gehringer_2

also in retrospect, if I was going to give Greene a day off it would have been against Corbin rather than Hill. A power slider is tougher from the other side than 'old and crafty'. Not that one bat would have made any difference against Hill that night. Or maybe letting Greene face Corbin was done as a learning day - with Hinch who knows what he's up to?

Mattison's D at OSU was generally better than ours under Brown other than maybe Brown's 1st year. I get the idea of needing enough youth on the staff to stay connected with young players, but you weren't actually getting that in hiring Brown who was hardly a young coach. He as a 'flavor of the month' hire that turned out to be a one trick pony. I think Mattison was the better coach at core. That said, Harbaugh did succeed in transitioning to a younger staff in the post Covid re-org.

Another great Ezra Klein podcast - Tim Snyder this time, He makes a the point that the intellectual structure supporting what is usually called the 'politics of inevitability' (i.e. that after the fall of communism the world has no other choice than to be like us) which has been sort of our (the US) FP intellectual ground zero since 1990 are starting to collapse into a more honest picture of a real world. If/as that happens, it should be make it easier for the US to improve relations with a lot of countries we had been dismissing as 'just wayward' instead of maybe taking a deeper view of their internal priorities and understanding them better. Maybe.

If you are an 80 win team and you run 5 starters out there at 2 of your regulars are probably going to have below league average ERAs. I don't know if he can get 'there', but Faedo is not far away - his slider is OK, it's his FB that needed a little help I think. He has some life but not quite enough - he gets lots of foul balls and locates it for CS decently but doesn't get any whiffs on it. There might be a tweak in there that gets him over the top - or maybe not, or his command could still sharpen with more IP, but he has a decent arm and reasonable control so there is something there for them to keep working on. You'd say he's getting a little old to have much upside left, but between the surgeries and reworking his delivery since then I'm OK with them giving him some more rope.

Red Wings were the victims of pretty bad cases of this more than once. There are a few things that go into it I think. I'd say the main thing is that Hockey is an energy sport. If a team can raise it's energy level it can defeat a team of more skilled players. It is possible for a team to play the 4 games needed to win a series at an energy level that makes them better than they could possibly have sustained for a full season. If the other team doesn't meet it, they lose. Hockey can also also turn into a game of physical intimidation, and sometimes a physically stronger team simply beats up a better team and takes them out of their game. This is what happened to the Wings at least once and it can turn on the officiating. You never really know if the league is going to decide from year to year to mandate closely or losely called playoff games, but officiating can absolutely be different in the playoffs one way or the other. If the officials swallow the whistles that's another recipe for a more skilled team with the better regular season record to be upset. The third thing is goalies. They are mercurial. If you have one go South at playoff time, you will probably be toast no matter what your regular season record.

well, maybe. As a practical matter if you connect yourself in public - which social media is - with things that are going make you personna non grata in the target population where your job has a public facing responsibility, then you have cut yourself off at the knees as an effective employee and that's a situation it's fair for any employer to consider. >but we live in 2023 where everything is political and there is no boundary between the public and the private. Too true and who knows where it ends, but maybe this case will not turn out to be the hill to die on about it. And we will probably also get 10 different versions of it before long.

