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Correct—I don’t. And you don’t.

And yet I’d bet money the vast majority of MAGA veterans will either give him a pass on it, or fully embrace this as a respectful gesture of support. Or am I wrong, @Tigeraholic1?

You’re close—more like, they’ll explain it to you like they’re a four-year-old.

This makes it look like the mechanic in color is the Republican and Rickets in black and white is the Democrat. Either way, whoever wins will caucus with the Republicans anyway.

I honestly don’t know what you’re referring to when you say this. I might be a bit ignorant of the details you’re aware of.

Theoretically, I’m not opposed to the idea of moving the mound back measurably, like a couple of feet or so, to provide extra time for the batter to react to the balls, although there would be a bunch of consequences to reckon with. One of the big consequences would occur when a pitcher moves up from a 60’ 6” league to a 62’ or 63’ league. Besides the extra strain that gets put on a pitcher’s arm as they try to make up the difference without losing their velocity (because pitchers are human and they’re going inherently to want to preserve that as is), they would also have to rework their entire repertoire of pitches to go 62’ or 63’ instead of 60’ 6”, and there are going to be casualties along the way, both in health and career terms. Also, that would mean all the minor league teams would have to move their mounds back, as well all the independent pro teams that feed players into the systems, and probably all the college teams as well. Elite high school teams in California and the south, which feed pitchers into organized ball, would feel pressured to move their mounds back, too, which might force entire state high school athletic associations to mandate the move, which would cost taxpayer money. And if the Asian leagues don’t comply as well, that would reduce the amount of pitchers that could step right into a rotation or bullpen and contribute to a big league team. So all the mounds in Japan all the way down to the high school level (and HS ball is HUGE in Japan) might well have to make that move. There are probably other consequences as well, but that’s one big one that occurs to me.

The idea would be to discourage the spin race by making it practically impossible to spin the ball as we see now. I might even say that spin rates have gotten so high that there must be pitchers who are overtly trying to break the record for highest-spin rate, just for the recognition.

If being critical of Israel, and not co-signing onto the resolution flatly equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is itself anti-Semitic, then the Republican campaign to set the bar at "you can be either pro-Israel or anti-Semitic, choose one" has been wildly successful.

That might be countered by fewer pitches per at bat, which I believe is a worthy goal.

Then how about changing the ball to limit spin? Lowering the seams would probably do that. They could also consider changing the surface of the ball from leather to some synthetic, and maybe even include microtexturing to the ball, to produce more symmetric boundary-layer separation that suppresses seam-shifted wake effects. Maybe another way to skin that cat would be to redistribute internal mass outward toward the cover of the ball, to increase rotational inertia without changing total mass. One last way, which is probably the most radical, is increase the size of the ball itself, maybe by a quarter inch and a quarter ounce. But even without that, if you put all three of others together, you could probably reduce max spin by 500 or more RPM, with the effect of reducing strikeout rates, increase balls in play, and tilting the advantage away from flame-throwers and toward command pitchers. If they coupled this set of changes with true robot umpiring on every pitch, which would force pitchers to have to come into the a hitter's zone to get strikes at some point, I bet they could move the K/9 rate from mid-eights to mid-sixes or less overnight. Counterpoint: MLB Marketing and Players would both hate this.

No, "being unhinged" and "knowing what you're doing" are not mutually exclusive by necessity. "Unhinged" typically means acting wildly, unpredictably, or outside social norms, e.g., impulsive rants, bold risks, or chaotic energy. "Knowing what you're doing" implies competence, awareness, and deliberate control over your actions. Trump exhibits both. You're going to focus on the "competence" part. Trump is not anything like competent when it comes to managing the economy, for example. A president absolutely should be competent when it comes to managing the economy. On that, we can agree. The breakdown occurs when we contemplate the difference between "should be" and "is". I would counter that managing the economy is not even his goal. Trump does not care about the economy. He cares about his own aggrandizement, control of others, and personal enrichment. He is very competent when it comes achieving those goals, and the economy is merely a tool in the service of those goals. This line of logic may enrage you. Certainly defensible. I don't like it, either. But just because he is incompetent in something that is traditionally important for presidents but that he cares hardly a whit about, it does not follow that he must by definition be incompetent in everything else, and in every way imaginable. Trump is unhinged. Trump also knows exactly what he is doing. It's simply bad luck that that which he knows exactly what he's doing is in an area that doesn't help the American people, or the rest of the world.

That would be nice, but the presidential electoral setup all but forbids this from happening. Setting aside structural barriers such as ballot access restrictions, the U.S. uses a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post election system, where once a presidential candidate beats all their opponents by at least a single vote within a state, they are awarded 100% of all the votes in that state that ultimately matter. This discourages voters who might otherwise be inclined to vote for a third party from doing so because of the concept of wasting the vote on someone who's destined to lose (something that also happens, BTW, when your major party presidential candidate loses your state anyway.) There's also the general tendency of countries that have single-member districts, instead of proportional representation, to emerge as two-party countries. Both the US and UK are emblematic of that. If we truly want more than two strong parties, we would probably need to move from a winner-take-all system to a proportional representation system, at minimum. Almost none of us here will ever live to see that happen.

That said, this would be a challenge because strikeouts for pitchers are as important to them (not to mention as marketable to the business) as home runs are for hitters. It's all about burnishing the personal brand. You don't get featured on Quick Pitch for inducing ground balls to second for an out.

If you believe in the Better Angels societal evolutionary and/or the Arc of the Moral Universe theories, it should happen eventually, because as long as there is an active, collective effort to do so, we will get there. The only way that can be reversed is to exterminate the intelligentsia and their educated acolytes, outlaw free education altogether, and remake society into a replication of the serfdom era.

I think one day it will be, but a lot of terrible ****, and then defeat and truth and reconciliation, is going to have to happen first, because we are nowhere near the level of peak fascism the country has to experience to finally wake the **** up. You and I won't live to see that entire cycle, probably, but if I were a bettor, I would bet that sometime in the next 25 to 75 years, the outlawing of gerrymandering will happen.

Either the name Orban is the Hungarian equivalent of Smith, or that woman is related to Viktor, and then I wonder what the family dynamics at Christmas dinner must be like.

Being unhinged and knowing what he's doing are not mutually exclusive states for him.

Change the ball to deaden it so as make contact less damaging than it is now?

I feel differently about the Tigers giving him #99: I don't think it's a lack of organizational confidence thing as much as it is a style thing, because uniform number 99 has a unique history in sports, much in the way the number 00 does. Gage might have even asked for it. But I think if the Tigers truly wanted communicate the ephemeral nature of his tenure with us with a spring training numbers, I think it would be more like #74 or #87 than #99. I have a feeling someone like McCoskey or Beck is going to write a feature piece contemplating Gage's uniform number 99. Who knows, they might be working on it this very minute.

The Tigers' training staff compound:

No, that was the Twins.

He is so ****ing unhinged and so many people are just eating it all up. I’ll never understand it.

I really liked when the camera showed the top of the Royals dugouts where they had emblazoned pennants with the year they made the playoffs, and 1984 was prominently there.

I like how the NBC guy asked Gage Workman, “how did you get here?”, apparently expecting a different, more metaphorical answer than the dry explanation Gage gave him.