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Houston is one of the highest payroll teams, and guys like to go where other players are getting paid because that means the team pays. They also have rings in their very recent history, and that's very attractive to players looking for rings of there own. As for Anaheim, like Detroit, they've had to overpay and overpromise to get top tier talent to sign there. They overpaid Rendon to go there (and, as it turns out, he doesn't even like baseball); and they were the only team on the west coast to promise Ohtani he could pitch. They also threw way too much money and years, probably unnecessarily, at Josh Hamilton and Albert Pujols. They also threw way too much money at Justin Upton, Jered Weaver, C.J. Wilson, and Mo Vaughn, and certainly didn't get their money's worth from any of them. If anything, I think they lucked out with Mike Trout already being there. I have long believed he is driven more by being in a comfortable situation toiling in relative quiet than he ever was in having a single-minded focus in winning. I think that deep down, he regarded winning a ring as nice to have, and not a necessity to cement his legacy, and if that's true, I'd bet as he's getting closer to the end, he's starting to rethink that approach. All this said, regardless of location, family atmosphere, and all that, I just don't regard the Angels as being a top destination for top tier free agents at this point in time, especially since none of the contracts I mentioned were signed even within the past decade. As for Detroit: I just don't think many guys, especially latin guys, would choose to come here for eight or ten years at a stretch just because we have decent suburbs, nice weather three months a year, and fishing and hunting up north. In addition to being a city with a decades-long reputation as being a dump, even despite the past couple of years, the organization has in their recent history the act of blowing it all up, and it's hard to get a guy to gamble on committing that many years to come here with that still in the rear-view mirror. Now, that said: I do believe that signing one guy, the right guy, could single-handedly do wonders to turn it around, at least for a little while. Twenty years ago it was the signing of Ivan Rodriguez that jump-started it. Signing Skubal to a long term deal next winter could very well serve the same purpose. If we put our money where our mouth is, then all of a sudden, top tier guys would see that we are serious about spending and contending, and that would instantly make us that much more attractive an option to commit to. But I would be surprised if we managed to do that this winter by signing someone like Kyle Tucker to break that seal. I put the odds against that as being at least 100 to 1.

No we don’t.

This should conclusively demonstrate to everyone once and for all that Trump cares not a whit about actual peace— he cares only about getting the credit for it. So he deliberately puts forward the directive to create peace without details on purpose, leaving those to others to figure out. That way, if the details don’t succeed—if peace doesn’t actually come—Trump can blame the others for it. But if the plan actually works and peace is achieved, Trump can take all the credit for it. You know, a lot like the way red hats view God. 😉 Pretty sweet deal for Trump, eh?

Also, I place "nothing burger" on the same level of argumentation trump card as "you do you".

Newsweek is not the MSM stalwart you remember it once being. Newsweek is to news as Sporting News is to sport.

Which they will blame Democrats for.

It's desperation. The world of explicit institutional preference for white men who profess to be Christias, a world in which everyone else lives to serve them, has just about faded out of view, and that generates a lot of resentment, because it's a world their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents enjoyed, but they don't get to. Trump is the last gasp for that world to make a comeback, and it has, although it doesn't have the kind of staying power red hats wish for. The older red hats may die before the comeback gets extinguished once and for all, and maybe their kids will live to see it linger for a little bit, but their grandkids will read about it and regard it on the same level we do when we read about Jim Crow America.

Sometimes a (usually left-handed hitting) player is so dominant from one side of the plate that teams will overlook how horrific they are from the other side. There are players who can get away with it more than other players. It's easy to overlook for Kurtz. It's harder to overlook for Carpenter. This is also the same principle as a player being worth so many runs and wins as a hitter that teams will practically overlook how much those players strike out.

I'm sure that will solve all the problems related to gambling on baseball.

Despite all that I just posted, I also believe signing Skubal long term would be a huge tipping point for moving Detroit into at least the bottom rung of top destinations, at least for a while. Also, I love Excalibur! HBO and The Movie Channel played the **** out of that movie when we first got cable in the early 80s (on a black and white TV, no less!), and I watched it over and over, to the point which I remember both the lines they delivered and the exact way they delivered them.

