gehringer_2

Good and evil can be defined from a non-religious standpoint, altruism and sadism exist in the world even if God doesn't and by common secular definition most people would call the 1st good and the latter evil. Even if you want to argue that its all operant conditioning, at the end of the day the result is still individuals that exhibit behaviors that will be judged as good and bad by the general culture. I grant "evil" does carry more religious semantic baggage than "bad", but practically speaking I don't know how much difference that word choice makes to how people evaluate the actions of others. Stepping back, It's attractive but in the end difficult to assign environmental blame for every screwed up person. Trump's older sister was a respected Federal Judge. It's true even siblings in the same home do not have the same experiences, but if the same parent has to be defined as a good parent to one child and a bad one to another in so many cases you're almost left with the outcome being randomly determined, which practically speaking is indistinguishable from saying the personality outcome was latent in the individual maybe subject to some combination of particular environmental triggers - which sounds close to how you frame it above. And absolutely everything we know about genetics and the brain argues there must some spectrum of genetic traits that affect personality but as a culture we still hold each person responsible for themselves in all cases short of a diagnosis of clinical incapacity. We don't have much choice because law as the organizing principle of society collapses if we ever accept a general proposition that people cannot overcome the environment they developed in, even if we sort of nod to the idea informally.

Had to happen. The ultimate grift for the ultimate grifter.

and SuperMcKinstry turns back into a pumpkin.

Tork get the hanging slider on the 3rd pitch but fouled it off. Could only keep it alive for McKinstry.

Nothing confusing really - you start knowing you have a major league hitter at about 500 AB, pretty sure one way or the other by 1000, and even then some guys might still go either way (Torkelson).

but it's the perfect feedback loop inside the MagaSphere. Given: Immigrants ruin the country. Posit: There are immigrants, Conclusion: The country must be in a state of ruin. Corollary: Evidence presented that the country is doing well must be fake news.

and the wheels fall off in the top of the 9th.

OTOH, if sticking pins in a Trump doll could work he'd have been gone a long time ago.

why not both? I've known gentle, sweet, mentally ill people.

He had an up and down year at AAA. Good April, lousy May and June and then really picked it up in July and has been hitting ever since, so he's actually got 3 pretty good months in a row now including the promotion to Det.

To be clear I think there is zero to it, but OTOH I'd stick with 2,3 and 6. #1 is probably easy- just look around at recent history around the world, or given that the planning is coming from a future Prez, you can probably persuade him he would be protected. #5 is probably also not much of a hurdle. Nixon, Bush, Obama, Trump himself on 1/6. We've had plenty of Presidential admins without too much scruple about people getting killed as collateral damage.

yeah - just for a recent example, Baddoo started out much better than Sweeney has and has flamed out. Trey is looking promising but he's got a ways to go to show you can start making plans around him.

I imagine he will get a full opportunity to outplay Javy in ST.

Neither he nor Trump place any value in truth but for somewhat different reasons. Trump has psychological pathologies. He only processes reality through the filter of his narcissism. For Vance, whatever ethics he may have actually held in his Hillbilly Elegy days or before have been subsumed under the needs of his ambition. So for him it's more like game play, it's cynical, nihilistic. He's clever enough to formulate the inventions that serve his purposes into the form of arguments and he thinks that makes him persuasive. A sophist, if you take the classic definition of one who argues professionally to make the worse appear the better cause. In the CNN clip where he is defending spreading the Springfield stories you could see it was all just a game for him. I would have thought any other human with functional antenna should be able to see that and dismiss him out of hand. But for enough people, if they are being told what they want to hear, they turn off their brains.

tying runs on the bases for Angels with 2 out top of the 9th. Angel got one in the 9th but games ends 6-4 Twins.

Bah! Twins go up 8-3 in the 7th

Nice play there by Jake Rogers, A seldom reported item from Jake's bio is that he ran away from home the summer he was 14 to join the circus, where he became a juggling sensation.

terrible AB by Torkelson. Took the FB in the zone, swung and missed at two breaking balls. I watched Brandon Inge do that exact pattern a thousand times - take the FB and then swing and miss at the breaking ball out of the zone. I've never understood why any hitter would expect a fastball on 0 - 1.

the number on the league page can't be the player totals even though it appears to purport to be.

Vierling walks on 5 pitchers, not one of which was noted by Benetti and Gibson

tigers hitters leaving all kinds of runs out there. Pitching better hold up.

it won't always line up that well. A team full of zero WAR guys should be under 500 but you also see teams further over 500 than their total player WAR.

Mize can't get through 5 with a big lead against a bad team. Not good

Meadows was not the only guy out of the lineup over most of that period and Maeda was still in the rotation etc.,

I guess some some endorsement do make a difference.