gehringer_2

Awww Schucks! Maybe we'll have to just play the games! 🤔

right, and even worse, when you are looking at teams you are looking at guys going in and out of injury states and players coming in and out the roster so you are faced with even defining whether for a given club the April and August teams can even be considered the same.

doesn't this deny reality though? Almost every player's career performance goes though an arc. They come up, improve, plateau and then fall off. At any point in their career applying the basic career arc effect is going to be a better predictor of the immediate future than the flat average of his whole previous career. Of course to take the most ridiculous example, what do Cabrera's career numbers tell us about what he is likely to do this year? Not much I'm afraid. So we weight the recent past heavier all the time - it's always just a matter of how much - and that's always a fair thing be working toward better definition.

You can look at it that way, but teams and players are not constant unchanging populations being sampled, they evolve. What they did recently is always more important than what they did in the past. The aggregate average of the data that form a trend is not best unbiased predictor of the future value if the trend is real. Of course picking the time interval to look back before what you are looking at is no longer what is (or isn't) is always tricky in human endeavor. But we do this all the time. Take a number like K rate - we don't look at a players whole career to estimate his immediate K rate, that normally stabilizes after only a couple hundred AB. What happened before that was for all intents and purposes a different player. So the argument is not really a fundamental one, it's just a matter of picking the timescales for any given type of data. How much a season captures the nature of a team? 12months or 162 is an arbitrary number, there is no fundamental reason to believe that is the best interval over which to base team projections. It's just the most obvious one...

the unreality of 'reality TV' at work. People thought he was person on their TeeVee, but the person on the TV was the producers' version of Trump playing a scripted character with his face, rather than the real character behind that face.

which is good example of analysis losing the forest for the trees. I'm more interested in trends. The Tiger team aggregates are skewed by last April, but a human factors approach argues that that was more likely the anomaly. But we'll see!

good catch, missed that. I read that the army wanted a laser guided mortar - looks like they got one.

land mine?

seems odd. They played the last 120 games at 7 over 500 and in the main the team is at a point where most players are still improving toward their peak years and they have overall made more additions than they have had losses, so why would you assume they would be any worse than the last 2/3 of last season? Of course with any team the pitching could take a huge step back, but that is no more or less likely for the Tigers than any other team.

yup. The low case counts are good to see but they might not really mean much anymore in terms of whether the Virus is circulating out there but only causing minor illness because of the community immunity level. But as Hong Kong shows, Omicron can still pack a wallop for the elderly unvaxxed.

don't see much of a chance for Cameron - I think he's going to have to put up some good numbers at Toledo for a while to prove his bat before he gets a call. Reyes and Hill will be good competition. Reyes had a good off season and you pretty much know what you've got - it ain't gonna be a lot but he can OPS 850 against LHP so he's a good pair with Baddoo. Hill has the higher ceiling but the bat has to be there right now. I think he can win the job coming out of the gate if he hits well in ST but whichever of them wins it. the other is only the 1st slump away from swapping places so I don't see it as a very big deal whichever comes north in April. As per this link Baddoo, Reyes, Cameron & Hill all have options remaining so they will be free to bounce them around.

yeah - I don't think any wires are going to get fished through that stuff without cutting wallboard. But most inside work guys treat redoing wall board as pretty much nothing. Of course if you weren't planning on repainting the room after the electrical work, well, now you are!

I had fiber insulation blown into the walls at my 1st house - it was a bit messy when you opened an electrical outlet - but the insulation worked great . I was always a little reticent about the foam blowers because of the potential for organics, but they do have much better compositions then when I was looking at it. Current house was built OEM with tar paper backed fiberglass in the walls - not enough, but enough that trying to shoot anything in around it is probably a bad idea....

another difference is that as I read it, there is still some semblance of a distribution Chinese governmental authority around Xi - he has not had nearly the generational time frame to consolidate his dictatorship that Putin has. He may have the same impulses, but he remains somewhat more constrained.

If China eventually losses control of Omicron despite the draconian measures to keep the lid on, Xi is going to see a level of pressure he probably thought he had reached immunity from.

maybe....hard to see how college baseball could fill the role that college football does given that it doesn't generate very much revenue, and even if you somehow generated the fans, it would take years to build out the college baseball stadium infrastructure to support a larger fan base.

25 cases in Washtenaw County. 1st time under 30 since.....I don't remember when.

If Correa goes back to the 'stos I'll wager it will be for less than he purportedly turned down from the Tigers - or else maybe it will be all deferred money out 20 yrs..... Along the same lines though, I'm beginning to wonder if the Tigers and Matt Boyd may not be done with each other either....

Yankees could get lucky and get 2 more good years out of Donaldson, in which this trade will be good for them, but more likely Donaldson's bat will fall off the table sooner than that.

maybe the Yankees are going to go all in on D and will join Baltimore in moving their fences back...... nah.....

can't figure out Minny. Dumping salary. But the Yankee end is odd also - a 36 yr old 3B and glove 1st SS are not really typical Yankee type targets..... ...and the list gets shorter for Correa...

another aspect of this that even with the most supportive position by Chinia, the logistics are very bad. There are only limited road and rail connections from China to Russia by land, and at this point arms shipments by sea could face Western interventions.

and this piece showed up today in NYT today by one Wnag Hulyao - who runs a 'non-governmental' think tank in Beijing (yeah - I know that's kind of an oxy-moron in today's China, but I'm just the messenger here.....). Basically making the case why this war is not really such a good thing for China. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/china-russia-ukraine.html

What I don't get is that it's crazy enough that for all intents and purposes he is "aid and comforting" the enemy, but he's not even doing a creditable job. The rhetoric is stupid weak from any side. Embargoing the importer of 8% of our imports is the "the worst..." whatever. That doesn't even make any sense as Russian agitprop.

Back in my philosophically more conservative days, I was more sympathetic to the idea that making things that are already illegal ‘more illegal’ is little more than a kind of virtue signaling, but as time goes by, I’m less sure our society isn’t becoming one in need of more formalized consensus virtue signals. If a guy with a deep record as a ‘real’ philosophical conservative, say a Justin Amash, opposed something like this one the grounds given above, I’d accept that as an honorable position, but not from this current House GOP rabble.