gehringer_2

yeah - you had me till there. 🌮 🌮 🌮 🌮 🌮

more rumbling on twitter of Russian forces losing steam, over extended again, but who knows? Should be an interesting few days coming up. One sign I take as a good one is Putin and Lavrov sabre rattling again. You don't need to bother making more public threats when things are going well -- battlefield success speaks for itself.

The interference was not the fault of your receiver. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

depends on the SUV. I've had a couple that drive really well - have been through the Appalachians, Sierra's and Rockies in Winter and Summer and never felt like I missed being in my old pocket rocket Jetta on the mountain roads. But aside from good geometry that's also old school hydraulic steering. I'm still not 100% on the car with the electric rudder. if I drive it enough (and we went cross country) I get to where I don't notice it, but then when I get back behind the wheel connected to the oil pump I realize I want to keep the old tank running at least one more year.

Cody made a typo, the Ranger's series is June 16th. For a minute I thought maybe Cody had taken some Henning pills.

but when was the last time the SBC campaigned to make stores close on Sunday? The message of the Christ was a wonderful thing, but I have come to hate what churches in the US have done to it. It stands to reason that it was a contradiction from the get go to even found an organized church in the name of preacher who spent most of his time railing against organized religion, but there's humanity for you. I've come to the point where I'll stand with what Gandhi said about it.

Even letting Leviticus go as purely cultic, go back to the fact that we completely ignore 8 of the 10 Commandments and even with that the only sexual 'crime' that even makes the list is not about the sex, it's about the violation of the marriage vow. Odd that so many US Christians can't find anything else to worry about. Projection.

Good post. My one quibble here is that one doesn't have to follow from the other. You can believe relievers are inconsistent and still think you are better off holding onto the ones that have at least has some success than taking new shots in the dark that have even worse probabilities. That said, I am near the end of my rope with Jimenez!

0/4 last night. I really hope he finds it again - a really entertaining player.

also true.

this is veering toward what should go in the political forum, but Lee is right, the modern, largely American Christian fixation on sex is not even biblical, either OT or NT. It's just old pre-cultural prejudices and superstitions syncretized over centuries into the RCC and from there into American evangelicalism. Homosexuality is not a 'lifestyle.' Most gay couples I know live just like everybody else and their relationships are just as stable and faithful to their spouses as the average hetero so even talking about LGBT as a 'lifestyle' shows education is lacking.

I say it's the wrong question. I'd actually take slightly different approach on this one and put it as "there is no such thing as the right sample size for most relief pitchers" So in baseball I would say you have three kinds of variations you have to measure. The first are things that have relatively small random inputs are almost fully controlled by the player and they stabilize quickly - K rate for a hitter is good example. 50-100 AB is all you need to predict pretty accurately what a hitter's K rate for his next 100 AB is going to be and probably his career. Then you widen the view and you get things like BA or OPS, where there are huge random inputs between how well the batter strikes the ball and the outcomes, they take a lot longer to get predictive - probably more than a season - some say ~1000 AB. So those are differences in how the stats behave created by the game process itself. But then you have the whole different problem of the player changing. Now most pros are relatively consistent, if they weren't they wouldn't have made the majors, but even there you get major and micro injury and other weird stuff going on with the person. Those effects defy statistical measure because they are really changing the thing you are measuring - which can basically invalidate all your prior samples and make you start over measuring the players new state. (like injured Cabrera vs healthy Cabrera - measuring one does not predict the other). Again, most players in the pros are constant enough in their persons for statistical measure to work reasonably well on them. But I would say this is generally not very true for relief pitchers. These are guys (mostly) like Chafin's tee shirt says - are failed starters. They failed as starters because they didn't have enough 'reserve' pitching ability to survive throwing a lot of pitches consistently, which probably means they are working right at the edge of a talent cliff where the downside is not good enough to pitch in the majors. (e.g. if you have 3 or 4 pitches and can't control one on a day you may get by, if you have only 2 and you lose the feel for one you are probably toast....) For these guys a tiny physical fault, the slightest shift in their mental or neurological state, may have them crossing that line between good and bad - esp from season to season. So the problem isn't in the statistics, it's in the persons. You can't take meaningful long term predictive statistics on a thing that is changing no matter the sample size. In a case like that the only statistical sampling worth anything is that done at a time scale shorter than the person is likely to change over, and then the predictive value is limited to that same short time frame, and since relief pitchers don't pitch a lot you do hit real small sample size effects there as well. So in 20 innings of relief work we may have some reasonable idea what Soto is likely to do tomorrow, or maybe for the next 20 IP(walk rate, whiff rate, velo), but 3 months from now or next year? Forget it. Statistics can't help you when there it something changing with the player, and there probably will be with a Soto or Jimenez. The consistent relievers you can do statistical projection with are the outliers of the species. But the problem is not in the statistics one way or the other, it's in the players.

We had a car throw a rod once. It is pretty dramatic when your engine just goes bang and stops!

we could ask David Forst.....

that's the thing with pitchers - sometimes the light goes on late like with Andrew Miller - and usually by then a guy that teased enough pure stuff to still hang around has probably been moved to relieving. Miller's first good season was at 27, and he was an asset for about 5 yrs after that. Sure he is at the top end of the possibilities but it's understandable why teams still hate to part with live arms. OTOH, when I look at Fulmer it seems that even when he is successful he is getting his outs by the skin of his teeth stuff wise. Of course I might have thought that about Rivera if I had watched him more. Probably a wrong impression but it sticks with me.

👍

reason 5347 I've never had a desire to pick up a golf club.

Of course, if you were listening to to Dickerson and Monroe late in the game, you heard the discussion about Soto, where they described that he denied he was having trouble with his slider in conversations with both of them despite both of them remaining convinced that he is. He has a great fastball but he's still not going to have much success long term if he can't start throwing his slider for strikes with more consistency.

I wonder what he would bring. He's not a guy I have ever been able to have confidence in since he went to the BP, but that's me, maybe he'd rate high with some GM.

for all the good their 'exposure' did, both are still in office....

LOL - nothing more dangerous than the last minute of the period. Tampa not dead yet.

What are the choices? Kreidler, Clemens or Short? Kreidler apparently still having pain in the hand.

yup - Iggy got old fast.

and a big reason the D fell short? Your 3B went down on his first chance of the game. It's beyond tragic at this point, their luck is pure farce. As fans we can vent about Al and Hinch all we want, but unless they are sticking pins in voodoo dolls of their own team, the truth is it wouldn't/doesn't matter who is in charge.

man this team is putrid. How can they take 4 of five from Minny and lay three egg like this? Of course that took 2 SOs.