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Powered by strong consumer spending, so says Trump's Commerce Department, a party with interest, about a period of time now three to six months ago? You don't say. Meanwhile, back in the present day:

I mean, just the histrionic graphics and fonts and punctuation should be enough to tip you off even without seeing it.

It's been two days since we've heard from either of you. Did you two finally get a room? 😉

I have nine days in January out of the country coming up. I should probably bubble-wrap myself until then so I don’t **** it up.

Or fall flat on their faces. Because, you know, Red Sox.

OK, serious question now: should there be an international amateur free agent draft?

If the other two networks have the balls, they should promote their own news integrity by highlighting this hypocrisy.

Pretty sure the new CBS sees this as a benefit. Gives them a chance to clear out the “traitors” and replace them with “patriots”.

Well (a) he's not Trump, and (b) he's brown. If he were white they definitely would have let him have it. Yeah, I really believe that.

this reads very familiar. We learned about this one some years ago, right?

To be clear, DOGE was in reality never about cutting spending. It was only about cutting jobs.

They're definitely planning on coming for the rest of us. You watch.

Very very very. That's how stupid.

Not impossible, since they certainly were not hired for their competence first and foremost.

Trump is a victim?

At the risk of looking too pedantic here, Epstein and Trump were not throwing parties for 14-year-old girls. They were throwing parties for themselves. The girls were invited to be the party favors. In a case like this I believe proper characterization is important.

I would guess that's because you intimately know the working of helicopters, you took great care to get it right, and you trusted yourself and the guys yous served with. The question is, do you trust everybody else and their rig?

That was one of the most Lions ways I’ve ever seen them lose. I mean, I knew the season was over as soon as Goff got tackled in the end zone, but to just stick the knife in and twist it like that is just so SOL. And the coup de grace of the whole thing was when the ref making the call at the end said “it’s a touchdown HOWEVER …” I mean, who else does this even happen to?? The SOLs are fully back. Holmes and Campbell can’t fight 60-plus years of history.

Something had to have happened with the guy. You don’t go from being projected at 8/158 from a Big Six team to 2/28 from one of the worst franchises in baseball because of swing and miss and defensive liabilities. Those had to have been already baked in to the projection. Something else is up.

That might be part of it. Another part of it is that she is legitimately a lightweight when it comes to baseball journalism.

And yet, the NBA is arguably the number two sports league in the world, probably after the English Premier League. Inarguably number two in this country, at least. And no one has mentioned it here yet, but the NFL also has a hard floor requiring teams to spend 89%-90% of the league cap across a four-year period. I’m not sure whether managing a 90% cap situation at a 26- or 40-man roster would be impossibly more complex than at 14, but I would think there are systems have been devised to do something similar enough that they could port it over to MLB usage. One big thing I can see preventing a tight ceiling-floor regime would be active blocking by the Pirates/Marlins/Athletics wing of ownership, the bloc that wants to simply harvest the business and pocket the cash. Their teams may be minnows on the field, but they might be considered whales among owners and able to project their will onto everyone else. Not sure about that either way, but it’s possible. Another problem might be the requirement to open the books to Players. No owner would ever want to do that. One of the biggest prizes of the Sherman exemption is the ability to operate in secret, yielding the ability to bury the sources of revenue within the business to minimize or eliminate taxes. Agreeing to a cap/floor band might well end that gravy train for them. One other large problem I see is actually implementing the payroll band among the teams effectively. Suppose they agree to a regime similar to the NBA/NFL in which a salary cap is set at 50% of league revenues with a 90% floor, whether trued up on a season-to-season basis, across a four-year period, whatever. Estimated 2024 MLB revenues that I could find said $12.1 billion. Fifty percent of that is $6.05 billion, and that divided among 30 teams would yield a roughly $202 million payroll cap with a $181.5 million floor. That sounds fine and all to us fans, but how would they actually manage the payrolls of currently $300MM+ teams like the Dodgers and Mets and Yankees and Blue Jays to bring them into compliance with that payroll band? Grandfathering current rosters and working toward the cap across an X year period sounds like a solution, but there is probably an entire competitive parade of horribles lurking within a solution like that, one that might disadvantage the Dodgers and Yankees on the field for some period of time, and I promise you Baseball would have explicit antipathy for that idea. That itself might be enough for them to continue rejecting the idea as being completely unworkable in the real world. Someone at a higher pay grade than I could probably figure out it, or maybe not, at least to a degree acceptable to everyone. But looking at it from this standpoint, I could see them never agreeing to a tight payroll band. It might be closer to what ATF suggested, a really loose band where the floor is something like a third of the cap, and maybe across time they tighten that up to something closer. Whether they would get anywhere near an ideal of 90% is anyone’s guess.

My impression is that they manage to do that exact thing in the NBA.

I do sometimes wonder whether the Playing Poor routine does help spike franchise valuations more, since making oodles of money while doing basically nothing to compete, even when fielding 90+-loss teams year after year, does seem like a pretty sweet deal that a lot of billionaires who don't care for sports, as well as PE firms, would love to sink their teeth into. I haven't thought all that deeply about it—yet—so I don't have six paragraphs to devote to it here—yet. 😁

Well, the Tiger did beat division winners as a wild card playoff team two years in a row, so ... I do like division titles, but in the final analysis, just get me to the dance.

And yet I see Ed's point in that the memory of it can activate in the subconscious and still lead people to intellectually acknowledge Emily's shortcomings in prospect evaluation but still have the feeling prospects fail at a much higher rate than they actually do.