chasfh

For a moment I thought you were advising Ed to run away from Florida! 😉

Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some dishonest pundit on Fox has pointed out that there are no rights for trans people explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

Agree. They are so loaded, they definitely don’t need Skubal this year.

The thing about WAR I don’t particularly like is how under the hood the calculation is. I have always wanted to know it so I could tinker with myself. Maybe they hide it by design to prevent that. Who knows. I do trust it to be accurate at least within reason.

I could see where, if Skubal loses the arb case and gets the $19 million the Tigers imply he’s worth, and then they turn around and bring in Chris Bassitt for something more, Tarik might be at least a little annoyed.

Make your friends' eyes roll at parties with this one.

Some will find this interesting.

Here are a bunch of maps dividing the eastern US from the western US. On that second one, I wonder whether the numbers would show if California were removed from the western US.

This poll was taken by Morning Consult among Americans in 2020.

I get how it can be difficult to understand just how much positional adjustments should matter because we can't see under the hood how they are done. I generally trust the hundreds of baseball minds who have been (and presumably continue to be) working on establishing and honing the valuation, but I do grant that it's possible there's a huge blind spot afflicting the entire informed-outsider analytical community about it. Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't let that possibility lead me to reject outright the current calculations, though.

Granting your point about first basemen positionally penalized by WAR, here is how Spencer ranks among all first basemen with 1,500 plate appearances or more since 2022: This includes no fewer than 12 first basemen ranking above him who've had fewer than 2,000 plate appearances the past four seasons, far fewer than Spencer's 2,118—including the guy above him who just retired because he can't perform to his own standard anymore. I'd be surprised to learn that the Tiger coaches and front office are unconcerned about his -42.5-run defense, let alone consider his +0.5-run offense to be good enough to disregard or even accept that.

Lack of spending by the Central teams? Probably both to some degree, perhaps independent of one another. The various ownerships may feel it's not worth it to pursue top free agents because they won't go there anyway—look what happened with the Tigers making the richest offer to Bregman, and yet his going to Boston for less money anyway. (At least that's how it looked at the time—it ended up being a smart money move after all, with teams he preferred to play on.) And the best the Pirates could do was make a half-assed offer to Schwarber, probably a performative gesture for their fans since they must have known that he was never going to take it. But players also have their own agendas as to whom they want to sign with, too, and that encompasses a small subset of the total number of teams. It's mostly about winning a ring now. That's why everyone wants to go to the Dodgers and Blue Jays right now. But I think it's also a combination of who has a recent history of throwing big money at players, and have a perceived chance of winning a ring or pennant right away. These eight teams—Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Mets, Giants, Blue Jays, Phillies—qualify by a long shot in the minds of players. A couple other teams qualify, I believe, as good "close to home" venues that also spend a bunch of money, also an attractive proposition to players, especially those who have school-age kids (Arizona and San Diego come to mind). Only one team seemed to have broken that cycle—Texas, for a couple of years—but now they are back in the dumps and are noncompetitive for top free agents. If the Royals had offered 4/260 to Tucker over the Dodgers, would he have taken that KC offer if the Dodgers were to not budge on their final number? It comes down to whether $240 million and a bunch of rings would have been more or less valuable to him than $260 million and no rings. I know what I think he'd do. It's no accident that since the 2021-22 offseason, of the 35 contracts of $100 million or higher, 25 of them, or 71%, come from those eight teams above, which make up 27% of all teams. Same when it comes to high AAV contracts: of the 34 contracts with AAV $25MM or higher, 22 (65%) come from those teams. That's 27% of teams more or less monopolize more than two-thirds of top free agents over the past five years. is that really sustainable state of affairs? We'd have to ask the MLB business people that question. If your question is coming down to, "Is it the chicken or the egg?", I think the answer would have to be, "Yes".

Agreed. Maybe they prefer to play in Boston or Chicago or San Francisco or Toronto or Baltimore or Philadelphia instead. What I have seen is that outside of the Cubs, almost no Central teams have been signing top free agents for big money or long terms the last few years. Of course, this year, short term/big money contracts have become the big thing, which players have gravitated towards I believe so they can make as much money as possible before the expected work stoppage.