everything has to do with culture. The number one mistake Americans generally making looking out at the world is thinking every one else thinks like we do - they don't. Now on a tactical level, I agree with everything in your post, but in your earlier post you referred to them being 'open' to certain tactics and that 'openess' has a cultural dimension as it relates to what kind of policies are considered socially comfortable and the choices they make within the overal policy and that is where I was going. For example, you can remain militarily non-alligned, but still take much stronger public positions on things than India does. There is a reticence toward what we might call 'moral clarity' there that goes beyond the tactical need of their non-aligned status. That is all in the way they approach it. To draw the contrast, I'll make the analogy to realpoliitik. The Indian non-alignment formulation is logically, tactically, along the same lines as Kissinger and realpolitik, but there is often a high level of social discomfort in the West - esp in the US, over the practice of realpolitik and lots of folks consider Kissinger to be morally repugnant even when they may have to admit he may be tactially sound at points. That's not to say I'm attempting to justify the US as having a more moral foriegn policy in the end - that's different set of arguments. It's just that we are at the other pole. We are a very 'Manachean' oriented culture - *everything* has to have a wrong and right side for us - and it doesn't have one we force one on it. And that can be just as bad in the way it leads us to demonize our adversaries and diefy our friends to the point we often don't make very sound judgments about things that maybe mostly grey (thinking in particular of the history of our ME policies). So that's where my take comes from - that way a society judges its own foreign policy conduct has a cultural aspect to it. Heck - at the extreme end, all we have to do is look at Russia to see how ambitious cultural conditionding can drive how a foreign policy plays in a society. But whatever.... Back at the practical level, you're spot on that India is snared by the legacy of chosing to equip their military with Russian hardware. They regret that both policy and technology wise, but it's not an easy thing to turn around, and kaee rupee. They want desperately to be better able to meet the Chinese challenge, but don't want to make relations with China even worse by being seen as too much in bed with the US DOD - assuming they were even disposed to.

TTBDNS

Nope.

Single, double, single. Two score. Nat's take the lead.

ooops. Jeimer sitting off speed and got it.

97.1 broadcast radio is maybe 20 sec ahead of my Bally video feed from DirectTV/ATT. That's about typical for here. The same radio feed that comes from the INet is usually another 30 sec or more behind that.

from the small amount of reading of Hindu lit I've done, there is a sort of ethos deep in Indian culture that I think it's hard for those of us steeped in the way we do morality in the Judeo-Christain system to wrap our head around. I'm not going to get this quite right but it's sort of a sense that you are justified in doing the thing your destiny has set you up to do. Or maybe "do your job man" and you're justified by doing it, release yourself from your judgments about it. If the Indian PM sees his job/India's destiny to position India thusly, then that transcends the kind of tranactional morality we would apply to the details. In the B'Ghita Arjuna is concerned that war is evil and he should not take part, Krishna basically tells him he is a warrior and *his* higher morality is to be the best warrior. That's not generally a WWJD take.

yeah - Englert's pixie dust supply seems about out.

no problemo!

He's getting a little like Anibal Sanchez - strong starts but the wheels come off completely at the end of the string. You just have to resign yourself to having a short leash - if you don't get an inning out of him you might have - so what? Tigers BP was always so bad when Sanchez was here that they always let him go too long. No excuse to do that now.

tough play on hard hit ball, you don't have a lot of time to take whatever extra steps you need to work around the lights and a park on the road never becomes 2nd nature.

maybe it's the darker shirts but Jeimer looks a little trimmer.

The question is "Whose Greed"? TPTB love to blame it on greedy serfs and their grubby socialist labor unions driving wages, heaven forbid you point the camera back on them for driving prices. 😱

May or may not be signficant that Colin Kahl is leaving the Admin to go back to Stanford. Supposedly he and Blinken have been at odds over levels of support for Ukraine.

TBF, Germany has made a turnaround since the Defense Minister was replaced in Jan.

Y

I have mixed feelings about Vierling. He's getting rave OF reviews but to my eye, it's all about his speed, I don't think his glove skills are all that good, but if in the end he gets to enough balls and make some easy plays look hard I'll be glad to forgive him for it! and yes - the bigger problem is that he is on a 3 for 37.

I don't know if he's quick enough on this skates to become a good pressuring forechecker, but sure, I'd take that kind of outcome - it's a big need on the current team.

Fair enough - and of course no-one knows what Russia is going to do. Putin could reverse himself, his position could collapse and what comes after could be better or worse, he could simply remain an intractable enemy of the West in all things, his army could turn on him, or not. We know from history that a dictactorship like Putin's is often perfectly stable right up until the moment it is not. Anyone who says they know is lying. But in the most fundamental sense, he is still the primary driver in this situation and everyone else's strategy is forced to be reactive. Clearly everyone hopes that an outright defeat or at least severe enough set-backs on the ground will eventually make Putin's continued control in Russia untenable and the resolution of the conflict with be a peice of the re-organization of the Russian state government, but hope is all it is.