gehringer_2

Somebody here already mentioned changing foul rules so that you can't be awarded a foul on offensive player initiated contact. Might be a tricky rule to write but would like to see that tried.

I have a related recent stat peeve though, which is the fixation with batter swing rates - exactly because I think they are pretty meaningless without breaking them down by count. For instance Tork is criticized for having too high a swing rate, but without benefit of the data on his count breakdown, by impression from watching the games is that he is actually TOO selective on the 1st pitch. Taking that strike puts him down in the count and then he ends up swinging a lot in defense on 2 strike counts. I might be wrong about Torks 1st pitch rate, but I think the argument holds that swing rates apart form count analysis doesn't mean much.

this is weird. The site has started throwing away my post at random. Well - I'll try this one again. I (and probably Cas) couldn't figure out the post because once at Twitter, if you had to click on the right link to get to the story instead of just going in circles back the same tweet.

And he should save that for the season. I would not call throwing max effort the 1st week of ST a mature level of training decision making.

likewise

I can believe he sees himself as persecuted in exactly the same way Navalny was....well, maybe except for the poisoning, the beatings, the jailings, the months of isolation, and the murder. But other than those petty details, *exactly* the same.

Taking US citizenship probably increased her risk for being in or visiting Russia.

Yup. Some people just don't think very clearly. If the Griner case wasn't a big enough warning for you, hard to know what could be.

a few generations ago Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi Christians made up a good chuck of ME emigres to the US. Their politics don't necessarily align with Muslin emigres. I don't imagine there are many Christian emigres coming from the ME today because there aren't many left, most having left in those previous waves.

TBF, being poor at the relational aspects of player management doesn't necessarily mean your talent as a tactical in game manager isn't good. I guess it depends on how narrow/wide the criteria for this ranking is.

I know Ras is a center, but I still think the obvious best match for the Wings is for him to be playing next to Larkin. Put Debrincat with his buddy Kane (and Compher) and play the other main line as Ras, Larkin and Raymond. The latter would give you combination of guile, playmaking, speed, shooting and *physicality* that would optimize all three of those talents. Larkin and Raymond both need to be out there with a big body to manage the chronic head hunting they otherwise are faced with and Ras is going to be be able to leverage his ability to command space better with playing with a great passer. It's not exactly Messier/Gretsky but that's a sound concept that has held in the NHL for a long time.

Boras.

I think I heard Ken Rosenthal say that Sacramento is outside the market definition of their local TV contract so they lose $67M going that far away. So they'd need to put together a new TV deal to make that move. Not impossible but another complication certainly.

I don't think the Freep has carried DB in a while. We got to know long time Freep editor Joe Stroud and his family pretty well. Joe would be rolling over in his grave about his old paper.

this one was all Lyon, the Wings really had no business being in a position to take points in this one with the number of defensive breakdowns. They didn't just give up shots today, but grade A scoring chances by the boat load. Broken record here but Yzerman still needs to do something to improve the D corps before the deadline.

I'd say Perez is likely the most on the radar of the under-the-radar guys.

Curiously, I actually ran into something a related a long time ago when I had ripped a bunch of CD's in linux, then copied them over to a windows computer and the player kept tripping over certain tracks, and it was because of colons and semi-colons in the file names that the ripping SW and linux weren't bothered by, but Windows wouldn't process.

Mitch Landrieu needs to move to a blue state so he can get elected to something. Too much talent going to waste.

a colon crosses up Windows? Figures!

Gostisbehere seems most likely to give them the return value Yzerman would be looking for. But he might cross us up and move a forward then bring up Berggren

Well to be honest, I'm not sure we ever had it. Orville Hubbard had already confiscated it first.

I had to post the above as an image from a screen cap. Weird.

I tried to post to this thread yesterday to followup and for some reason it kept throwing them away. So if this post goes I will try again.....

And there is a historical cultural confluence that also fuels the issue. It's not just a group of people who have been dispossessed by war keeping things alive, that has happened in a lot of places without them turning into the ME; it's also a basic tenet of fundamentalist Islam that territory gained to Muslim conversion/conquest may never be lost. So Israel's existence is also anathema to any radical Islamist. It's a match of interests that compounds it all. And conversely and perversely, the existence of Israel is an argument Islamic radicals make that the people need to be more devout (read as "support us"), because if they were, Allah would never have allowed them to fall from power in their previously won lands.