gehringer_2

At least to far, the Wings seem to be getting away from playing such a simple game, which I think is a good sign. It was like under Blashill he didn't want them playing anything but dead simple hockey. That's fine to limit how bad the losses a bad team is going to suffer are going to get, but if you start getting skilled players you need to start seeing skill level play - less dump and chase, more sophisticated passing schemes, more effort to retain possession instead of just constantly clearing the puck back to the opposition. And yes - it can sometimes backfire, but you can't beat good teams without playing a higher level game.

I don't know which is true because I haven't seen any follow-up reporting, but as CMR notes, there was a report put out that it was McCarthy who evicted Pelosi on his way out the door because he believed she reneged on an earlier pledge to support him against a MTV. Also - supposedly under the rule McHenry can't do *anything* except preside over the Speaker election anyway.

They would need to get McHenry a 'nerf' gavel though, otherwise he might accidentally kill someone.

so then what's our excuse? 🤷‍♀️

Ironically the tech might make a solution possible that never was in the past. Let just say for the sake of argument that these injuries are the result of increasing lateral spin velocities. So what do you do? In the past you could never talk about banning a particular pitch anyway because it wasn't really possible to prove a guy was throwing it. Well now you can. Of course if you did something like 'outlaw the slider' you'd have to make other shifts to compensate the pitchers' loss. Maybe enlarge the K zone and raise the mound etc.....

not too bad. Or how about you play the 154, then the top AL and NL team immediately play the traditional 7 game World Series. Then the top 12-16 teams (which includes your WS participants) feed into an international tournament with Korean, Japanese and Latin American league leaders. Each year you have WS winner and World Tournament Winner. That gives you the US world series for just the two best US teams and you get a huge tournament with an international audience and more importantly, world wide broadcast $$. Sounds like a win/win to me. The WS can claim to determine the best US team. The international tourney makes even more money for its participants. You can give Latin players from non-playoff teams the option of playing for their home teams if you want to make it more competitive but even without that you'll still get a lot of upsets in short series.

Gotisbehere did seem to be everywhere. Holl shows a little flair on his skates for a big guy. Doesn't guarantee anything about his quality of play but always nice to see a bit of plus skating out there. You notice Petry was not out there tonight. I'll leave it at that. > they might need to break that up with a bigger forward at times. seems likely

Law and Justice lose their majority in elections in Poland. They may not go gently into that good night, but still a promising step for democracy in Poland.

One theory would be that it's the Rhapsodo machine. If you can tell when a guy spins it harder you can teach him to do it more consistently, which is more stress on the parts of the forearm that spin the ball.

you would think if the Tigers can't get him to his optimal pitch design he's got real problems.

I was a little surprised that when they took so long to size each other up that the officials didn't take that opportunity to stop them before they started. The league is so schizophrenic about fighting in the game. The attitude changes from season to season and sometimes month to month.

Bad announcing!

right. Mickey and Daniels were so busy talking about Skittles they hadn't mentioned Det was already on the PP. So the goal cancelled out the balance of that one and the hook/slash was assessed. One goal only cancels one penalty.

Bingo. But we shouldn't take that particularly hard. Professional sports has always been an entertainment business, and as an entertainment business the idea is to make money. The world tried to have an amateur sports institution with the Olympic movement, but the model ended up unsustainable, much like NCAA football and basketball as amateur endeavors are proving unsustainable. I think if you want sport purely for the sake of sport head down to your local tavern for a game of darts.

yeah - I have to believe that eventually people will realize that carrying all that extra weight around is not a logical way or cost effective way to get range. If better tech for fast charging does not emerge soon enough, the better solution is already available, and that is modular interchangeable battery units. It's a bigger infrastructure lift and would probably require some kind of international standards agreement, but it's certainly doable.

fabulous bit of hand-eye coordination by Ras to set himself up for goal #2.

LOL - I guess I'm like Lee, I don't really care about the playoffs if my team isn't in them, the interest is strictly academic in terms of how you organize them. It goes back to what the league's objectives are in the end. You can play an unbiased tournament and just decide you are OK with that being what it is, that it will have next to nothing to do with determined the season's best team despite what the Media guys try to hype it into. Or you can try to devise that tourney what seeds teams to reward regular season performance. When all is said and done the latter may be a fool's errand, baseball just has too many randomizing inputs in a game for any reasonable length playoff format to actually determine a 'better' team with any regularity. So to me, that all adds up that the fair thing would be for there to be some greater rewards for your regular season performance separate from a ticket to a tournament that has no real value for determining anything about its entries. Maybe institute weighted scheduling like the NFL but the other way to reward good teams? Or just a pot of money for the players? Whatever.

It's really hard to say. So one way you could look at it would be to look at the variance in a team's winning percentage over some period of time - say wins/month, between different periods - IOW how up and down the team of interest is over the course of a season. You could then look at the difference between their average winning percentage and the variance in those numbers to get a finer predictor than a simple binomial on their overall record for the odds one team will defeat the other. But the problem is that over the course of the season players get hurt, other players join and leave the team, so 'team' is always a moving concept - and probably more so in baseball than other sports because of the length of the season and the mobility of minor league players. So it might be interesting to look at whether a team's winning percentage in it's last 50 games of the season is a better predictor of success in the playoff than their overall record. But then you remember the year the Rockies came into the playoff off something like a 20 game winning streak and promptly got bounced!

we'll have to disagree here. When it's tweedle dee and tweedle dum IMO it's all the more important to suss out the marginal difference and go with it.

No kidding. I think that is the real reason they schedule back-to-backs in the NBA - so the fatigue factor injects at least a little bit of randomness into the outcome against the better teams.

yup - he doesn't seem to be playing with the pace I think he can. But I also wonder is some of this isn't the way Lalonde is using him. I wasn't watching that close but it seems he's keeping his minutes down early in the game and then keeping him out there a lot at the end. That's probably a tough assignment for a young player. I'd almost like to see Lalonde say "Moritz, I'm going to hold you to 23 (or whatever) minutes a game, so don't worry about pacing yourself for longer minutes."

Things are always same until they are not, but a thousand years of Chinese culture still argues they will exhaust every avenue to get what they want by guile and pressure before they start an international war.

Yup. That's the $64 dollar question - can Chinese industry maintain excellence in a closed repressive society and if so how long? The Russian example should frighten Chinese business people.

LOL - The first refinery I spent time at still had some units with some pre-WWII equipment and if you knocked the gunk off some of the old valves you could still make out what was left of the embossed swastikas through the scale layers. Actually I would say you're more likely to find lower quality in South American or South Asian goods than Chinese anymore. I don't think you can buy a better laptop than a Lenovo and they aren't priced at the bottom of the market either. iPhones too for that matter. That's why Biden worries today. Nobody needed to care when the Chinese could only make poor quality stuff.

I've seen Sieder force his man to the outside on a breakaway rush where all Husso had to do was handle the shot from the outside and the shooter still beat him. That's not real stellar goal tending either - so we'll see. I think the job is open to anyone that steps up to claim it.