My point is that I believe Bassitt, and any other free agent who has a choice, would choose to take slightly less money from a high profile team than slightly more money from us, at this point in time. That could change in the future, meaning we could become competitive for top free agents with the “best” teams, but before that happens I think we would have to both (A) win a pennant, and (2) commit to at least one star for a long-term, preferably high-dollar contract while under team control.

This probably won’t happen, but maybe reducing the responsibility of the Senate to being more like the House of Lords, more of a deliberating and delaying body than a full legislative body, would improve things? I don’t know, just spitballing.

I agree this is fairly likely, although I believe Baseball’s thinking is if they incent pitchers to pitch longer, pitchers will let up on max effort every pitch to preserve their arms for longer outings. There might be something to that since starters have admitted in articles that they come out with a reliever’s mindset knowing they’re only going twice through the order, max. On the other hand, a recent pitcher told us SABR nerds once that the #1 priority for pitchers these days is keeping the ball out of play, so swing and miss is their primary goal, which requires max velocity and movement from Pitch One. I do believe MLB is going to do something, and if I know anything about them, it’ll be without fully consulting the Players. Won’t that be interesting.

I think Carpenter is too much a platoon guy and an iron glove to be a linchpin piece for a championship team. He’s a primary DH, a fourth outfielder, and a potent bat off the bench for that kind of team. That makes him a a 400- or 450-PA platoon guy, not a 650-PA core guy. I think I’d be surprised to see a 30-year-old Carpenter be considered part of the 2028 core. I suppose Tork and Riley could be linchpin pieces but I don’t think that’s a fait accompli, especially for Tork, who still looks like he has too many holes in his game to be that guy. He has over 2,000 plate appearances across four seasons in the majors and has barely cracked 2 WAR for his whole career. That might be good enough for the Avila Tigers or even a bubble team, but not a team striving to play on Halloween. As for Riley, I think this is a pivotal year to prove he can be that consistent five-win All-Star for the next half a decade so he can be signed long-term to be a championship team leader. Dingler has potential to be a Freehan type as long as this year wasn’t his outlier. MLB didn’t think he was good enough to be listed on their Top 100 show, although that’s not super meaningful, either. If he follows up this year with the same or better, I’m gonna get awful excited. If we have those nine guys in the lineup for 2028, meaning zero moves by Harris in the meantime, I think this board would have a hairy conniption.

Salary cap doesn't mean anything for competition unless they have a tight salary floor along with it. After all, any salary cap wouldn't even affect something like 20 of the 30 franchises, so theoretically they could continue merrily underspending to their hearts content and just bank the loot.

Is this really what Trump wants?

Ever hear of the cube root rule? What is the Cube Root Rule in politics? The Cube Root Rule in politics is a principle that suggests the optimal size of a country’s legislative body (e.g., parliament or congress) should be roughly the cube root of the country’s population. This rule is often used as a guideline to help determine the appropriate number of representatives in a legislature to ensure effective representation and governance. How the Cube Root Rule Works: Calculation: According to the rule, if a country’s population is PPP, the ideal size of its legislative body SSS should be approximately S=P1/3. For instance, if a country has a population of 27 million, the optimal legislative body size would be about 300 members, as 27,000,0001/3 = 300 Rationale Behind the Cube Root Rule: Balance of Representation: The rule aims to strike a balance between having enough representatives to provide effective representation for citizens and not having so many that the legislative process becomes inefficient. Historical Observation: The rule is based on empirical observation of various countries, where many legislative bodies approximate the cube root of their populations. Scalability: It provides a scalable approach, meaning as populations grow, legislatures should expand at a manageable rate, avoiding the extremes of overrepresentation or underrepresentation. Cube Root Rule in practice in the US:

Could this possibly be one of the reasons Trump has a hard-on for Colombia?

I'm really starting to think Trump wants Greenland because of Mercator. Nobody tell him about Africa, OK?

She sounds like a true blue American! I'm like that, too. I never watch TV during the day except a sitcom during lunch. I too feel like it's being lazy!