gehringer_2

Yeah - a lot of ways to drill even deeper into this and pickup some more specific things at maybe finer grain. There is solid research that GOP voters score higher as apprehensive personalities and living in cities probably can act somewhat to force an apprehensive personality into a higher engagement level with other people, which in turn might modify their world view, so I don't argue the base the premise, but I think you can break it down more. For instance, I don't know if the rural/urban fear axis is the best correlate. For instance, not all Midwest Farmers have always been conservative - out state dems were once strong in MI and you have the example of the Farmer/Labor party in MN. And TBF, many 'suburban' areas are the most strongly conservative even though life in those areas still involves a lot of public interaction - certainly much more than in truly agricultural areas. But the people that now live in US cities are from the same gene pool that lived in US rural areas before the urban migrations yet the segregation in US politics is clearly geographic so something is driving a clear difference in world views based on geographies as opposed to say - genetics: Two suggestions to narrow down subfactors: The first is very close to the original premise, but tweak it just a little. It's not population density - meeting strangers per se, but population diversity - meeting *strangeness*. By and large US suburban areas are just as segregated as US rural areas. So make the analysis not numbers of strangers in general, but strangers who also look/talk/feel different and I think the correlation between the politics and geography tightens. Or another way to put it is that living in segregation is going to condition people (mostly white) to a higher level of cultural discomfort around anything that departs from their Whiteness even in people who have no explicit ideological predisposition to overt racism. The cultural piece operates at a much more subliminal level. The idea being a more specific cultural kind of fear/disorientation rather than just broad fears of anything new. The second is religion. And I think there is some chicken and egg intertwining of the two effects, but white religious conservatism is strongly geographically correlated. I think here the original premise about urban living per se may apply more directly and again it goes to cultural segregation. It's easy to be religiously doctrinaire when everyone around you agrees with you. Harder when faced daily with people that circumstance forces you to acknowledge as your peers don't see any particular validity to your parochial truths - add the effect of cross cultural romance and marriage in cosmopolitan areas as another moderating driver. To me the effect is easy enough to understand, but I don't really have a good clue as to why conservative strains of Christianity have such particular appeal today in the West and Upper midwest rural areas. I don't know if that's always even been the case. In the South, ties between the 'Lost Cause', conservative religion and racism are easier to understand/trace. A little side note on that intermarriage point. The old Ottoman empire was a place with a lot of cosmopolitan cross interaction between different ethnic and religious groups yet people never overcame their prejudices about each other. I think the difference again being religion and the strict taboo against inter-religious marriage. Christians and Muslims lived shoulder to shoulder with each other in the Ottoman world for centuries, but they did not marry one another. The communities forced themselves to keep each other at that minimum arms-length distance where they could still more easily deny each other's humanity when it was politically expedient.

I think it is natural that in any period when QB salaries are growing more rapidly than salaries in general, there will probably be push back from ownership down through orgs to reduce risk to expensive QBs by reducing their running and a result will be a swing back toward drop back passers. There is probably some cyclic character to all this.

Not to worry. The Saudi's will hold it until it's worth about half what they paid, then bail.

Poor Jim Acosta - who's ever going to talk to him now?

Wiki says is was Navin only unti 1938. I have no idea if it was just a joke with my dad or if there were other people that weren't big on calling it 'Briggs' but he mostly continued to call the ballpark 'Navin' field so I always knew that name.

they have been shut-out 5 times in the last 3 wks and scored only 1 in two other games in the same span. That's a 1 run or shut-out basically twice a week.

and it turned out he was out there with a stiff back that day wasn't he?

Baddoo doesn't force Kimbrel to throw a single strike. Just a pathetic line-up.

2nd guy in on what is basically a BP day. Good sign that his use is being downgraded to lower leverage.

I don't get much happy vibe from Vierlings bat. Be nice to get Carpenter's back though - he may find the seats once in a while.

good Torkelson AB - he didn't take any hittable pitches.

