gehringer_2

yup - If they went from bad to almost 500 with the addition of Seider, Nedeljkovic and Raymond (and missing Vrana), then adding Edvinnsson and Berggren might get them to playoff level, at which point a couple of serious FA signings might get them to a good place. Injuries are always the wild card though...

One of the local rags (edit: actually J Beck on the MLB site) had a story about Inge working as a volunteer coach for UM. You see that at first and you think, journeyman kind of ball player - can't the U put him on the payroll? Then you go to sportrac and see Brandon made $43M in his career. What's an assistant baseball coach salary to him? (or at least what should it be.....🤷‍♀️)

before the game ended Mickey said that the officials put the empty netter up as unassisted because it was an 'awarded' goal because of the stick toss, but all the boxes have given Larkin & Gagner assists so I guess they changed the ruling, or Mickey just read it wrong. Maybe it's only an 'awarded' goal if the stick had prevented the actual goal?

what about one side is more evil but also more right?

the other thing is that it's not only the owners vs the players, but it's the fans vs the players, because every additional dollar spent on player compensation ultimately comes from the fans. It's easy to sit here and say the owners should up the cap because they can afford it, but that's not how it works. The owners are just the pass through, all the money that goes to the players ultimately comes from the fans because no franchise ever operated at a long term net loss.

You'd hope the players have (should have!) seen this coming a mile away and even the MLB minimum is enough money that you could have put yourself in position to go a year without being paid.Of course there will be some players who are unprepared or have leveraged themselves with outside debts they can't support. Probably more than should have! Most owner theoretically have more than enough resources to cover their non-playing overhead, but it might be complicated for some - they may not be able to just shift money into their ball club from some other entities without violating responsibilities to other partners or stock holders etc. And you might have some owners who are just more the sportsman and want to play more than they care about their co-owners' last $.

He was very good for FB PBP. Maybe 2nd in my rankings to Van Patrick, though Dan Miller has grown on me...

the thing is it doesn't mean much to just get some mediocre level of production when you are playing next to a really good player - almost anyone would do the same. It you can't at least make yourself visible on the ice playing without a star dragging you along, you aren't really very good. Call it Abdelkader syndrome.

correct, Philly is not much of a test. At his best there is still a huge falloff from Bertuzzi on that line to Zadina so you are wasting Larkin's potential to that degree, which is why I'd guess he's not going to be there once Vrana gets back anyway.....

LOL. For one of ours we would loop a wide belt or even a bath towel under her and just take a little weight off and she'd come up once she felt the lift but the other never went for that either.

In the end most of the industries - particularly auto - will be able to make it up. As long as capacity is greater than the total market - which it is, they'll eventually build all the cars they can sell. There will be some loss but the production loss estimates they throw around in cases like this are a little artificial. Now if you are selling groceries or gasoline and the guy down the street is open and you aren't, that's gonna hurt as those sales are gone forever, but most people aren't going to change their choice of car over a week or so delivery delay.

Over the years two of our dogs had gotten to the point where they couldn't go up steps very well but neither of them them would do a ramp either. We even tried putting I/O carpeting on one for one of them - no dice. So she'd bark at the edge of the deck and we'd go out and help her up....What else ya gonna do?

The contrast was striking, but again, that's not Stafford's fault. More likely SHF (maybe with some input from Spielman) deciding it was time to change the background music.

he's sort of all over the place in his column. But Carlos is an old curmudgeon before his time. I don't know what the point of dumping on Stafford for the Lion FO's inability for so many years to build the quality and depth (esp on at OL and secondary) to ever win consistently. It wasn't Matthew doing the drafting and signing. As he says, Stafford can win with a level of support the Lions only came close to giving him once. The question was always out there as to whether the Lions were good enough and Stafford wasn't or vice versa. So Stafford has answered that question and the Lion org looks the worse for it. That's not his fault. OTOH, I can understand why there is little love for him in the local sports press. That would follow from the fact he so resolutely refused to ever say anything significant or meaningful - esp to them, which was only drawn into higher contrast by the fact that Kelly too often did. 🙄

this one is for the DVR. I'm going back to bed.

