gehringer_2

I enjoyed Hawk - as long as the Sox were losing badly. When they were out of the game he turned into a good color guy. But if a win was in sight he got progressively more obnoxious.

And I think it's all been Xi. The Chinese scientific community had been reasonably integrated into the rest of the world - at least until very recently with Xi trying to clamp everything down. You can lay directly on Xi the inability of China to pivot on policy when it started to become clear that rather than follow the initial model of the SARS viruses earlier in the 2000's that were able to be stamped out, COVID would be become endemic. I think in pre Xi China, Chinese science would have been able to stay in a more cooperative stance with the West and the it would have been possible for their knowledge to influence and change the stance of China's government toward the same pivot everyone else made. I'm sure Trump politicizing things just made it worse but in the end I don't think that would have mattered to Chinese policy if Xi weren't spending all his energy angling to make himself dictator for life.

Short just gave Lange the night off....we hope.

Son pitched as high as college level didn't he?

in his last 7 games Cabrera is hitting 100. That's 2 hits in 20 AB with 5Ks. But with 6BB. The walks actually got his OBP up to 300 over that stretch.

yeah - you can't turn down the pass but I wanted to see Torkelson get another 3 ball pitch.

Torkelson gets under Giolito's skin a little.

Sure - I didn't put that very accurately- yes the roster spot is wasted, it's the ABs that are available subject to the additional roster cost you note.

Well, except that it's more perception than reality that Cabrera is taking up any spot. He's only playing half time at most. We could be carrying a DH that can't throw, they've chosen not to, and maybe for other good reasons related to the fact that you want him to work back into shape as an OF. If any of it is about Cabrera, it shouldn't be.

yeah - though the truth is that this would be a non-story if we had even a marginally functional Congress. All Scotus really says here is that the Congress wrote a very poorly drafted, ambiguous piece of legislation (which it did) and that it wasn't up the court to allow EPA to advance the most expansive possible reading of that ambiguity, it was up to Congress the clarify what they meant to regulate. In a normal world this is exactly the decision reasonable people should agree upon. There is/should be a working tension between how much we want SCOTUS to 'just fix' what Congress does badly vs having Congress repair it properly. The former is convenient, at least for the people looking for a particular result, but it's also long term corrosive to keep bailing Congress out of its incompetence and in the end cedes too much power to the judiciary. I think that to a certain degree at least - 'believeing the courts will fix it' has been a historical factor in liberal voter apathy.

Short usually tails off as soon as he starts getting AB against ML pitching, but at this point I doubt he could do any worse than Schoop. That was probably the longest ball Short has ever hit as major leaguer.

14 yrs since her keel was laid. The US Navy really needs a win with this ship because other than the Virginia subs their procurements have been a disaster for over a generation. DDG1, Littoral Combat Ship, Seawolf sub, A12, F18A, all ****canned programs.. And major screw-ups on the F35-C. And still waiting for the Arliegh-Burke replacement 30 yrs later.

Not the use case here, but ironically, smoke may be useful in the future against laser based close-in ship defensive systems.

I have mixed feelings about this. One one hand, I can approve of a 'no negotiation with hostage takers' stance by Biden if it comes down to it. But on the other hand, Biden also may have a "Nixon goes to China" moment here if he is clever and skilled enough to use it. There have to be many things that have become somewhate sacred cows of spending that even a liberal old hand like Biden must know can and should go. Here is a chance for him to get a little useful reform if he can control the process. Give away things he doesn't want anyway, let the GOP get their fig leaf, and all the while the Dems can still blame it all on the GOP to the complaining constituencies (which there always are). That's IF Biden is that smart/clever. I don't know if he is. but I would guess he does have some kind of 2nd level strategy for his decision to engage after initially saying he woudn't. Say what you will about the man, if there is anything we should know about him by know, he thinks tactics/strategy in longer terms than your average DC pol.

Still, there are hitters that are more consistent month by month than others. I guess I'd pick Bryce Harper as an example of a guy who had an almost year to year streak thing going for a number of years. Temporal preformance variance is going to distribute across the population of players just like any other variable.

I think part of it is also that the expectation is unrealistic. Any church will be just as fallable as the people in it so the idea that a church is automatically going to have any claim on inerrancy, whether implicit, or even explicit (I see you RCC!), is an unsound assumption. But of course as human and falible institutions, those exact unrealistic expectations are explicity stoked by many Church hierarchies exactly because like all ambitious humans, they are interested in temporal power and authority (not to mention $$)

Well. I would say my view is that any number of professed Christians and Christian Church organizations have earned all the ridicule that they get. To me that is quite a different question than whether Christianity is ridiculous. Always good grounding to remember that no-one came under more criticism by Jesus himself than the 'religious' of his day.

The relative experience of Greene and Torkelson argues that if you get a good one, the path of a HS bat to the majors may not be that much longer than even a classe's top ranked college bat.

to look at them both you see at leat one difference is that Judge is the same size he has been while Perez is letting himself put on weight. Never a good sign for the longevity of a ball player.

It was funny, but also I suppose the only was it could happen. It was Obama's existence where he was that was radical, but not much about the man was(is) - very conventional in his economic views (too much so for me!), almost had to be dragged along to get to LGBT rights. But even without the man being any kind of radical, the backlash to his existence where he was laid bare an amount of race animosity and white panic that had been relatively suppressed for a few decades, and now fanned in to full fury by Trumpism, is further than ever from subsiding.

Ear worm!

For the first half of the history of the NHL, there were 6 teams and 4 played for the Stanley cup. This in the day when one Al and one NL team competed for the World Series. I would put it this way - the problem with American sports leagues is not that they let too many teams into post season tournaments - it's the weird notion that broad post season tournaments should be how seasonal champions are crowned. They should not be. A widely inclusive post-season tournament is a fine thing - very entertaining and lot's of good rivalries and story angles, but in baseball in particular, they are not going to tell you who the season's best team is/was. It's that need for fans and media to take that last wrong step that turns what should be an entertaining event into the travesty of crowning some mediocre team that got through a tournament as a 'seasonal' champion. Or the short form would be - their needs to be bigger 'payoffs' in all ways in baseball for A) having the best record b) winning whatever league subdivision you are in.

yeah - hitting is weird, guys can look like they have it all figured out one month and be back in the minors forever the next. Schoop is the cautionary tale there - when he's on he looks like he's in complete control at the plate, the rest of the time it seems that other guy must be a doppleganger from another planet because he looks like he has no chance of figuring it out. Right now Tork looks comfortably in command of his swing, his timing and the K zone. You have to remind yourself it really is the same guy who was tentative and with no rhythm at all less than a year ago. If this is really the hitter he stays, we are going to be very happy - but who knows if it is?

and back in the day we killed the entire adult population of Vietnam several times if you were to believe the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is about 100x more trustworthy than the Russian MOD. More likely 70 dead local innocents.

LOL - you don't seriously think they did this expecting to hold the territory did you? Defeated? More likely made their point and then melted away.