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Watching my first Tigers game of the season, at the Orioles, on MLBN. They’re wearing those new blue alternates. They are ugly and cheap-looking. They look like the kind of uniform you get playing for a team in amateur men’s hardball.

Come on, Claude, stay strong, man!

Please respect the people trying to avoid him.

I agree with most of this. Jones might not even make the team because we might unlock whatever Austin Slater had for the Giants, plus he's a better defender. I might be buying Sweeney a little more than you. I don't think Carp is going to to be any more than he is right now, which, really, should be good enough for another year or three. I'm shorting Tork more than most. I'm with you on everything else.

Baserunning an F? After all the stories written all year about their historic baserunning achievements and then ending up with the high percentage of extra bases taken by a wide margin? It’s obvious he didn’t watch the team. That’s the only data point I need to dismiss the guy. If he gets something that basic and well-known wrong, how can you trust anything else he says?

Please stop.

This is a core reason I don’t care to know anything about players as people. It’s not that I don’t like them as people—after all, I don’t know them as people IRL—but their personhood, which occurs exclusively outside my purview, is simply not germane to my preferred way to understand them. When I follow a team, which is by necessity populated with players, I build a profile of those players in my mind, and that profile is about only their performance in games. In that sense, I care only about the player and what he does on the field, not the person and what he does off it. This is why I don’t care a thing about who a player dates, or who his wife and kids are, or what his charities are, what he wears on the red carpet, what he does for fun away from the game, what his opinions are, any of that. I don’t want to know any of this because the more I know, the more a fleshed-out person he becomes, and then what he does or says something awful, I end up disappointed in them as people, and I don’t want that. Miggy and his two families is a good example of that. Why did I need to know that about him? How am I to factor that into my appreciation of him as a player? How can I not let it affect my view of him? How can I root for him without reservation anymore? I don’t want to have to think about that. Let the players be people to the people who know them personally, away from the game. To me, and as it relates strictly to my enjoyment of being a fan, I would prefer them to be only players.

That’s fair. Watch the game for its intrinsic beauty, don’t follow teams or invest your fandom in players. That’s how I watch cricket during the winter, because I have no team and don’t know players, and it’s a very nice, zen way to enjoy a sportscast.

They’re the guys you avoided during middle school and high school because they might give you a swirly at any given moment.

AA got it from Andrew Marchand who posted on X saying the thing eveyone’s been saying since January 6, that NBC is *expected* to hire Jason. That’s where it stands. Honestly, NBC would be a little obtuse not to hire the one announcer in the game that engages listeners more than just about anyone else, one who would gladly abandon his day job for the national spotlight as often as possible. And even more honestly, if this meant Jason were to be gone to do Fox every Saturday and NBC every Sunday and Dan Dickerson called the game on TV instead, I would be thrilled with that arrangement.

I would think “can Tork prove once and for all he can hit” and “can Kenley make a real difference in the back of the pen” might be up there as well.

In light of this, what’s your approach to following sports?

I don’t know if Trump will declare any kind of emergency prior to the election in order to broke it. I think it’s more likely they run the election, putting their thumbs on the scales as much as possible with lawfare, and if it turns out the returns show the Democrats winning, the Trump people will simply tie up all the contestable elections in court in an effort to prevent Democrats taking office. They’ll be doing this on the state level in several states where Republicans get smoked off the ballot, too. Twenty twenty-seven is going to be a complete mess in Washington and statehouses cross the country.

It’s the Christian right thing to do, at any rate.

I’m pretty sure he has other plans to make sure his people get sworn into the House on January 3rd by Mike Johnson.

Me, I’m glad I never turned it on in the first place. I feel sorry for people who have to cover this guy for a living. It must be mentally, emotionally, and psychically exhausting.

Well, if anyone wants to abandon the Red Wings because of the fruit of Dylan Larkin’s tree, then go ahead. That’s what I’m saying. If he offends them, they should stop following him. But they shouldn’t be surprised if the team they end up following instead has a bunch of Dylan Larkins there, too, and they’d have to make the choice all over again. American professional sports are lousy with red hats.

I don’t know, I’m having a little trouble taking seriously an ex-NBA writer who would bat Parker at the top of the order and Colt #9.

Wo. Bacon.

If I had to pick a spot where the biggest offensive weakness is probably baked in, it’s CF. Every other position, there’s a fairly wide range of potential outcomes depending on how much progress certain guys at certain positions can make, and of course, whether McGonigle breaks camp at short. But Tork, Torres, Keith, Riley, Carpenter, and Dingler all have the potential to rake. Or to flop.

I would guess that the sticking point with the front office to locking down Skubal will be the years, not the dollars.

His goal is not to court independents, never mind liberals. His goal is to mobilize red hats.

Yes, not getting daily briefs on security involving the Olympics is not the kind of impeachable offense Kash Patel likes to engage in.

He'll award you the presidential medal of freedom if you publicly praise him.

Why bother? He'd just be replaced by another red hat athlete. Most professional athletes, especially the white American ones, are ardent red hats. If you want to be a fan of big-time sports, you can't allow yourself to set a bar of no MAGA ever for your teams because you can't ever have that. Either disassociate the player from his ideology, or give up following big-time sports. Simple as that. You're rooting for the player, not the person. Difference.