gehringer_2

the other question is whether the Yankees even care how far over the threshold they are - the franchise has money to burn.

I suppose, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me to go big with a young player than go half way with an older one. I just think you are more likely to get burned in the latter case. To many guys don't really hit at all after 31/32. You might get burned worse if the young guy comes down with some career ender, but you are so much more more likely to get a good number of good years I think the total value vs dollars risk is going to be lower overall. Seems counter intuitive to spend more to get less risk, but that's how I would go. Plus given a steady 2.5% inflation, the last year on a 10yr deal for an unproductive player comes at a 28% discount, that time discount at 6 yrs is only 16%.

Really don't like the college setup. I'll take the current NFL scheme any time. Sudden death after each team has had the ball once makes sense to me and if you get steam rolled for a TD on the opening drive, that's a decent justification to lose as well.

Tracy Smith. His prior stop was ASU. Spenser Torkelson comes to us courtesy of Tracy Smith.

Bregman will be 31 next season. I don't want to go more than 2yrs - 3 max for guy at 31 and that almost certainly won't land him. Soto is a pipe dream, but coming up on his age 26 season he's only one year older than when they took on Cabrera and Cabrera's 1st contract value was fine. You might get 8+ good years from Soto. By the end of a deal that long it won't seem so bad even if he's fallen off.

there are all kinds of questions there. Harbaugh was strange, but was that part of what worked for him or was it really just that any ex-NFL QB/NFL Superbowl Head coach is going to have so much cred with young players that his eccentricities aren't going to hurt him? So does Moore need to communicate differently - you betcha. But at the same time there is nothing he can do to have Harbaugh's NFL resume, so it's about as apples and oranges as it can be.

that was weird. Collinsworth obviously forgot the rules. Tirico just ignored it.

jack has made 25 starts in 5 of 7 full seasons, and both years since the injury - he's actually reasonably healthy for a modern pitcher. But not to worry - Chas is right - we won't see him back.

and I'm already PO'd at Subaru because every time you start the car the radio turns on.

Darth Vader's light saber is extinguished. James Earl Jones has passed away at 93. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2024/09/09/james-earl-jones-dead-star-wars-lion-king/75149628007/

Lions once had a guy named Bill Munson - could throw a football through a brick wall. He wasn't very good either.

I miss Tampa being a divisional rival. 4 team divisions are too small.

LOL! 3/12 hip actually but it is due in the next couple of years!

The difficulty with hiring any assistant is that the way most teams are structured, assistants all have a piece but are seldom involved in everything - so until they succeed or fail as a head coach it's damn hard to know if there is some gaping hole in their skill set that is going to doom them in the top job even if they were all world in the piece they were doing. OTOH, if you pick right, you get younger, more energetic (and cheaper!) coach and set yourself up for a longer run than if you shop the used head coach rack. So it's lower cost risk, lower floor, but potentially high ceiling. And part of it is they are keeping their options open given the likelihood of change. Why put $100M+ on the table to a guy like State did (and just barely escaped from) if you don't know if he's going to be a good fit for where things are in 3 yrs? Maybe you hire the best recruiter in the country and then we end up with a HS draft? Buddha likes May, and that's cool, but he and Moore are still both hedged bets.

One of the things that players have said about Harbaugh as a coach was that he had a nearly infinite attention to fine detail. One of the things you notice immediately with Warren is that he just hands off the ball. JJ did a fake/feint on every single handoff. How much difference does that make? Maybe none 99.9% of the time (esp since he doesn't run much), but if it holds one LB a few milliseconds one time, it's worth doing because it's completely free. Just a detail. Moore should be at least be in a little better situation compared to when Lloyd retired because Harbaugh and 'his people' won't still be around sniping!

it dovetails with the Dusty May hire in the sense that there was no idea to make a high profile, high cost, higher risk hire. Retrenchment.

you can make a reasonable argument that he was cut off at the knees out of the box because of he was hired so late - so next year will be his real recruiting test, and realistically, where the team is two years after that - if they give him that long.

