gehringer_2

I'd add you have to have the reflex speed to go with it, but I agree that hitting is a genetic gift. You can do things to augment it if you have it, but if you don't it's been proven that you can be Michael Jordan and it still won't get you to the majors.

Ideology is a luxury, in fact i'd say ideology is always stumbling block; but good ideas are a necessity.

A lot more things become possible if you get past this hurdle.

Use of hands allowed:

there is a more fundamental aspect to this though which to me is under-recognized, and that is honest, rational, constructive conservatism is by nature a stabilizing reaction to an active and potentially over ambitious or mis-directioned reform/liberal movement, and the truth is that liberalism as an active social re-organizing force was spent after the civil rights and great society pushes of the post WWII era. Liberalism has not had any kind of interesting or novel ideas or approaches for things like the stagnation of the middle class that are the things people are most deeply concerned about. It's been largely stuck in the social welfare theories of the 30's for 90 yrs now and the useful parts of those things are already in place. Or worse, it's been naval gazing over identity politics. You can hardly expect anything other than stagnation from Conservatism when there are no serious reform movements to be the counterbalance against. Are there even any decently serious thinkers in the democratic party on economic restructuring beyond Elizabeth Warren? AOC and Mamdani have welcome energy, but the DSA doesn't have the right answers to the future any more than the 50's British labor party they appear to want to emulate did. The country is desperate for ideas relevant to this century to reform corporate governance, education, politics, media; where are they?

only thing I question in his remarks would be the assumption the inflation is on a downward trend. Also notable that he called current rates or 3.5-3.75 as 'close to neutral'. I get the impression many people assume that the 1% rates that came out of the prior couple of decades is the 'normal' that policy was heading back to. But over the long-long term, those were anhistorically low rates driven probably mostly by the drop in monetary velocity as the huge block of boomers moved into retirement and lower spending - so people should probably stop assuming interest rates are going back to sub 2% or even sub 3%.

repetitive to say it of course but that is because they are not and never have been conservatives. Bob Dole was a conservative, Barry Goldwater was a conservative. Actual US conservatism died out with that generation. These people are more like what the scholastics were to the renaissance - primitive and irrational - fundamentally barbarians.

IMHO, the biggest issue for baseball fandom is too much player mobility. Whatever they come up with needs to allow players to get paid without having to move to do it so teams can build their identities long term around their stars. Perez has identified the issue but his proposal does nothing for teams not paying the tax, and they are ones losing their players.

Mid Summer Sunday day game, Billy was probably too hung over to care what he was doing.

GM has been kind of flying under the radar under Barra. That's probably good.

A good number of Dmen who learn to pace them selves play OK to their late 30s, and even if the third year is a bust, it will be less than 3% of the cap. In general I do worry about Yzerman not leaving himself enough room to make a big signing when a Hughes or McDavid hits the market, but not enough to worry about this deal.

My objection to soccer is purely philosophical. It's the fact that we have our arms available instead of tied to our locomotion with hands with opposable thumbs at their ends that makes us what we are. Any activity that denies the use of the arms strikes me as being somewhat sub-human.....😉

LOL - it's nice for baseball players to be athletic - it means they will run and field much better, but athleticism is only marginally connected to whether a guy can figure out where a baseball coming at him at 98mph is going so he can put his bat there.

the latter has already happened to the degree we see the RSN's failing.

religion? do you think they asked if they were practicing or not in the roundups in Germany or Armenia or Rwanda? The fascists don't care about what your religion is or whether you practice it, and the American Christian right wingers don't care what you are either if you are anything outside their own cult (theirs being one of the most excluding theologies out there). Religion is never more than a convenient construct to define what groups will be the targets for redirecting the anger of the masses in a failing society. It's all about picking a target that is easy to identify, the 'why' of that identification is purely incidental. All that matters is that there is an elite who needs to deflect from their own corruption and greed, an intellectually lazy or economically exhausted mass who'd rather not be reminded about their own failures, and a set of identifiable targets the elites can persuade the masses are the cause of their problems. Religion never matters in and of itself. It's nothing more than the sieve.

one could write a book on all the likely reasons for this, most of which are bad, but it would have to start in a different forum.....😉 Short version would be that I don't think the state of organized youth baseball is enough to keep MLB from becoming more niche as well.

Playing Colorado twice without him is not a happy prospect.

apples to oranges though. It's like comparing Bach to Led Zeppelin, they function in different spaces. The entertainment value in baseball doesn't follow as much from raw excitement like hockey, as from the slow tension builds the you get at times like a critical 10 pitch AB or as a pitcher starts losing command and digging himself a hole in a one run game, or whether a relief pitcher can work his way out of a 2 on no-out jam. Individual plays can be exciting but are more the icing on the cake than the main events in a baseball game. Baseball is more 'interesting' than 'exciting' - or at least a very different kind of 'exciting.'

yeah - 10 shots through 40min, Wings had better have been banking their energy for the big finish.

Exactly. I guess it must be like the sense of taste - they say some people can taste all kinds of things others can't, or raising one eyebrow, but some people just have zero sense of detail/texture for how things sound. Get a couple of them in the right executive positions and you get dumb audio decisions like pairing Rizz and Rathbun. They were doomed from the get go.

why would Putin send the money for the NRA to do that?

this is true.

"The Conference Board's long-running consumer confidence index fell 9.7 points in January, to 84.5, from a revised 94.2 in December. The steep drop was seen across both survey respondents' assessment of the present situation and their expectations for the future. The index is now below even its level at the depths of the global pandemic, when unemployment peaked at nearly 15% (it was only 4.4% in December).... .....American consumers are on edge and deeply pessimistic about the outlook, despite robust GDP growth and a relatively low overall unemployment rate." https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-macro-01172560-fb8d-11f0-8de3-51b8195e6ff0.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosmacro&stream=business It would be nice if they would just ****can GDP and start using median family income as a better national economic health marker. Axios makes it sound like people's perceptions are at odds with their reality. They most certainly are not. GDP may look good, but GDP doesn't buy anybody's groceries.

Alex Vindman announced for the FLA Senate seat