I don't know if practicing against a better pass D makes a better pass O, but I believe it does does work the other way - more likely to get to a good pass D when it has to practice against a good pass O.

Cabrera doing OK recently. He's upped his OBP 70 points since the beginning of May and it's been ~ 370 over his last 30 or so PA. The question is: even if you wanted to, how much more could you play him without it just going south again?

still, one run after 5, the pitching staff is giving you more than can reasonably expect.

didn't Johnny Damon do that or something along the same line once with the Tigers - i.e. outran a shifted or out of position IF to third?

LOL -At least one analyst thinks the Russians did such a sloppy job managing the damn it may just have failed by abuse. https://twitter.com/gbrumfiel/status/1665959437981429762

The siesmic data from the failure at the damn was picked up a European monitoring stations. Analysis of that will likely show if the explosion was too big to be anything delievered by air.

WaPo with a story today laying Nordstream at Ukraine's feet. Makes more sense than the charge that we did it. That fact is that at 70 meters water depth it just wasn't that hard to do. Any diver trained on tri-mix diving gas can get that deep with otherwise standard scuba gear. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/06/nord-stream-pipeline-explosion-ukraine-russia/

Also - FWIW, Maton's HR was on a breaking ball. This team does take baby steps. Problem is that at the rate they add up it won't make them competitive until 2052

It's right there on the back of the one listing the closest toilet to each of the kids' coke stashes.

so taking a dive into his statcast and fangraphs data there are a couple of things: he has lowered his rlease point - so presumeably his arm angle - maybe in search of more FB velo - which he got, BUT, the velo on his change and cutter have increased more than his FB velo - so his overall delta Velo is DOWN. Dirks mentioned this the other day as well. Not only is delta velo down, but the delta vertical break between his pitches is also down - probably for the same reason - less delta V. To me, if you lose delta V and delta break, more barrels would be the expected result. Now the brain trust *must* know this, and maybe they think this is transitional on the way to something better - like maybe he gets to where he keeps the FB velo and the cutter/change drop back to where they were, or maybe they want him to use his curve more for speed change. IDK. Or maybe the arm angle change was based on an biomechanics analysis that said it would reduce the risk of further injury to his arm and they can only hope he can eventually make it all work. And after all, he was supposed to be in Toledo where he could work out all these details without the consequences being suffered in Detroit. (Or maybe we've been conned with techno jargon and they really don't know what they are doing? 😱) This reminds me of Verlander's mess in 2017. There was a lot of talk about his slider being 'rediscovered' by Houston's geniuses, but I still don't buy that line. What the charts say happened is that JV had changed is arm angle in the off season chasing the velo he lost when he had the abdominal weakness and it took the life off his FB. By about mid May he started moving back to his old release point and as the FB life got better, the Slider became more effective. I'm always little skeptical about talk of better and worse sliders because the real key to any breaking ball is how good the FB it's being played against is.

I've read a couple thing to the effect that McCarthy is trying to co-opt her by giving her real work to do and it may be working. I'll believe it when I see it though...

This. When the cost of the shot is nothing, you shoot everything, but the hidden cost is that then the overhead of going through it all means you may effectively 'get' nothing. The SO and I have maybe a couple of thousand vaction digital pics going back about 8 big trips that we will probably never take the time to collate. In the end, probably could as well have left the camera at home. And how many times have you been talking to a friend about who knows what and they say - "wait, let me show you what I mean, I have a picture" but can they find it on their phone? So do they really have it?

to be accurate, the rules did away with LOOGY, but to the general question of whether he would be better off in relief, I think the issue would be his K rate isn't what you like in a reliever. OTOH, some guys can tick up their velo once they start working short and that can make a big difference, so I guess you don't know until you try. They sure are not in a position to give up on arms of any kind.

amazing. I figured that if he wasn't at least ready for fulll season A ball this years they'd have cut him loose. Somebody must think there is still something there...