gehringer_2

TBH, Correa not that much betters in the 'antics' department - depending on how you like that kind of thing.

Schoop is an odd one. A little like Upton in that when he is slumping, he looks so unable to find the ball that he should have been out of baseball two years ago, then a week later he's got the zone down cold and is hitting every ball hard. In Schoops case it is way more than just the random BaBIP noise that all hitters go through. He literally does go from a great to a terrible hitter and back again. Sleep issues? Allergies? Bio-rhythms?

over 9K cases per day for the last two days. We are in a full blown rout. I just took a test today as I have come down with something- feels like an ordinary cold but at this point you have to check on everything.

Brooks goes and dies and the County administration turns to mush in 2 years.....

question: Who is going to want to take this case? These folks don't look like they have the money to hire OJ's team. The Oakland county public defenders office is probably not a happy place since this tragedy

Iowa needed 4 INTs to beat PSU and lost to Wisc and Purdue. Cade is the most careful QB in the conference. On paper there is no game here. Of course 20 yr olds can come up flat for mysterious reasons, but aside from that always there underlying risk of them not showing up, there isn't any kind of football based analysis you can do to persuade yourself MI is likely to lose this game.

Sorry son, I know you are on trial for crimes that may put you away for the rest of your natural life, but we are facing a class D felony and are booking it out of here. Good luck. -Mom and Dad.

I would say that as of last year Cabrera did have long stretches where he saw the ball pretty well, but the knee would come and go - you could watch to see if he was picking up his left foot from day to day/week to week or just swinging flat footed. There's always a possibility the layoff or some off-season routine or treatment will help the knee, or it could just get worse. So I won't try to guess what Miguel can contribute. Clearly last season he was not ready to go when the season started (329 OPS in his 1st 17 games, 747 the rest of the way) - . Hinch had given him 40 AB in ST, could have done a little but not much more there.

but didn't call the cops or the school immediately? Have they determined if he was just picking victims at random?

1st a live round that magically appears and now a gun that magically fires itself?

I've seen 3 weeks given as the minimum ST for the pitchers - so 1st week in March?

Notre Dame promotes their DC to HC. Marcus Freeman is in. Probably saved some $$ there. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/college/2021/12/03/notre-dame-promotes-freeman-35-replace-kelly-coach/8851561002/

kitty-corner has an interesting history. Nothing to do with cats https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/kitty-corner-a-word-history

I felt really bad about Dirks. What I couldn't figure out was that last time he went to Toledo after having back trouble, he got hurt again stealing a base. WTF was he doing stealing bases rehabbing a bad back? IIRC, it was shortly after that he was done. I always wondered if he had done that on his own, of if the manager had called it, which if true, would have been a pretty shitty thing to be doing.

yeah - I've seen that. I think if you insert a quote and then delete the entry cursor - for instance you put in a sentence and then delete it all the way back the beginning, you lose the cursor out side the quote box permanently, even though you can still edit in the quote box. The way out is to ctl-Z to reverse the deletion you made. Then edit what you want but sure not to delete the entry point again.

you know me, I'd do something more radical. How about a scheme were the league pays everyone's minimum at about 2 million, and the teams all pay a revenue based tax to the league to fund that. All the guys at the minimum would go into a draft every year, which would include all AAA guys with 5 yrs. You pick the guy, you get him for one year. If you like him, you can sign him to an 'extension' contract, say a minimum of 2yrs and 25% more than the minimum, but otherwise for as long and as much as you want and you leave the luxury tax in place. When contracts run out, guys with enough seniority (say 5 years at MLB) are FA. If a FA doesn't sign during the FA period, he can go back to the draft pool with the rest at the minimum salary. If you are at the min and don't get picked up, you are a minor league free agent. That would leave a lot of decent players as a performance floor for bad teams to turn around quickly with and you could weight the 'draft' rules even more heavily toward bad teams - say multiple picks in the 1st round to the worst teams. You 'own' your minor leaguers for a fixed number of option years much like now, but if you don't give them the 2yr +25% deal in 5 yrs, they go to the pool. just a sketch - but the idea is to increase minimums and give poor teams more options to turn over their rosters at moderate cost. Insulate players from cheapskate ownership since the league sets the floors. Let journeyman players move and maybe help keep good players with the same team. It doesn't address what to do about albatross contracts, but I think in the long run that is self correcting because the teams that give them out almost always do suffer in the end.

the one that tricks me is that Halifax is south of the line. I had to go there a few times, it always felt "up" in Canada when it's really "over" in Canada. the more striking number is that 90% of Canadians live within 100 mi of the US border, which of course does include Vancouver. I believe Halifax, Edmonton and Calgary are the most populous places that are not.

the history of the world is replete with systems put in place by men to control other men, but especially women. The male has always feared the power of sexual attraction the female possesses. That's cooked into a million years of genes. Civilization is the the long climb from genetically programmed to rationally based behavior, but the US is clearly regressing on that scale as a society, so this should not be unexpected.

Whether you are going to have deep (6 teams or more) divisions, or not, but especially if you do, you have to do something to insure parity, because no-one is going to pay to go see a 5th place team that is 20 games back at the ASB. Trying to 'reward' or 'punish' owners is a fools game and can only hurt the sport in the long run. You need a structure where more teams have a chance deeper into the season - whether that is fewer divisions and more WC or vice versa is immaterial, it's how many team stay in the mix for how long. The system now incentivizes the kind of build and bust cycling that we have seen in Detroit and that leads to the huge talent disparities and noncompetitive teams. Chris Ilitch has just proved that the Tigers were not bad because he was a cheapskate owner but because he was following the straightest path the system left him to get better. The big issue, parity, is not directly addressed by the how you put together the divisions at all and not even that much by how many team make the playoff in the end. You could go back to just one pennant winner playing the WS but if 20 teams were in the hunt into Sept you would still have the same fan engagement for the season.

Cade showing a little something in the 3rd

I'd eye ball it at about 86-91. Looking at the range plots, compared to '19 his average isn't down so much as as his 'best' fastball is. 2yr ago he was touching 94. His best FB this season were down 2-3mph from that. https://www.fangraphs.com/players/zack-greinke/1943/graphs?pitchgraphs=true&statArr=&legend=1&split=base&time=daily&start=2019&end=2021&rtype=mult&gt1=15&dStatArray=FA&ymin=&ymax=

🤔

The luxury tax works well enough for the owners purposes they shouldn't feel the need to modify it. The luxury tax is a de facto cap, it just has a squishy front end and two year grace period to get back under. To my recollection, no one has ever tirggered the draft pick penalty, so you can say the luxury tax for all intents and purposes is hard cap at that violation level (~$40M for 3 yrs)

2 QBs in the top 30? Someone, or two, is going to score a sleeper at QB.

YES! Forgot him.