural strength increase will probably give more HR than in 24 with the same approach. The problem is no-one ever accused baseball players of being the most self-aware observers of their own game.

True - and back in the day when it was even rarer I never thought Laimbeer got enough credit for forcing opposing big men to come out to cover him. Playoffs are often all about matchups. Maybe if things break right for the Pistons someone knocks off the Spurs before the finals. 🙏

and Wagner was a Nazi but his operas are still the epitome of the art form. Whadyah gonna do? The idea that only moral people (by whatever definition) can produce things of positive value is a naive and false reading of humanity. Nor does the that fact that they do vitiate their culpability for the bad stuff.

yes, of course there is that.... 😉

yeah - if that's the way it actually reads, they screwed up. But these confusions started when they lowered the national age of majority to 18 in 1972 in response to the protests about sending boys to War but not letting them vote. Of course that also lowered the drinking age to 18, which states realized they didn't want to do and eventually in '84 the Federales pushed all states to raise the drinking age back to 21 separately. So you have this split regime. A lot of people still think of 'Adult' in terms of the *drinking* age (21), even though that is the exception to everything else being 18. Still no excuse for legislators to be clueless. But like I said - too easy for clueless people to get elected in the US.

one hopes. I was happy to see Edman's post that WBC guys have their own training/exhibition setup. You'd think this stuff was all obvious but historically we know they've often screwed things up because the planners were more concerned with the $$ than the players.

Unfortunately childish simplicity is what American Voters vote for. In America, serious people need not apply, or at least have to hide themselves behind a faux persona. I joke about it, but I guarantee you Newsom will gain or lose more votes over his hair than he will over his positions on how zoning rules and building codes affect housing affordability.

self selected sample. How many non-trumpers watched it? Or even worse, how do you trust any telephone or I-Net pol in an age of AI bots? Serious question that goes beyond Trump. The old line about believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see needs to be update to "none of none"

one would guess the population is also higher than it's ever been.

are WBC guys prepping somewhere else? Seems it would be important that players going to WBC get some work in prior because you know there is a high probability guys will overdo it there.

or they have a plan and it just isn't optimal.

I don't care they they are losing with players that aren't going to make the team, as longs as they don't get so obsessed with seeing every joe blow prospect in the system in a Spring game that the regulars don't get in enough competitive work and we end up behind the 8-ball before the team hits stride around Mid May. It's still plenty early though....

this is generally why so many of these back and forths are silly. And a big piece is that the internet reports factoids without context instead of complete stories; and with a factoid the listeners add whatever context fits their bias. A half-way decent political press should tell you what Patel or Whitmer are doing there overall. I certainly don't care if either of them show up at the games if they manage to do something useful overall on the trip, we don't need to be Puritanical. But we don't get that - or at least never until well after all the hot air and venom has been spewed around. Like the right's big MN story. There is fraud and abuse in every program. It's just the way it is - in the end it always costs more to get rid of last few percentage points of loss than to just let them go. That's just being practical - the most money in NOT saved by the most buttoned down program because the buttons cost a lot of money too. So the real question is the context - is it worse in one place than another, what is the actual scale compared to the overall spending? Numbers with lots of zeros always sound newsworthy, but the dollar aint what it used to be. 'Billions' in fraud may be less than rounding errors when Trillions are being spent. But we don't get those contexts reported either, because the media machines aren't interested in truth, only in scoring points for their side.

I assume it's a windy day? Apparently it's windier in Lakeland in Feb/Mar than most guys are used to playing in. If it's the Sun I have less sympathy. You've got to deal with that.

you can ignore people, that doesn't make them go away. And I will continue to make any available joke about Newsom's hair. 😎

I told you, guys with perfect hair are always suspect!

I think you combine the deader ball with moving the mound back a foot or foot and a half and you would take the game back to where it was a couple of generations ago. Moving the mound back negates in the increase in velo that stronger pitchers has produced, so many more balls will go into play. The deader ball negates the increase in HR's that stronger batters and maple bats would otherwise produce given more balls in play. But to your last point, the question remains whether any majority of the game's stakeholders actually want to go back there

I'm out on the Mags as well. Have some individuals I still like and picked up some Euro stock indexes to diversify some more and a lot of short term Treas for the time being.

Piston centers who shoot threes are about the rarest thing in Det sports. On this team Stew averages less than one make a game. You can go back a long way and not find much in the way of long gunning Piston big men. One year of Kelly Olynyk? Rasheed if you want to call him a center, then all the way back to Laimbeer?

so far doing a great job of cutting down on the K's. .....🤢