TBF on this point - when you have zero deep threat, both because your QB has not demonstrated he has any accuracy deep and because you don't have any receivers that have proven jump ball take away skill, that is going to leave the middle pretty clogged up for the TE passing game. JJ was a singular level talent who could look the D off his TE and then come back and deliver an accurate high speed ball to him in close coverage. I think the UM TE game was always as much about what JJ could do as anything else. Harbaugh would bring in grad transfers for the o-line, and coupled with the COVID eligibility extension they ended up with a really old O-Line - which is a great strategy if you can work it. Older is almost always better for O-Linemen. It is a good question why Moore appears to be going the opposite way.

US Gasoline consumption peaked in 2017 (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mgfupus1&f=a) The combination of fuel economy standards, EVs, remote work etc, will all continue to steadily push consumption down in the future. Refiner's will give up margin to keep refineries running at efficient capacity factors. It's not going to be a pretty future if you run oil refineries. That's why the "majors" have sold off so much refining capacity to independents recently, who will have no assets to go after for clean-up after they go bust and walk away from messes left behind.

The Fed rate cut could help a lot - not because it will make much economic impact on voters other than those house shopping, but because the cut will get a lot of press and the press will be that rates were cut because inflation is down.

IDK - the public's perception of economic conditions lags a lot. Prices might have been stable for two years but you go to buy a car and then you get the sticker shock well after the fact. Surveys have also shown that people simply to do not see the raises they get during inflationary times as the counter balance to price rises. Universally people still see raises as relating to their personal worth and not as part of general economic re-adjustment. Just stupid human nature. I could be wrong, maybe it will cut no water with people, but I think the dem's best case is don't try to minimize or deny inflation - make the case they it was factors beyond all control and then show that affected the whole world and that the US/Biden admin did better than any one else with it.

The only thing I wondered is why anyone thought they would be good this year in the first place. Huge senior class leaving. New coach. No QB. And Harbaugh wasn't a Saban, he was never building for the long term - he was building to win once because he knew he'd leave after he won. So the dog and pony show all year with Harbaugh, the NCAA and the NFL and JJ's late decision all hurt recruiting and they clearly were not able/willing(?) to throw a lot of money into the portal this year. As to the last one, I also get a sense, just from the level of silence from the whole University Athletic community, that UM prefers to bide its time as much as it can until a new organizational regime comes into being - I don't think they want to put a lot of effort/resource into personel/org structures that they think are bound to be obsoleted soon. Keep the powder dry and try to leap frog the competition into what comes next.

I don't know what ratings are doing compared to previous years, but improving the quality of the TV broadcast is also important and they just are not there yet. Benetti is big step up from Shepherd but the quality is still very uneven. He needs to settle it down a few notches. Audio production has been bad, the revolving door in the 2nd seat is still bad. Petry is improving as he works more - he is their most insightful guy - his delivery is improving but could still improve a lot more. His talent for pronouncing "Change-up" as a three syllable word is also unique. But the rest of the bally work is atrocious - Kane, Thompson, Kerwin are all cringe worthy. And there is rot at the heart of the whole Bally "make it more interesting with outside stuff" approach, which is that by constantly ignoring the game action, they are sending the fans a signal loud and clear that the game is not actually worth watching. You don't persuade people the game is worth their time with that approach. You will never see an NFL broadcast where they deliberately cut away during a play. If the broadcasters don't validate the importance of the game by paying full attention to it, you are telling the fans not to either. The have the technology to do split screen and they won't even do that. Benetti actually blew off criticism for cutting away during play in a recent broadcast. I hope that is because he has to be a team player and not because he believes it.

84 would put them half way to winning 90 next season. Would we expect at least as much improvement '24 to '25 as we got from '23 to '24? The RH hitters needed are not in the system, going to have to sign one - or two or make a trade. And they need Flaherty V2.0 - with a multiyear contract this time. A another LH bullpen arm. That not an unreasonable lift for an off-season.

Yeah - to win a game against a great QB with rookie corners bodes pretty well for the future. Of course they made mistakes, buts it's the NFL; to play well enough to win 1st time out against that competition is actually pretty big.