The Tigers are simply not on par as a consideration as are the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, or Giants, and Detroit as a city is simply not as attractive a destination as New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Five of those teams have had championships within living memory of ballplayers, who grew up with all of those teams being dominant at one point or another, and the Mets are a NYC team with a huge cultural footprint befitting their location. You can't wish away the huge advantage these teams have in attracting top tier talent. Detroit is also not as attractive a destination as San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas, or Houston, which are all warm-weather cities with very prominent Spanish-speaking communities, as well as being close to offseason homes for a lot of guys (although if they ever wanted to spend as a franchise, non-destination Miami could easily blow all four of those out of the water), so it's easy for their families and long-time friends to travel to watch them play at home. Seattle also has a leg up over Detroit as a destination both for its youthful coolness and its proximity to Japan. Of the remaining destinations, I would say Detroit also firmly lags behind Toronto (recent WS team, Vlad is there); Philadelphia (solid contender on the east coast, lots of superstars already there); and Atlanta (legacy franchise with a recent ring that is also close to home for many guys). Despite their recent run of Central Division titles, I don't think I would include Milwaukee, since beyond playing in a dumpy town just like Detroit, the Brewers are also known to be in the 15th to 20th range in payroll. Speaking of payroll, the 14 teams I have named as destinations are all in the top 15 in payroll. Only the Angels are up there with them, and they are not a destination because players can easily see how they can't win as a team even with Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout. I think the Tigers could be very competitive for second-tier free agents with any of the remaining 16 teams. Players want to go where the money and action is, and they also like to go where there are paid superstars already on long term deals. That last part was Detroit once, but then they famously blew it all up. What top-tier superstar would want to commit to a team that would do something like that?

1988 East German Map of West Berlin

None of The Countries That Bordered Poland In 1989 Exist Today

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/father-speaks-after-family-pepper-sprayed-in-little-village/

Trace it back even further to the election of Reagan in the wake of an ineffectual Carter presidency that itself was supposed to be the moral and ethical antidote to the brazen criminality of the Nixon/Ford run. The whole thing was set in motion at the polls by the Silent Majority still sore that LBJ was such a race traitor.

I'm highlighting this part to remind everyone to be careful what you wish for when you cross your fingers and hope Trump dies.

I don't think "defund the police" was ever a serious movement. First of all, it was never a starve-the-police-of-all-funds-and-then-disband-them movement. The goal was to recognize that a lot of what police do today is really social services, in particular mental health, and that it makes more sense they be handled by people specifically trained for that kind of support, and so, some funding should be shifted from policing into social/mental health services to properly address the problem. Whether the money would still be earmarked for the police and re-expressed into mental health personnel on the force, or shifted away from police departments into mental health departments, was supposed to be immaterial. The point was to stop requiring police to perform services they were not specifically trained for, and to fund the proper performance of these functions by trained professional instead. It's a very reasonable and, I believe, noble approach. Instead, the RWM and their Russian benefactors seized on the unorganized nature of the movement by highlighting the phrase itself and recasting it as "ban all police and let criminals roam free". That's not anything like a brilliant re-interpretation of the phrase because as fruit, it just hung so low, a high-schooler could have come up with it. But the brilliant part was how they were coached to hang the phrase on the entire Democratic Party, everyone in it, and anyone who ever voted for them. And perhaps because of the unorganized nature of the original idea, Democrats could not effectively fight that off, in no small part because they do not have a left-wing media ecosystem with nearly as much reach to help them out of it. I think it's still a great idea to shift responsibility and its commensurate funding for social and metal health services away from police and toward trained and educated professionals who specialize in them, but the damage from that phrase was so total, we may never see that happen in any of our lifetimes, even you young guys. Given the MAGA takeover of the nature of governing (i.e., ruling) nationwide, it seems more likely we would see police be tasked with solving mental health crises by simply shooting the people involved dead, than we would be to see a shift in responsibility for mental health issues encountered in the street from cops to trained professionals. Neither one will happen, of course, but given the current climate, one is at slightly more likely than the other.

Trump ain't got eight weeks to do ****. He doesn't give a flying **** about healthcare for the people—he cares about how to manipulate the issue so he can get good and paid. Plus, there's a real political reason not to come up with any ACA replacement plan: once it inevitably goes upside down for some large constituency, Republicans would take the blame, which the party has exactly zero interest in doing. So, better to keep ACA on life support and wield it as a political cudgel while they continue to defenestrate until it eventually looks exactly like healthcare 2008, only with prices that are higher by a factor of multiples. That is something they can definitely hammer the Democrats with in 2026, 2028, and beyond, while we all die slow, avoidable MAHA deaths.

Yes, but healthcare subsidies are still a leverage point, are they not?

McConnell had the luxury of a party voting constituency with one-track ideologies on his side. The Democratic voting bloc is a coalition of disparate interests whose ardor for the party waxes and wanes with the priority their interests enjoy at that given moment.

Mayonnaise has a conspiracy attached to it? How does it go?

Many red hats were normal, or at least within shouting distance of normal, all their lives. Then they took the red pill and now they are literally deranged, which is why they are so worked up about some sort of derangement syndrome they are projecting onto the rest of the country.

Moving toward official Buy Borrow Die policy.

It's really not about policy or governance or even politics anymore, is it? It's all about personalities, for or against. Although those against his personality have plenty of policy evidence to offer up as well.

Are you asking me that because you think I think that?