chasfh

You might change your tune on this if you ever have your insurance company deny you coverage on a major disease because you bought cigarettes and alcohol on your credit card over the course of a number of years.

This is consistent with a concerted effort to get people used to worse and worse so they accept it as their lot in life. It's why food tastes worse and is more scarce, products are made cheaper and meant to throw away when they break even as prices rise on them, and customer service has become nearly extinct and practically impossible for average people to engage. Trust me when I assert to you that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will never deny himself a single thing even as he exhorts millions of his own acolytes to do the same. In fact, he'll almost certainly ratchet up the luxury as precious diminishing resources continue to get diverted from the great unwashed to the elites.

That means only a few thousand.

Go back to 2006 and tell 30-something you that you will be typing this on the Motown board in twenty years.

There is no reason a player should be guilted into taking pity on a major league team and doing them a "solid" by retiring to save them a little money. Owning a franchise in the only legally-protected monopoly in America is as risk-free a venture as there is on this entire planet. I see no reason every last risk factor must be removed from the game just to protect those poor hedge fund owners and private equity firms who own the teams. They want to own a big league ball club and bask in glory among their peers at Bilderberg and Davos and epstein islands while raking in even more billions from them? Fine, then let them have to continue paying players while they are injured. **** those guys.

Back in the old days, what we call "forearm tightness" would be the precursor to "dead arm".

This one can be easy to forget. Talent distributed among all 2.3 billion males aged 20-39 in the world may be on a Bell Curve, but at the very top of any profession, which in baseball represents the top 7,500 or so men in the world who make an actual living at it, talent is more accurately represented as being the tip of a pyramid.

Works for me

So I took a hack at trying to figure out how many net runs the Tigers gain through their taking extra bases. I gave it the situations from this table: https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2025-baserunning-batting.shtml And run expediencies from this table: https://tangotiger.net/re24.html And ask it to determine runs gained and lost depending on whether the runner stopped after one base, made it an extra base, or got thrown out at that extra base. I asked for a sortable table and got this, at this link: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ae435d12-66cf-4f68-a634-73b59162a9cb Here's a pasted table. Bottom line: Tigers are second in runs gained but last in runs lost. However, that works out to having them rank fifth in net runs gained, behind Brewers, Dodgers, Jays, and Reds. pretty good company, and substantially above the league average. That means that despite leading the league in outs lost trying to take the extra base, it was a net positive for us.

No, that's not me saying that, that's them saying they want their money back. That's why it's in quotes.

eff it

God, what a great president she would have made.

"It's OUR money. We want it back."

Lawfare running amok.

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.