gehringer_2

I haven't seen anything about in about 3 weeks on whether BP got the Whiting refinery in Chicago back fully on line - another screw up there would be something that could spike midwest prices. It's not because of crude prices - they are still falling.

he who lives by the cupcake, dies by the cupcake.

yeah - short of covering a muffed kick in the end zone you couldn't score any faster.

Average luck will tend towad average. The Tigers are not likely to suffer another year of craptastic misfortune like this one any time soon. The trick is trying to figure what was bad luck for players who will rebound and what was players that have to go. Which all comes down to player evaluation. The org needs to be able to figure out which guys are doing it right but having bad luck vs the guys who are not going to get better - or exactly what the org has been failing at for the last several years.....

it sort of weird in the NBA right now - the big men can dominate statistically in the regular season, but the guard/swing dominated teams can run them off the court in the playoffs. Makes "who is better" an 'it depends' question.

Unitl I see learn something to change my mind, I'm still going with the thesis that somehow as a team, Coolbaugh and the data team had the Tigers too focused on the wrong things at the plate. That said, I have no idea what role Hinch either did or didn't play in it. I think what Kaline used to say remains true, that as a hitter you have to have an idea what the pitcher's plan against you is, but beyond that, you have to look for strikes and swing at them. Everything else in a hitters head as a pitcher delivers is counter productive. It goes to what Harris said - you have to command the zone, and the only way to do that is by swinging at pitches in the zone and taking pitches out of it. No data about analytics or a pitcher's general tendencies or any other global information (other than scouting about a pitcher's possible 'tells') actually helps you at the instant you have to decide about *this* pitch. Recognition of *this* pitch always needs to be the focus.

the mortgage assumption thing just seems like concept from Mars when viewed today. I think it goes mostly to the way banking has changed from a business that makes it money on loans to one that makes as much of its money on fees and derivatization. Those mortgages were assumable because no-one thought about the loss of income from forgoing new origination fees, because banks didn't charge those fees - the money was in the income from the loan, so they just didn't care if the holder of the note changed - and note this was an era when banks & S&Ls (another quaint anachronism) actually held mortgages - they didn't just originate them and pass them off to securities bundlers.

Market down across the board, 2% for the S&P, 3% for the Russell. Oil at $78. If late buyers don't emerge the loss for the week will be 5%.

the problem is there are way more 18 yr olds than the military can use - it's a professional army now and they don't want lots of guys for one or two years, they want people who stay long enough to develop deep skills. If you are are going to do a national youth service program the military would only be a small piece of the program today - the rest would have to be civil services - and you end up with a political problems doing that because if you have a million youth doing some public service, you are probably displacing some people today who are gettin paid to do some of it. Those aren't impossible impediments to a national program but it's the kind of thing that reduces political enthusiasm for it as soon as it ever moves past the talking stage.

I'm going to be curious to see if they (try to) carry fewer pitchers next season. Sounded like Harris was talking about a deeper position rotation with more flexibility to matchup against oppostion pitching. That would normally imply more lef/right options but that requires a longer bench. The current (past) regime used a very long bullpen and tried to make up for the short bench with switch hitters, but the problem is we've had too many guys who have been switch hitters in name only, and in particular switch hitters who have not hit RHP well.

sounds about right

I think Europe - including Germany - was aware in 1939 that the US had achieved economic and military power sufficient to swing any war it entered. But it wasn't only Japan but England that crossed up Hitler's hope of keeping the US out of the war. Hitler didn't really want England in the war either - firstly because he thought that having gone to war with and defeated England's historical enemy - France, that England would become his natural ally, and also because he knew the bond between the US and England could pull the US into the war if England would not make peace. But Hitler misunderstood the nature of English/French history - that from the Normans on down the English/French wars were as much royal family feuds as the kind of deeper religious/ethnic hatreds of Eastern Europe and thus a France threatened from the East became an imperative for England to fight for rather than abandon. Alternative history is always pure speculation, but even if Pearl Harbor had not happened, it seems plausible to me that the German and US Navies would eventually have come to blows in the Atlantic sufficent to have resulted in the US entering the war there if it hadn't in the Pacific. And likely the ETO would have come to resolution that much faster if the US had not been fighting on both halves of the world.

I will say up front I know nothing about Vick, didn't follow and don't care about his situation. So the following may or may not have anything to do with him. That stipulation made, I believe that it's not uncommon for decent people to get pulled into or just grow up in cultures where things seem 'normal' from the inside that are most definitely not considered normal on the outside and often those people end up perfectly happy to move out of their old culture and into a new one once it opens to them. Which to my mind is what 'rehabilitation' , when successful, is often about.

the Russian system is just not well thought out. The system of training new cadres inside operational units is always going to fall apart once those units are deployed and under stress.

one of the takes I've seen today is that Putin is getting pressure from both the dove and hawk side, but sees the threat from hawk side as more politically dangerous, thus a mobilization despite the Russian Army infrastructure likely being incapable of effectively using it.

Sort of but to a different purpose. Believe it or not, prior to about maybe 1970-something, you could by a house *with the mortgage* that was already on it. IOW, come in with enough principle to pay off the current owner's equity and just *assume* his mortgage in place. It was quite common practice. The idea being that mortgages were so unitform, rates so constant and the terms all so similar, it wasn't worth anyone's time to originate a new loan exactly the same as the old loan.....

this one has been floating around since May. I will tell you this, he has pain in his right leg. In the last year I've yet to see video or pics of him where he wasn't unweighting his right leg when he was standing. Now that could be as non-life threatening as a little sciatica, but it's easy to see once you notice it.

does anyone remember 'assumable' mortgages?

IDK, I think it was more an ego gesture - "I am going to show just how much the Tigers are playing with the big boys on the coasts by writing just as big a contract as any they would..." It's not like Cabrera was going to end up destitute on the street if his patron saint didn't take some special measures to take care of him - he was already a millionaire times over from the previous deal.

too depressing to think about the comparison of outrage generated by abuse of dogs vs abuse of poor people......

Putin's complete lack of command of military strategy and operations has been quite the revelation. The last thing an army that can't do logistics for the soldiers it has is....more soldiers to do logistics for. He demonstrates no useful insight into how and why his army is losing. Good.

Javy's K rate is the second lowest of his career, at 25.3%. Team average is 24.3, league average is 21.9. It would be nice if he struck out less, that's true of everyone. But Javy's real productivity issue this year is not that he is K'ing more than his usual amount or even that much more than the rest of the team, it's his HR rate. His K's just look worse than other guys'.

ask not for whom the bell tolls....

1st game of the season, young D-line, star rookie DE - everyone amped up to beat their man - probably not quite enough attention to discipline, working together and maintaining contain. I think that is the kind of thing that can/should improve next time they see a guy like that.

The part that doesn't work is that if the wall is going to be that far back, it should only be 8' so you could still get leaping plays in front of it, but it would have cost a lot more to lower the stands than to just take out a few rows of seats.