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If he’s even allowed to run, then democracy and the Constitution are literally over. At that point it will be Xi, Putin, and Trump explicitly carving up the world among them, and EU Europe will basically become the Warsaw ghetto.

TDS has been fully embraced by Trump as a nice little cudgel, although I don’t think he could ever have come up with it, because he truly has no innate idea people could ever not love or respect him, except for mentally disabled (or, as he and MAGA would say, “retarded”) people. I think someone had to come up with it for him to explain to him how anyone could ever not love him.

Murdering drug smugglers? I thought Trump was pardoning drug smugglers? 🤔

Trump wants to be all things to all people at the same time. He wants to be both the president who satisfies most people by keeping us out of war unlike those RINOs and Democrats, and be the guy who thrills soldier sniffers with the rapacious overseas adventures they crave. This is not unlike Jesus who is also all things to all people—he’s the Prince of Peace to most Catholics and mainline Christians, and, at the same time, the ass-kicking no-prisoner-taking architect of the Apocalypse to the evangelicals.

Trump despises norms and institutions because they serve to constrain his worst immoral and antisocial impulses. Norms and institutions are for suckers and losers, people with no balls. Trump is sending a message to everyone in the world: we are the biggest, baddest mother****ers on this planet, and we have a divine right to control everything and everyone on it, especially you. Dare to complain or push back in any way and we’re gonna destroy you, too.

I’m pretty sure Trump’s talking about the oil under Venezuela soil that American companies started taking after it was discovered there in the 1910s, then Venezuela booted them out in the 1970s.

Of course Trump thinks this is the greatest economy in history. That guy is cleaning up.

weird not weird

EPETD = Everything Private Equity Touches Dies. Private equity firms do not buy businesses to build businesses. They buy them to quickly extract whatever remaining value there is in them before leaving them for dead. I would prefer they not leave the carcasses of numerous big league teams strewn in their path as they move rapaciously through the big league baseball landscape. In a way, though, that is kind of how some billionaires see the opportunity of buying into sports teams now. The ability to make oodles of cash without having to seriously invest in the product, driving up the desirability and thus value of all franchises, is what makes owning the Pirates, Athletics, Marlins, etc., such a sweet deal for people who are far more fans of money than of baseball. Not for nothing, this is also why that particular faction of owners is spearheading the move toward limiting the amount of investment teams can put into technology. In a competitive business landscape, teams have to amp up that kind of investment so they can effectively compete and win in the marketplace. In a monopolistic/trust business landscape, the owners can conspire to squelch such inconvenient competition by forcing everyone to forego that investment, which serves in the long run to degrade the end product consumers receive. As for the NHL, they generate only half the revenues MLB does, although I also wonder whether there is a basic psychological difference in the expectations of hockey versus baseball players when it comes to the pay. I have no idea what that would be.

Would tat also be true of the Rockies? They have among the fastest games.

Glad to see I could unite all you guys! Looks like my work here is done …

I happened to notice that the Yankees had the longest average game time last year: 2:51. That's still almost three hours, and is two minutes more than their 2:49 from last year, and eight minutes more than their 2:43 average time in 2023. Another thing I noticed is that, when I looked at all the teams ranked by highest average time of game, the teams at the top tended to be those with good records. In 2025, the six teams with the longest times of game were Yankees, Mets, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Mariners, Blue Jays. So I did a quick and dirty correlation between teams' average game times and their winning records since 2023, when the pitch timer was implemented, and the result is +.294, which is not statistically significant, but then, not nothing, either. What I found more interesting, though, was when I broke the correlation down by season: 2023 0.159 2024 0.378 2025 0.413 The correlation between winning percentage and game time in minutes has been rising each year. I think there is a possibility that certain teams may have noticed that by stretching out the game to fit the maximum amount of time they are allowed between pitches, plays, innings, etc., that they gain some edge in terms of performance, perhaps from maximizing their rest time in even minute, marginal ways. I wonder whether anyone on the inside has noticed anything like this, and how they regard it, if at all?

If a salary cap is required then a salary floor should also be required, although I don't think it should be as low as 40% of the cap. The NBA has a salary floor of 90% of the cap, which keeps teams from spending their way to titles. I'd like something a lot closer to that. Also, I'm not wild about whatever the unintended consequences of allowing opaque private equity money in the game is, since EPETD.

