gehringer_2

Snake eyes

So I'm listening on gameday to Dan and Scales and watching the Bally video. What they are doing with the audio is bizarre. The audio is about 45sec-1min behind but I can buffer the video to match. So I get it all lined up but it keeps moving around. Every couple of innings they slip an extra commerical in on the audio and get further behind, then they pick the time back up - apparently by micro chopping the audio buffer, until the audio catches back up to match the delay on the video that had orginally been in sync with the audio.

Any time a Tiger hitter decides to join the game play tonight.....

Ump looks like he graduated HS this spring.

the only thing you can hope for until one or both of them die is that they continue to get so wacko that even the other 4 conservatives start to feel good about disagreeing with them.

There were still 6 outs left when it happened so the perfecto was far from a sure thing

Lord Please, Gibson, Maybin someone? Anyone? Couldn't they have left Monroe at home?

that's interesting to hear. I knew that managements didn't like it because it's not very repaintable, but hadn't heard much as about its wear properties. I wonder if all that prill is recyclable?

This aspect seems to be less widely reported on. Analysts talk a lot in terms of how a team evaluates the depth and distrubution of players in the draft when it come to decisions about trying to move up or down, but that decision is probably driven more by an evaluation of the a team's current roster and their estimates the probability of draft choices beating out an existing player to make the team. Shallow or weak teams need quantity of picks to build depth and because they have a lot guys they don't want to keep, the better/deeper a team, the more you should be willing to give up picks to move up for quality.

And he appears to have reached his level of imcompetence as well. Musk has been involved with a number of businesses but they were all arms length from their customers in an important way. You sell a Tesla, the customer basically drives off - they don't continue to interact with the company in the use of the product. You made a paypal purchase it was nothing more than a computer widget to the user - use it and put it down till next time. SpaceX doesn't even have 'public' customers in any meaninful sense. Twitter appears to be the first time he's been involved in business that is customer rather than product driven, and he seems to have no clue how to manage a customer base on a ongoing basis.

Seems striking in Stroud's case, but not sure you can ever make too definitive a conclusion based on any single point measurement of a sample human. Carter showed up out of shape and fat once - it was a bad decision but a lot of folks argue that shouldn't matter. Stroud may have blown off the test for some stupid poor judgment reason. If you look at his game film and you don't see a guy who can make real time decisions, then I guess I'd tend to put more stock in the result, but I wouldn't put it above a good coach's evaluation of his game film.

this.

It doesn't seem so now, but I think it's too early to make that call. There are still a enough Avila players coming through the system that could become useful pieces to swing the balance between his level of futility and Randy Smith's.

Alec Baldwin off the hook for now - charges dropped. Interestingly, some evidence apparently emerged that offered some support to Baldwin's contention that he never pulled the trigger. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/arts/alec-baldwin-charges-dropped-rust.html

I'll check it out.

there isn't much precedent in recent memory for a 'full-employment recession'

there was a lot of failure in the early experiences with Ti. The problem is Chloride, and the weird thing - and probably the reason it was hard to figure out initially, is that Ti is very resistant to sea-water and Chlorides of all kinds - at room temp. The trick is that if you have even a trace of Cl present and get the Ti hot enough, you're going to get a failure. Even the sweat from a welder's hands can do in a weld on Ti.

The underlying trend for stocks has a steeper slope than for bonds. A long time ago when I knew even less about it than I do now, I Fedelity guy in a class explained that businesses borrow money to make more money. The money they borrow is at bond rates, if their return on equity (basically refected stock prices) isn't better than interest rates, they are out of business, so on a very global view, stocks have to do better than bonds long term because they are always making investments with ROIs higher than interest rates. That overall result is separate from variance/volatility effects. But course individually, some companies make investments that don't pan out, they go bust and don't pay back their loans - so the higher return comes with more risk /volatility for any individual stock.

My recollection is that they were pulling the plug mostly to cut expenses, that they knew they were going to lose, didn't particular care. I don't remember it being a 'tank' that had a high pick as an objectve. I don't think the Tigers in those days had ever drafted well enough (not in the least because they would never pay top $ in the pre-allotment day) to even consider 'tanking' as a rational long term strategy to get better.

LOL. Actually I give SpaceX a certain amount of credit for changing the paradigm on vehicle development. Real engineering development always takes place as a balance between two extreme approaches - build it exactly right the first time, and build a bunch of prototypes, test them and learn from the failures. In rocket work, it's always been the first, either because you aren't going to test a Minuteman with a trial run on Moscow, or because you had one chance in ten years to catch the orbital mechanics of an outer planet at the right time, or because the design was going to have a man in the loop at a relatively early point in the development so the failure risk had to be driven down. The thing is that there is a point at which the process becomes so meticulous it's actually more expensive than just building and testing - and maybe blowing up a few prototypes. In an age where we don't need a man in the loop until very late in the process, if ever at all, the early designs don't need to be human safe. SpaceX figured this out and worries much less about blowing things up, and so far has done some good work at lower cost as a result. It's is ironic because today simulation capabilities have gone a huge way toward reducing the need to test so many prototypes, but even giving that, SpaceX argues you can't always assume that a build, test (crash!) program is going to take longer or be more costly than the cost of hitting perfection on the 1st build.

I think if you look at it in terms of analysis of variance, you can at least show that in the limiting case, streakiness is bad - as follows: if every team scored exactly their average number of runs per game (variance ->0), everyteam would defeat every other team with a lower average runs scored every game and lose every game to each team with a higher runs scored average. The team with the highest runs scored average would win every game - subject only to integer round off error because the averages would not necessarily vary by a full run. Introduce increasing variance into the averages, and the winningest teams can only increase their losses. At the other limit, (variance -> inf) it will be true that if every team has a huge variances in its runs scored, all team records will converge toward 50% no matter what the difference in the overal scoring averages because all wins and losses will end up being the result of random noise being larger than those averages, and thus will distribute toward uniformity. It would seem the real world has to exist between those two limits. (that fact that the exponent on the pythagorean win prediction formula is about 1.83 rather than infinity captures all this) Now while I take the argument above as pretty reasonable, the practical question is how much of the net variance in team scoring is temporal player performance variance vs the natural chance randomizing inputs in the game (non-uniform balls, bats, weather, fields, umps etc.,etc.) . In baseball we know those effects are big, bigger than in most sports given the geneally narrower disitribution between winning and losing records between baseball and say basketball or football. And as noted player streakiness is also averaged out within the team because there are at least 9 players contributing to offense each game. So while I think the directionality of the logical argument is clear - it's not at all clear what the level of significance to the effect is or how to tease it out with any reliability.

It's a conspiracy!

this goes back to the discussion the other day. Are streaky totals actually worth less than consistent ones? One on hand, it's absolutely true that you can only win each game once. If you have streaky players you will have situations were they combine for excess runs you end up wasting in routs. The counter point is that you have 9 guys hitting so one player's heat will normally be at least somewhat balanced by another going cold. Even there you will suffer some cost in terms of batting order optimization - though probably not much. And of course you can end up with the 2022 Tigers where everyone runs cold at once.......😭

That analysis could have been cribbed from Westmoreland in '67.

Wasn't Max a guy that complained hard when they banned SpiderTac? Guess he meant it.