gehringer_2

Oil in a gas pipeline? Russian innovation?

Moving great pitchers almost never works to a team's benefit. The Tigers dismantling of the Verlander/Scherzer duo will go down in history with the idiocy of the 70's Mets letting Seaver, Koosman, Ryan all get away.

Yup. Ukraine becoming independent is 'divisive' also come to think of it.

On the one hand you can argue the conventional wisdom that you aren't going to win any votes calling voters bad names - but OTOH, there are going to be some people for whom being labeled 'proto-facists' by the President of the United States, may bring them up short enough to maybe give a second thought to what they doing - people for whom the office still demands a certain attention even if they are basically in political opposition. Or maybe not. But I think the idea that there is some kind of honey that is sweet enough to move the hardcore is probably a pipe dream, so all you can hope for is strategies that work at the margins. In the Washington post today - Micheal Gerson, onetime Bush operative and 'old school' conservative Christian, wrote an fairly incredible piece (in terms of being far longer and deeper than any typical opinion piece) which was in part political analysis, in part religious history lesson, but much more an impassioned religious sermon imploring - in fact challenging - anyone who calls themselves Christian to re-examine how anything they claim as 'Christian' faith can be squared with today's Trump Republican party. Can't say I have ever seen anything quite like that in my years of watching US politics and media. (It hit a nerve somewhere, I've never seen a Post column pull >6500 comments in less than 24hrs!)

With Biden the general problem is that he's an old man trying to give a younger man's speeches. They need to get him to adopt a speaking style more fitting to his physical limitations. Slow it down, calm it down, keep the rhetorical peaks to fewer, which will make them more dramatic anyway. Reagan and Clinton showed you don't need to put out a lot of verbal tension energy to give an effective political speech. And the backdrop didn't need to look like Christmas in September.....

Yup. Of course if the player is getting high levels of NIL, whether his tuition becomes taxable is going to be small potatoes to his 1040 bottom line anyway. AFAIK, the tax exempt status of a tuition scholarship does not depend on your income. Now if your grant contains something like a stipend for work performed, like what a teaching fellow receives, that part is already taxable as a TA is an employee as well as a student just as NIL will be.

This is an old, old story -- and they still haven't straightened it out?

oil at $86 today. I call it 50/50 that by the time of the election core inflation is already at or below 3.5%. And it will have had nothing to do with anything the Fed did, it will just be the snap back that was due after the bust and boom caused by COVID. You can argue, and pretty much rightly, that the Fed has been too loose for too long, but demand has been so slack with aging populations in the developed world that all that was really able to was drive up was asset prices. As things settle back to some version of normal, the Fed tightening is going to affect asset prices on the down side just like it did on the up side, but I am skeptical it will have a whole lot more more impact on general price levels than QE et all ever did on the way up. But time will tell.

California - under the control of a democratic Governor and legislature, has extended the operation of the Diablo Canyon nuclear generating station. This and the debate in Germany - small signs that the imperative around climate change is being seen as more serious than the politics of the waste disposal problem.

He's gotta point there.

give him a moment.

correct. Just a misdirection, and one the Judge sounds like she may be betting sucked in by.

"Defenestration" Sounds like something that should be a violation of some EPA reg doesn't it?

Do you remember Hinch's response to a question about the dealine (non)deals to the effect that "I was not in the room when those decisions were being made" (paraphrasing from memory there...). You could gloss that as something that was technically true by necessity (Hinch was with the team playing games), but the tone sounded more to me like a broader statement about where the relationship had gone. Maybe a subtle distinction, but what a 180 deg turn from the kum-ba-yah we heard early last season when Hinch was bubbling about a working relationship new to him because he had never had a GM that just dropped by the office all the time.....

What I find interesting is that the Russians don't even bother trying to be credible in the lies. They have gone beyond using language simply to deceive. It's all about establishing an almost 'Matrix' like duality of universes: "Your experience may tell you that in the 'real' world people do not fall out of hospital windows, but you are not actually in the 'real' world. We control the ultimate reality, and that is hidden from you. We are merely hosting the reality you believe in out of our forbearance, and should we withdraw that benevolence toward you at any time, you will find yourself in our world - one full of unknowable terrors for you."

It's another one of those things like not staying outside the line as you go to 1st, somewhere along the line you have to learn that you stay on outside of the 1st base line and turn toward the stands after you run through. Sure they could make it a judgment call for the ref and a play like this might go the other way, but why when all guys have to do is learn to do it right and eliminate the need for the Umpire to have guess about it? I don't have much sympathy for guys who can't learn simple easy rules and then bitch about it.

I remember that the conventional wisdom was that he was throwing an 'improved' slider in Houston. But the reality with JV has always been that how effective his breaking pitches are follows from how good his fastball is, and his fastball was steadily improving from a point somewhere around mid-summer when he made some delivery adjustments. I can't recapitulate it at this point but there was a clear change in his release point and from that point on the FB starting getting better and thus the breaking balls got harder to adjust to. As 84 notes, this indeed was all in process in the month before he was traded. I have no problem giving credit to the Houston staff for offering JV some new analysis, but I do question it actually made much difference in the trajectory of his improvement, which was already well set. The other point oft forgotten but not to be minimized when looking at JV's 2017 is that he moved from a terrible (-115 RDS) to a good (+21 RDS) defensive team as well - especially in the OF, where the fact that JV is a fly ball pitcher had been negatively impacted by the pretty terrible OF play of Martinez, Matook, etc,(and of course Nick's terrible 3b play). 136 runs is more than 3/4 of a run per game difference off a pitcher's ERA all by itself.

Easy 1st inning for Manning.

I took that as a pure "win now" play. I don't think Ray's talent has hard to see, but he needed more time to turn into the pitcher he would become than the Tigers were willing to give him.

exactly. Granted you might be predisposed to take what the player says with a grain of salt as the player who has been scuffling has an interest in projecting that there was a reason for his poor performance that has now been addressed so he can in turn project more success from himself going forward. In such case one expected counter from the Tiger org might have been, "Well we worked with Robbie on x/y/z but we are sorry we just didn't seem to find the key for him but we wish him well...." What as NOT expected was for the Tiger manager to say "Yeah, well, that *is* a problem." Sure we can spin that a Hinch just setting the bar at the "We can all always do better" level, but if so still not the most articulate way to do it.

LOL - Rangers have committed half a billion to their middle infield, and they can't turn easy double plays.

Arb salaries can drop by a max of 20%, don't know if it ever actually happens though. If team offered -20% and the player offered no change, I can't imagine any MLB arb not taking the player's NC number since no raise would already be considered a huge concession in the current system.

the problem comes when the cops join on their side and you have to call out the national guard......

Stolen from the comments section of a WaPo political column: "I will give Trump this: he supports one of the traditional Republican values -- small government. He wants the government to consist of himself, and himself alone."

MRI'd his calf.