gehringer_2

To me, Meadows is the toughest call. You have no idea what you really have. 50/50 whatever you decide, you end up wrong.

also a good point. The toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube. The relationship between Russia and Ukraine can now never go back to the status quo ante - at least while Putin lives.

Correct. No question that 3rd parties - like the US - are also trying to shape the conflict to their own advantage. No denying that it is also a proxy war by which the US seeks to defang the threat we see in Putin for reasons completely apart from Ukraine's interest. That is just the real world. But when real-politik also happens to line up on the side of the angels, I can live with it.

so before this started, I asked the question about whether the Ukrainians were going to be 'serious' about defending themselves or whether we would find, like say in Vietnam or Afghanistan, that we could pour in effort from this side to no ultimate good, because if that had been the case, then none of the death and destruction war would be justified. Cut a deal with Putin and be done with it. And since history proves that the US is quite capable of misunderstanding the true nature of the clients we have picked in the past, I absolutely had doubts about this enterprise. But the truth has been that the Ukrainians answered the bell from day one. This is their war, not ours, and they have every right, and every moral justification, to fight to create a way of life different from what they could expect under Putin. And anyone in the "West" who fails the see the need for them to win doesn't understand the value his own freedom, because it's the "West" the Ukrainians are fighting for.

inverting of the old school "you have to win your job in practice" and coming up with, "you have to lose your job on the field"? I can see the value of the psychology in that for the rest of the team once you assume that the loser is going to leave the program anyway. Otherwise you might be concerned for the loser to have the battle play out in front of the fans.

'nuf said right there..

I think Pioneer could be giving them a better game.

IIRC, I think in more recent years I did see a ball assessed on Benoit - once, but back in the day you are right, they didn't have to because nobody took the time - still you would see an umpire occasionally wave at a guy to pick it up and they would. I think one of the big shifts was teams realizing that it froze runners when the pitcher held the ball. I think that drove the shift toward making the taking of way too much time more standard practice - and it leaked from there into all situations --And again you are right, the leagues never responded as it was happening when it was happening. If they had then, it never would have gotten to where it is now.

the comedy is that most important thing they are doing, the pitch clock (which I am all for), isn't really even a change - it's just enforcement of what was always theoretically on the books but the Umps just stopped enforcing a few decades ago.

no one in the BP for Det. Just Foolish to risk letting Manning go back out there again -- if it gets the bottom of this inning.

if that ball hit a few less raindrops Tork would have had a dinger. Of course if they call the game this inning the triple will get wiped out anyway.

One more out and this one is official and they can call it. ....done.

Sure. Just like the 'settlement' on the Sudetenland brought peace to Europe. False retcon assumptions. No matter what Putin negotiated he'd have gone to war for more - he just would have started in a stronger position. Unfortunately, the only way Putin's territorial ambitions in Ukraine were going to be ended was going to be on a battlefield. He's been committed to that route since at least 2014. In fact no-one today can look at the criminal outrages perpetrated as policy by Putin's armies and have even a shred of belief that Putin's Russia could have been a reliable negotiating partner.

I can't come up with the link but I thought I read it was the guy from double A they brought to Det.

Walk by Baddoo, doubles by Reyes and Baez, single by Harold. Tigers putting the hurt on KC in the 3rd.

I don't think Dingler's bat has shown enough to get him to the majors yet. Maybe it will next season but if I'm playing GM he hasn't converted his prospect status to eventual MLB contributor yet. That and the fact that Rogers' bat is not getting any preview this season makes C pretty wide open for next season: Haase plus unknown unknowns.

yes. People need to be clear eyed. No one can let down their guard or relax. You can be sure Putin has at least one more throw to make.

Part of it is that most guys would suffer in any comparison to Barnhart, who is really good back there. But even Ozzie Smith had to hit to stay in the majors. You can acknowledge Tucker's excellence with the glove and still be clear it doesn't buy him 250+ MLB ABs if he can't OPS 550.

always.double.down

Haase should have played more this season. He couldn't get out of his own way in April so it put his numbers in a hole for the whole season, but from May 1 forward his OPS is > 800 over 250 PA. I get that they wanted to get Barnhart going and they liked his receiving, but they needed the hitting more. Again, what has the focus of this organization been? Is there any discernable? Winning? Player development? Or just an ad hoc mishmash of playing guys you happen to want to regardless of any movement forward with a consistent concept?

For me it goes back the same argument that baseball is not really much a spectator sport anyway. The appeal of baseball was always that people watched it because they could identify vicariously with the players because they had played baseball. In the older generation even the women played in grade school, played softball in co-rec leagues with their guys, etc. That's is all disappearing and that is what baseball cannot fix by trying to turn the game into something 'entertaining' that it never was in the first place. They might someday come up with a successful mass market product, but it's connection to baseball as it was known to the generations born before 2000 will be incidental. Cultures change. Baseball as we knew it is/going to be a casualty.

banning the shift is the wrong answer to the right question because it introduces a set of totally unnecessary variables for the rules to fret over forever (can this fielder be 'here' or does he have to be 'there') in place the absolute simplicity of 'a fielder can play where-ever he wants to" that managed to serve for a century - until they rabbited the ball that is. But it's the modern American affliction: When you break something, you can never admit it and just put it back, you have to go 100 yards out of your way to change any and everything in the environment so you can deny you ever broke what you clearly did, and all without ever getting back to where you really want to be.

Not to mention that repatriated solders could be a destabilizing force in Russia. Putin's hero - Stalin, knew that all too well, which is why he threw so many returning solders like Solzhenitsyn who had seen too much in Europe into the Gulag.

except that deadening the ball would have been more effective than banning the shift. Banning the shift doesn't decrease the incentive to swing for the fences and strike out at all- it only increases it because you have decreased the penalty for that approach. Sure, there will be more base hits, but not because batters are doing anything to actually play for the base hit rather than the HR.

Dickerson was saying steals were up in the minors with the pitch clock and throw over rules, so the premium on top defensive catchers is only going to go up. Of course throwing is only one aspect of a catcher's defense and I don't think it's his throwing (his CS% is bit above league average) as much as his receiving that is the knock on Hasse.