gehringer_2

which goes back to something I thought back in 2016, which was that whichever candidate won the presidency that year, their party was going to suffer long term. It didn't actually seem to happen with Trump, but maybe (hopefully) it's just been a delayed reaction because his cult of personality has the glue holding that voting coalition together. If the GOP turns against him now en masse - which seems to be the plan - at least in terms of presidential politics, the GOP's underlying weakness may be become more exposed. That said, I wouldn't underestimate the Dem's ability to screw up the chance they may get.

I tend to believe there are still millions of low political information voters out there who still believe DJT to be the highly airbrushed character they think they knew from the 'Apprentice' and that no amount of political news reporting will ever persuade them otherwise. With no other GOP candidate having anything at like that kind of Hollywood head start on creating such a perfected public persona, the rest of them have to depend on who they actually are, which in most cases probably won't get them anywhere near as far as NBC's massaging of Trump for years got him. So I'd like believe virtually none of them just fall in line behind a nominee like DeDantis, but of course, I could be wrong - it's still the $64,000 question.

There is a universe in which Luka demands a trade, but is there a universe in which Luka demands a trade to Detroit?

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

There are times it would be nice to believe in hell.

at the current price it's almost possible for them to increase sales over time enough for their P/E to start looking normal without more drop in the share price. Telsa has always been priced as a magic beans company, but the truth is they are a car company - and the slide in price is mostly the adjustment in the view of investors from the one to the other. The fact that Elon is acting like a 2 yr old at Twitter doesn't help of course, but I think at most it's just hastened an inevitable reckoning.

fair point, but over the a season a good pitcher has to have more good days than bad so I would think some signal would still emerge throught the noise. Another issue is handedness - you'd have to factor that in some way. And of course of you slice and dice too finely you end up with insignficant sample sizes for your data pots!

The stats I would like to have access to - which I imagine I could probably pull from BR if I spent enough time, would be the difference between a hitter's success agains negative ERAPlus pitching vs positive ERAPlus pitching. Over the years I've thought that there some hitters that really feast on bad pitching but can be had by better pitchers but I've never seen a breakdown. As an example, by observation, I would say that when ARod 1st went to the Yankees, he was putting up more impressive numbers than Jeter, but he didn't seem nearly as tough an out against top pitchers as Jeter was. My *impressions* of watching those two in the same lineup is sort of the poster case for the idea, but like I said, I've never run it down to check whether the impression was correct. Now I suppose if you have a bad team, you don't care, any production is going to increase wins, but if you are thinking about winning in the playoffs against a generally higher quality of pitching, I want guys who do better facing the best - if there is such a thing.

low delivery? Hinch is a proponent of the theory that you want your relivers to all look different so each one is a change of pace. Might be part of the motivation to give a guy with a low arm angle a look.

I noticed that my thinking about baseball has shifted over the years. I no longer think of the sport in terms of the regular season being a single competition to be won or lost in the playoffs, but more like a many episode TV season. The corolllary is that the playoffs are just an annual tournament that for all intents and purposes can be totally divorced from the regular season entertainment value, and where I'm indifferent to who or how many get in other than the Tigers and about which my main concern is that the quality of the play not be ruined by games that end up being played in blizzards.

Watching the team that played this game you wouldn't think they could go winless in 7. Great game for Rasmussen, but it's pretty much a trend with this team that if you play with Larkin and/or Perron you are going to have a chance to put up numbers. Morritz playing like he was fed up as well, getting himself thoroughly under the Lightning's skin by crushing several of them in the course of the game.

I don't know if we give them enough credit for how well they sang - I ceertainly never really thought much about it at the time, but but listening with a better ear today, I think John especially had this ability to sound like he wasn't doing much while actually nailing some pretty difficult tricks. And the three part harmonies on the early stuff was as good as anyone ever.

I always thought it was an interesting symmetry that at Redford's age, Robertson had played JFK, a notable cold warrior, in a time when things looked different.

The Injuries have probably driven Madrigal's trade value into the crapper, of course that also means if you get him you may never get anything out of him! Docs would have to have a lot of imput on this one.