If I had equated my wearing my lucky Tigers hat every game with their going to the playoffs, I would agree I'd mistaken correlation for causation. Since Harris came in, made a bunch of changes to the roster, training, development, and infrastructure, and the Tigers started winning after six straight losing seasons under the former guy, I think it is reasonable to conclude that Harris's efforts were at least a substantial, if not the complete, cause of that winning. Can I prove as much with a mathematical formula? No, I cannot. If that's the minimum standard being established, then I have to admit to falling short on that standard.

Which one?

I guess I see what you mean. I mean, sure Avila did put losers on the field for a bunch of years running, but it's already been three years and Harris hasn't put a winner on the field with this team y ... wait ... uhh ... I mean, he hasn't led this team to the playoffs or anyt ... errr ... I guess what I mean is, we haven't actually won any playoff ser ... Maybe I don't really see what you mean after all.

I think I see what you're going for here, but I would stress that we're not those being deranged by Trump. We are still within normal range. He and his MAGA elite operate completely out of range.

If you're thinking about people of color here, I'm not so sure, at least until they perfect the manufacture of robot janitors and crop-pickers and slaughterhouse workers.

Better than nothing, but that's a super low bar. This is still far less than halfway what it should be.

Betcha five bucks?

MLB is not unlike the Premier League. They have their own "Big Six" there—Man City, Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Tottenham—which draw in the elite soccer players of the world. Certain clubs pop up the table and generate consideration occasionally, like Leicester City or Newcastle United or Aston Villa or West Ham. But year in, year out, it's that Big Six, and those teams ended up at the top of the table five years ago, ten years ago, 15 and 20 and 25 years ago—just as they will this May. All the other teams bob in and out of the League, and essentially serve as chum for the Big Six, which use the others to sharpen themselves up for Champions League play. If an elite soccer player wants to both get super paid and help their personal brand, those are the six teams they will focus on. Superstars are not going to end up signing with Brentford or Burnley or Wolverhampton Wanderers, because that would be career death. I mean, yeah, those clubs are in the Premier League, but let's be real: they are not premier teams. This is allowed to happen in England, and really, most soccer countries, because those systems are truly capitalist, with teams being promoted and relegated based on where they land in the table, and if a team is financially struggling, I mean really struggling, they'll be allowed to simply "wind up", meaning go out of business. C'est la vie. There is no meaningful revenue share, or any other aid teams receive to maintain competitive balance. The lords of the Premier League couldn't give less of a **** about competitive balance, because six teams make the lion's share of the money for them, so that's where they focus all the eggs, and they lean into that and hard. And so Baseball has also evolved to become similar. The difference between Baseball's Big Six situation and that of the Premier League is not as stark, but it is there. We won't see the Texas Rangers suddenly get their act together and become dominant year after year like the San Antonio Spurs were for a quarter of a century; or the Kansas City Royals become an elite team like the Kansas City Chiefs did for a decade running; and flip side, the New York Yankees and New York Mets could never become league ciphers like the New York Jets or Brooklyn Nets have, because those leagues operate their businesses to spread out the competitive balance in a way Baseball has practically refused to consider, at least thus far. As long as Baseball runs its business like so, things are not going to magically change. The Tigers will never become an elite team year in and year out because we don't simply have the market size or national media cachet that the Big Six do, but also, we do not have the geographical/divisional proximity of a Philadelphia or Baltimore or Toronto or San Diego, who serve as a sort of Next Six level, that can help us get the occasional Pete Alonso or Kyle Schwarber or Fernando Tatis or Shohei Ohtani. We are a second tier market toiling away in flyover country. Elite players simply won't consider coming here as long as there is even a hint of interest from those other teams. We don't have the resources or cachet to out-zig those teams, so we have to focus on out-zagging them. It's our only chance. That's what the Ilitch/Harris front office is working on at the moment, and I am comfortable rooting for that instead of pining away for something that will never happen, like a Soto or Ohtani or Snell or Japanese superstar signing here. I think we have basically one chance to crack the Next Six level that could last for half a decade or more, and that's re-signing Tarik Skubal. If we miss out on him, though, I think we are going to have to remain basically The Little Engine That Could, zagging our way to occasional relevance now and then.

I think you have a pretty good idea of that.