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Also, I don't think I have any interest in guaranteeing a 26-man slot to the flawed center fielder with no big league experience who is the #42 guy in the Orioles system.

I agree that there should not be a cap without a floor, because that would have the effect of restraining salaries at the top end without incentivizing spending by teams at the bottom. IOW, it would hamper five, maybe ten teams tops, and wouldn't affect any of the others, many of whom are only too happy to spend nothing, field a perennial loser, and rack up guaranteed profits and skyrocketing franchise value. I do believe the ceiling and floor should be a lot closer than your example. I believe the NBA essentially requires teams to spend anywhere from a max amount of payroll to 90% of that max amount. That sounds good to me in principle. Teams should be made to spend competitively among one another to remove the natural advantage big markets have. When it comes right down to it, Pittsburgh and Colorado and Kansas Citty should have the same chance to sign top tier free agents as New York and Los Angeles and Chicago do. It's true that big markets generate more revenue, so, there should also be more revenue sharing among teams, including of local broadcast and maybe even some degree of gameday revenue. Of course, to make this work, the books of every team must be open, not necessary to us the fans, but at least to some independent commission appointed to oversee the whole thing. And as I spool this out in writing, I can easily see how this does not have a ghost of a chance of ever happening.

Hard at work making America great again!

Speaking of construction, I understand why this happens and that it's not going to change, but I really hate how all of a sudden, starting about late October and going through the first big snowfall, there is a rash of construction racing against the fiscal calendar to get completed, and streets get blocked just about everywhere as a result. And then, once a street gets successfully repaired, we go into our harsh winter, and the combination of the freeze-thaw seesaw and the constant heavy traffic causes those same streets to significantly break up and develop potholes before spring springs for good.

Yes, but it is your kind of witch hunt, so, cheers, mate. 😉

Well, they did tell us over and over that they are going to conduct witch hunts against Democrats.

THANK you. Exactly right. This is a ****ing social media forum, for god's sake. Why are we being tasked with providing solutions, and then begin criticized when we are deemed not to have adequately satisfied the task?

I don't know that he has any particular inside knowledge about this, but it certainly passes the smell test, and is the very thing many of us have been alluding to, anyway.

Wasn't the Second Amendment designed to protect us against things like this? That's what I'd always heard.

I view this as a question different from, "how many wins did he contribute to?"

Player's individual accomplishments do contribute to run totals, runs do contribute to wins, and there's good research indicating that ten marginal runs contributed by a player results in a win, so I think it's valid to express it in wins.

And she's certainly free to, and she will be shat upon for political reasons and not her loose cannon antics, and we will be one step closer to how the world of politics should run in the first place. No serious person on "teh left" is expecting anything different from her.

Can I just tell you how funny it is that they're trying to hang what MTG did in the service of Trump, MAGA, and the red-hatted rank and file on "teh left", after she specifically repudiated that same behavior that she did on behalf of Trump et al? Talk about lazy.

You mean back when she was a card-carrying MAGA flamethrower? Yes, that checks out.

This is a really underappreciated argument against the efficacy of voter fraud as a potent weapon to steal elections: it's just too damn succeed doing so at a granular level. How do paranoid people actually believe that someone could effectively go from precinct to precinct on Election Day impersonating other people in order to steal their votes in their place? How many could a single person even manage to pull off? Six? Eight at the most? That's nowhere near enough to swing an election that's starting out tilted against you to go your way. Doing that would take a person literally all day long to accomplish. And how many people would you have to enlist in such a scheme to have any chance of swinging an election in a particular jurisdiction away from a sure Republican winner to the Democratic side? Hundreds? Thousands? And multiplied by how many jurisdictions to steal a whole congressional district, or senatorial race, or presidential election? And how could you keep such a conspiracy quiet, never to be found out? They odds against pulling off something like that are so astronomical that it barely rates trying to even seriously calculate it. The whole idea of voter fraud of this type is just so illogical that it crumbles at the merest examination. This is why the concept bottoms-up voter fraud is literally no threat to elections. To cheat at winning elections, you'd need to do it at a scale massive enough to swing the election. Doing so requires top-down elections fraud, the kind people with institutional connection can arrange through dodgy tactics such as mid-term redistricting, or the kind of onerous voter requirements that favor people of means over people without. Elections fraud that neutralizes votes, or that invalidates the ability of a qualified eligible voter to even vote in the first place.

It is, in fact, and institutional form of voter suppression by the party in power for the specific purpose of hurting the out-of-power party at the polls. And that party in power is always the Republicans, and that party out of power is always the Democrats. I challenge anyone to provide an example of when Democrats attempted to enact a voter ID law and the Republicans objected. I'll just wait here.

She's offered her apology and declared her intention. That's a good first step. Now comes the next part: backing up her words with action. That's going to take a lot of work and, frankly, a long time. Probably longer than between now and the election. I won't handicap her chances of succeeding, but I'm willing to give her room to prove it.

I don't have any world.

I get that it's de rigeur here to virtue signal contempt for the New York Times, but this is a really solid piece.

Who the everloving **** is Alex Wilkins?

So you're going to raise prices to include taxes, meaning the number on the menu is going to be higher. Bold move. I honestly hope it works well for you because I'm a big fan of that idea.

I don't know where you're getting this one, but I have told nobody anything of the sort.

Would you please share with us the data you have at your disposal proving the US electoral system is besieged with widespread voter fraud necessitating voter ID laws? None of us can find any. Anything you can share on this, we'd appreciate. Thanks. Also, reminder: anecdotes are not data.

No, it doesn't make sense any more than your supposition that agents never have backchannel conversations with teams because they are afraid of getting caught.

I think you're right on this although I would bet that average minor league fielders are a lot closer to average major league fielders than average minor league hitters are to average major league hitters.