This is truth. There was not a post WWII movie made that featured grey ships with white numbers that I didn't see as a squirt sitting next to ex POFC/Gunnery A.G. at NBC 'Saturday Night at the Movies." (or even a few at real movie house). 'Caine Mutiny' not the least.

my only reservation about the perfectly fair moral admonitions in that last scene is that in the real world, often enough the Queegs don't have that epiphany where they are open to a reset a failed chain of command relationship. In this telling that stands as the ethical pivot point that allows this denouement the not so happy ending feel that 50's angst required. I'm fine with the allowance for artistic license, but one has to think that in a case that ever got that far, the Queeg would not have reached even Bogart's Queeg's level of awareness that he might need a change in the the situation. And on a semi-related note, other truth I have learned over the years is that sometimes the people who are most insufferable under 'ordinary' circumstance, turn out to princes when the chips are down. Of course those stories don't make for good novels

It the same dichotomy as Nickelson in 'A Few Good Men' but Jack played it over the top enough so that listening to the argument wasn't the point. The difference between the ambiguity of the 70's and the self assuredness of the 90's But it's Von Sydow that makes TDOTC. He is beyond perfect. His is the only real truth in that universe.

also pretty much zero platoon split over his career - much less than any of our recent SH have had. Madrigal at 2B and Schoop to 3B. And if at some point Keith or Kriedler or Perez can outplay one of them at either spot, that's fine. Schoop supposedly working on mobility all off-season, but it's not like that will hurt him at 3rd.....

Madigal is interesting. He's a limited player but he does have good on-base skill. I think one or two guys like Madrigal who are tough outs, even if they don't do much OPS damage, can have more value to a team like Det that doesn't have enough tough outs, than they may have to their current team or the rest of the league.

For over 150 years, no land battle has been fought on the American mainland. Oceans help, but the other primary reason is that for over 100 of those years we have an explicit policy of supporting allies closer to the things that threaten us, so that when those threats turn into hot conflicts, they happen 'over there' and not 'over here'. Does this policy have an element of cynicism and self-serving? Of course, yet it's still manifestly also in the interest of a party like the Ukrainians, who would just as soon win the battle for their land instead of becoming meat ground in the prelude to the US facing Russian at the Atlantic shoreline. Just because everyone's motives are not 'pure' does not mean a situation is still not a win-win.

US pro sports are set up for roughly uniform geographic distribution. You identify the centers for marketing a sport and you put a team there. That is the fundamental imperative to the way that US sports are set up that means no team will ever be 'relegated' out of the 'majors' because it immediately removes the overall sport's access to that market. Everything regarding playoffs, parity, or an any other team competitive consideration sits on an importance tier that is a full step lower.

Weekly unemployment claims refuse to go up (216K), GDP refuses to go down (Q3 revised up to +3.2%). Market sees more interest rate hikes in its future. S&P bumping against 3800.

Between the Lux tax and the fact that there is some media money in a national pot now, the bottom teams do get more support than they used to, but I'm curious if the revenue side even explains some of what we are seeing this season. Do the Mets, as the weak sister in the NYC market, or the Rangers, really generate the income to cover what they are spending? Or is it just that the general concentration of wealth trend over the last 30 yrs is making some ownerships so loaded that it doesn't bother them to subsidize their teams with non-baseball revenue? I would think the league would frown on that but books are easy to cook. Any way, don't know if that's what's happening but some of the money being thrown around makes me wonder.

I think at the core, that is why it could never be done in a US league. An owner doesn't just buy a team, he buys the membership in the league. Given the structure of us pro team ownershiop, would be an obvious tort to try to remove a team from the league the owner bought the rights to be in. Slam dunk court win. You'd have to start from scratch with a league that had a different, more limited set of ownership right plainly established. What you might be able to do in US leagues is force an owner that won't try to win to sell their team. There is precedence for MLB forcing 'bad' owners to sell, but not purely over their team's performace. And of course a sold team might be a moved team and that's a whole 'nother headache for the league. The problem there is that most teams aren't going to care that much if there is some team out there not trying very hard to win, because that just makes it easier for them!

Dodged that bullet.