But let's keep the logic straight. There is a difference between being bad because you are trying to stay profitable during a rebuild and being bad with the objective of getting good draft picks. The Tigers cut payroll to maintain profitability, not to be bad to get draft picks. The difference being that you can't solve that with a draft lottery because the picks were not what motivated the behavior. If you want to stop teams from cutting payroll when they are losing and revenue goes down, you have to do what the NFL does and uncouple revenue from winning. But that requires 'nationalizing' the major leagues, and NY and LA are never going to give up their current market advantages and agree to a more fully revenue shared league.

Yes, you have to wonder about the fighting trim/moral of the Russian army. Still conscripts right? And does that play well with high tech HW? The Chechens cut them to shreds. Putin supposedly has changed all that, but if the underlying sociology is still the same does a lot of new hardware fix it?

Angels strike me as another management stuck on “stars and scrubs” and the scrub part mostly around their pitching.

yup. 'JR was listenable pretty much 24 hrs a day if you happened to be somewhere with something else to be doing at the same time. The only connection left that I know of left to those days is that Mike Whorf's son Peter is now on air at WRCJ.

I'll be honest, at the time of the Crimean annexation I thought the issues were much more grey. Ukraine's gov was barely any better than Moscow's and Crimea is/was majority ethic Russian and Russian speaking and the history was that Stalin only made Crimea part of Ukraine in one his made for show federation moves - it had been core Russian for a long time prior. My view then was that if Putin weren't so ham handed (and loath to do anything democratic) he probably could have won a Russian preference plebiscite in Crimea. So I wasn't particularly then and really still am not all that worked up over Crimea. But Ukraine has morphed into a bigger issue for the overall future of Europe

Frank did a good job for a long time with Detroit teams, but he lost me when he started doing UM games. I never cared for the way he ingratiated himself into a tradition he had actually never been a part of, and then later he went off the deep end as conservative political commentator, so not to speak ill of the almost dead, but he was pretty tarnished to me by the end.

still MTU - there is still a universe of space from the extremes of not caring about something (giving a shit) and being willing to start WWIII over it. Case in point was a story today in the NYT about Finns rejecting 'Finlandization' as positive historical outcome. But no-one bothered to challenge those Finns who thought that Finlandization was so bad with the comparison with the actual alternative of having been forced into occupation and Soviet satellite status and how much further ahead Finland is today for not having suffered that fate. You push back as hard as possible with every tool possible and you make is as costly for them as possible, but in the end if the Russians are willing to start shooting on a large scale, we can't opt for a cure that will both be worse than the disease because it will destroy the country, and which also presupposes American's care enough about Ukraine to see their sons and daughters die there, which is again a much higher bar than simply 'not caring', If it's the welfare of Ukrainians we value, than destroying the country is certainly a worse outcome than anything the Russians will do it between now and Putin's eventual demise. That may be cynical, but it's also true.

I don't like the trend to 15 second competitions judged on 2 second subset of that. FIgure skating has gotten that way - the whole performance wins or loses based on a single feat spit second action. It's some form of entertainment but is it actually sport? There are a whole bunch of events - esp in the winter olympics but more in the summer as well, that are all just variations of dance competitions - some in the air above the snow, some on the ice, or on mats - but basically still all just dance competitions with different geometries. I have a pretty limited taste for any of that any more. Give me a biathlon or even curling match and I'll call that sport over the rest.

I wouldn't let the statement "history isn't relevant" pass without a comment on the fact that it's an asinine thing to say. History is ALWAYS relevant. Whether it should be determinative in any given case may be an open question, but not the relevance.

The most complex cases were/are always dual nationals, primarily people born in country that have become naturalized US citizens and are back either because of family, NGO or US sponsored work.