gehringer_2

Don't know what's up with Bart - but he might be trending to a backup profile. The discouraging thing for his value is that he hasn't been able to hit at AAA either since they sent him down. Injuries maybe?

Rationalist theologians were always easy pickings for Hitchens because religious belief, if it's real at all, is transcendent of objectivist experience. Heck - I rather have seen a discussion between Hitchens and Deepak Chopra than Hitchens debate the head of the Anglican Church. More potential to be instructive.

this is one good question. How do you keep the athletes "in" school at all once they are paid to be professional athletes - even given how tenuous the definition of "in" might become? Slippery slope to a professional league where the basis of the link to the college just atrophies away? They will come up with something but it may look a lot different.

Yeah - i'd guess it's half that many. But it all depends on how income distribution to players shakes out and I don't think we know that yet. And a few things have to change. 1st, NIL as a concept has to go - it's a nonsensical because the real money players generate is in tickets and media, but NIL only allows them to be compensated by people who do not get media and ticket revenue. That's a fundamental mismatch that is unworkable long term. They set up system where it is inevitable that ticket and media income is going to be illicitly diverted to NIL payers. Get rid of NIL and put the payments above board or it's a disaster in the making. And of course Congress could also force the athletes back into amateur status - or some as yet un-imagined intermediate status. That's seems unlikely but you never know. That could put everyone back at square one or some other as yet totally unknown square. But assuming that some system emerges where players actually get a meaningful chunk of the total income generated (CA legislative model) then the equation is forced back to market considerations and I can't see how you don't end up with teams allotted more or less along media market lines just like every other pro sport model. And that would be less than 40.

We've got Skubal tomorrow. Do we dare hope?

Not only on Trump's GOP but also on Netanyahu's Israel. I've always believed Obama's relative antipathy to Israel (because of Netanyahu) was a big part of what drove Charles so deeply into the arms of the harder right GOP to begin with. He was not nearly as strongly party aligned before Obama's falling out with Bibbie. (Of course Fox was also paying a lot to buy that alignment by that point as well). I wonder if he could have brought himself to admit Obama was right about BN. I thought generally FP was a severe weakness for Obama, but he had Netanyahu pegged right.

If I had to guess today, the off season departures will be Baddoo, Maton, Haase, Ibanez plus whatever trades they make.

First time I went to CA was in 1972. The didn't yet have jetways at the gates at LAX, you still came down the stairs from the plane to the tarmac. That was exactly what the sky looked like when the door of the plane opened and it stung your eyes as soon as it hit them the first time. It's easy to forget that air and water quality improvements in the US have been huge - it's something to keep in mind because it proves we can change the way we do things once we decide to.

I think Ukrainian supporters would like to see the same leverage applied on Taurus and ATACMS as happened with the Abrams and the Leopards: i.e. Germany signals they want to wait for the US to approve ATACMS to send Taurus. That increases pressure on the US whereas as straight out German approval would decrease pressure on the US.

Brieske looking good. Can he be consistent? That would give you a BP that looks like Brieske/Foley>Holton>Cisnero/Shreve and what do you do with Lange?

If he and Malloy split RF and DH, Vierling plays 3B and RF and Greene and Meadows play the other two outfield spots nearly full time that can work.

Stat sheet says he hasn't hit a single yet? 6H, 2-HR, 3-2B 1-3B

Brieske has a FB that can play in relief.

Freaking ump has missed two pitches in this AB

Olson showing a decent fastball.

Maybin could be pretty good if he just said half as much as does now.

Do you suppose Diane Sawyer or Gwen Eiffel ever thought to bring us the news of the day in a little off-one-shoulder frock?

QFT. If what we think didn't matter to us, none of us would be here!

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BR has him about neutral as well but his sample sizes for fielding are still too small to be meaningful. With Kerry it could be he looks worse by the eye test than maybe he is be because he is not good at all near the wall, and those are the plays that get replayed a lot. OTOH, he seems to do OK going to the line and coming in and he has thrown a couple of guys out so maybe on average he is average. Cumulative fielding stats take so long to be reliable that they aren't that useful when you have to decide how to play a guy now. You probably get a better idea of what a guy is capable of from individual play statcast data but even then just because a guy makes some good plays doesn't guarantee he is also reliable - a la Righanne Rheighbourne.

Fair point. Maybe it's a case where the rule doesn't really do what it was intended to do. The original idea was probably more to help guys who were major league ready get a chance to get out of an org where they were blocked, but in practice its operates more as a potential prospect cherry picking exercise on teams with global roster constraints unrelated to the particular players being left unprotected. When a team has a MLB ready minor leaguer that's blocked, they are still going to keep him as insurance or as trade capital and expose some guy so unready other teams will pass. And there we are.

Doesn't matter what you think of the rules - for sure a lot of them are dumb, but both these guys broke them in ways they knew/had to know were going to be unacceptable so no excuse for either of them. Hazing is out - period. Everyone knows/should know that by now. You can't spend 10 min at a US University and not understand that. Impeding, obstructing investigators will get you hammered under any and every enforcement regime. In Harbaugh's case it may be true that the NCAA is a joke 24 hr/day, but he was still a fool to thumb his nose at them unnecessarily as long as he was still subject to their decisions. Won't hurt Harbaugh though, part of his appeal is his weirdness/windmill tilting

The Ziesenheim twins were born identical, but politically they were night and day.....

Baddoo is becoming expert at the Willi Castro tease - will he or won't he ever be the player he shows you once in a while? TBF, I guess he's still short of 1000 MLB PAs, it just seems like he's been around forever.

you can put it that way, but willful ignorance has always been the go to defense for coaches, which is why 'institutional control' - that they are absolutely responsible for what other people are doing, is a concept that applies to them to a degree that doesn't apply to most people in normal society. So I get why Fitzgerald is being hammered. But I also agree on Harbaugh - that whole episode was an unforced error he put a lot of effort into committing, so he can go ahead and enjoy the V-days.