gehringer_2

Labrum used to be Sayonara for a pitcher but the surgical techniques get better every day so we can hope.

yeah, nice to see JV in the old English D again but I'd rather have a healthy Olson.

but that wasn't the actually the point I was trying to make, which was about the raw visual stimuli value of watching something. If you are a baseball aficionado like us, watching a pitcher delivery a high leverage pitch has suspense and drama value and maybe we even appreciate the movement on the ball, but there still isn't much visual stimuli value there compared to a ball in play, where people are moving around on the field, possibly athletically, and compares still less to the kaleidoscope chaos of a snap in football with 22 guys in day-glow unis going every which way at high speed. All to say that to love baseball, you have to know baseball. The entertainment value is less in what you are seeing than in your understanding of what you are seeing means at higher levels of abstraction.

expanding the House would be a good step toward getting actual democratic balance back. And an anti-gerrymander rule that says re-districting must drive toward minimum boundary length. It's a simple rule and would cut down on maybe 80% of the abuse. The bigger problem is the Senate. I think a good system would be to have a 100 member Senate reapportioned by population but all the Senators in each state continue to be elected at large state wide and each state guaranteed only one. Or maintain two per state minimum but raise the total to 200. That would still be unbalanced but less than now. Of course to get there requires major Constitutional surgery, expanding the House does not.

any announcement from the Pistons on what they are doing?

this is a good point. Third parties here do get coopted for the purposes of the other main parties too often.

Snoop was a UM Dad at one point.

third parties have their primary value in parliamentary systems where they can be the swing votes to form a majority coalition if no party wins a majority. We don't have one of those. One party is going to win the presidency on its own in almost every possible election scenario. Doesn't leave national 3rd parties much potential leverage. In the US third parties can have a working presence in local Govs where seats on city councils can have swing leverage. We had a functioning third party locally in A^2 through a few election cycles in the 70's. Collapsed when they tried to go state wide. Democratic Socialists of America are alive and well in NYC.

Yeah. I think people are guilty of a lot of sloppy semantics. Human beings can and do become habituated to any behavior. Those issues can and are addressed successfully by people all the time. The dividing line between that and addiction may sometimes be somewhat hazy, but it exists.

The big change is that higher awareness has led to getting guys off the field when they are concussed and keeping them off till they are symptom free. The clinical question is how much difference does that actually make to whether continued high impact activity still causes long term damage. Maybe a lot, maybe not much. The assumption is that it does, I don't think the epidemiology exists to adequately resolve that question yet.

I agree some structure seems to be an organic necessity, but the idea that structure will continue to be based on the free association of a significant proportion of the ordinary citizenry certainly does seem to be in danger of extinction. If you look at PAC money - which already dwarfs party funding power, you can guess where the future is going.

you almost wonder if the game isn't played so fast on average now that you see less bursts of all out speed because players don't have enough left in the tank by half-way through a shift, or they worry more they'll end up out of gas when the play reverses before they can get off.

The CF projection for Javy is interesting. I think the probability he get 35PA out there is almost zero - I think he is either going to get put out there for an extended run or not at all, so I guess I take I'd that number as the average of a dumbbell distribution.

so the downside could be the typical American vandalism imperative to try to sabotage the device by feeding it some material deliberately compounded to screw it up.

Thank-you Jimmy P from where ever you are.

If each team sends 40 players to the plate in a game, 80 PA, maybe 20 are K's so 60 balls in play, most of which are completely routine outs where only one or two players even have to move. There are a lot pitches thrown, but nothing happens on most pitches. A football game may have >120 plays from scrimmage, plus a dozen kick offs in which 22 players are all going every which way in an incredibly complex scripted dance. Most plays involve some one running for their life, or leaping in the air, and then someone getting brutally tackled. I can understand people not finding the action appealing, but to me the visual input level from the field much higher than baseball. But agree that dead time is an increasing problem in football. The game takes too long to play the hour and there are too many commercial breaks that are too long - IOW -the same problem that baseball moved to address recently. The only thing that keeps me watching football anymore is that I can DVR a game and watch it in half an hour without missing a single play.

I've said this before, (but not recently so I'll repeat myself 😉) a baseball game does generate a certain amount of situational dramatic tension, but as you note, on a baseball diamond people are mostly standing around, so it's basically not particularly visually interesting to watch for the action in the way football or hockey or even tennis is. Which is why it's my contention that its popularity as a spectator sport has always been tied to the fact that playing baseball at some level has been a common experience for a larger part of the population than any other sport. Golf is similar in this regard but even more so. Do you know any non-golfer that watches golf tournaments on TV? Compare mentally to how many football fans ever played any football. In the past, growing up *everybody* played some baseball. That makes it the sport where the most fans have the highest degree of vicarious identification with what the players on the field are doing. Thus if the popularity of baseball falls as the older fans die off, it will be because fewer people in the population left played the game in their youth (or still play it as softball). And to the degree greed reduces relatively free media access, the rate at which its popularity may fall can only increase.

I think the biggest thing is that fish does not keep, and Americans are used to meat meaning beef, which you can leave thawed in a fridge for a week and still be perfectly fine. Once a piece of frozen fish thaws you literally have minutes to start cooking it if you want to preserve its quality. And then you have the insane practice of American grocers that receive their fish frozen (as virtually all fish is shipped frozen) and then thaw it out to sell it to buyers that take it home and freeze it again. By the second thaw you might as well toss it as it probably already stinks.

Ok - didn't pick that up - I thought maybe there was a head butt by one of them.

I couldn't see what Duren did, I only saw him back out of the confrontation. Stu definitely in trouble though.

I'll give people a lot leeway on seafood because it's hard to buy right and harder to cook right. You normally can't get much of anything that's edible from any chain grocer like a Kroger.

I don't think you get in the door for less than $100/month at DirectTV, certainly not on a plan that you can add Fanduel to, so call it $106/mo minimum. The question is how much value do we get out of the rest of what is on DirectTV, and to me that answer is precious little. The SO would not be in complete agreement there however.......

it's currently $72/yr to get Fanduel added to DirectTV. ($6/mo)

I hope the Canadians tell him to pound sand. The bridge is will still be there long after Trump assumes room temperature.

thanks for the heads up. I have a hip roof all the way around and I'm thinking about a couple of cameras under the soffits, but one of the best spots would only be reachable by ladder so it's either something with a really good battery life or get a cat6 out there through the attic and use POE, but I've been to lazy to get 'er done.