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Baseball!

We couldn’t have signed an impact bat this offseason if they wanted to, at least without dramatically overpaying.

The overarching goal of any team is to win, but that goal is also tempered by the reality of roster abilities and likely outcomes. A team constructed in such a way that everyone knows they’re not going to make the playoffs, such as the Tigers, don’t have the same urgency to win this game here 162 times a year, as playoff bubble teams do. So they can manage to other goals, such as keeping players fresh to nurse owies or to last the whole season, or marketing legends way beyond their sell-by dates, while hoping that everyone still puts it together more often than not and wins enough to keep fans happy, all the while not affecting their expected season outcome.

When it comes to fascists, it’s not about your freedom to choose how to live your life. It’s about their freedom to tell you how you’re gonna live your life.

They’d be arrested, at minimum. Stupid ****ing Heller.

Who’s the high-value target here that would be worth the comp?

down, boy

There might be a case of the ignorant leading the ignorant, too. If there is a big science story that takes technical background to report on and understand, mainstreamers are still not going to have a technical writer report on it. It’s going to be staff journalists trying to get just enough of their arms around it so they can topline it for an audience that probably won’t get it anyway.

As long as phrases like "free market" and "market economy" and "market competition" and "capitalism" are deployed, the voting useful idiots will be satisfied and none among them will be motivated to look too closely under the hood.

A key currency of fame is relevance.

Greedflation—not just a conspiracy theory anymore ... 1 big thing: "Greedflation" goes mainstream Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka "greedflation," is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press, Emily writes. Why it matters: Though inflation is starting to come down, it still remains well above the Fed's target level of 2%, and understanding what's causing inflation is key to combatting it — now and the next time. The idea that profits drove our current bout of inflation surfaced in the last few years among progressive economists and lawmakers but was waved away by more mainstream types as a "conspiracy theory." That changed earlier this year. In a speech in January, then-Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said wages weren't the main driver of inflation and pointed to a "price-price spiral," where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs. In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on "profit margin-led inflation," describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn't really.) Most of the time, these companies have "weak pricing power," meaning they depend on repeat customers and can't just wildly increase prices because consumers will abandon them, he says. But businesses both large and small had a convincing story to tell: They really didn’t want to raise prices, but there was "this terrible war or the pandemic or labor shortages or whatever," Donovan tells Axios. "That's what's basically been going on." With so much in flux, people were more accepting of higher costs for everything, and more convinced companies HAD to raise prices. In earnings conference calls last year especially, executives spoke in corporate lingo about consumers accepting such price increases. A few weeks after Donovan's paper came out, European Central Bank executive board member Fabio Panetta expressed worries that inflation growth was "due to increasing profits." The following month, a column in Bloomberg Opinion drew attention to increasing profit margins and urged consumers to push back. "The idea that corporate profit expansion has been a big driver of inflation was once mostly confined to trade unions and left-wing academics, but it’s now taken seriously by central bankers," the authors wrote. By May, the Wall Street Journal published a story on how corporate profits were keeping inflation high, citing the work of Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was derided for her work on the topic back in late 2021. In a stunning comeback this month, The Times of London profiled Weber's rise from a lone voice to a star economist who's drawn attention to the notion that companies and certain sectors can drive inflation. What she's saying: "Suddenly everybody wants to know how to think about inflation differently," Weber tells Axios. She's been inundated with calls recently, she says, from central bankers, Parliamentarians, think tanks and academics — and reporters, of course.

I've always had strong doubts about that, too. It sounds so much like an urban legend. I took a hack at trying to replicate what the least severe angle would have to be in order for this to happen, and ... gee, I don't know. I'm not as sure now that it couldn't happen, especially if somehow there was a swirling wind pushing a moon shot back.

He sounds like one of the good ones.

The criticism of transgender people from a transgender woman makes Caitlyn one of the good ones. Same as a black person who criticizes the blacks.

Sure it’s free. It’s the freedom for the people in charge to control other people’s personal and private lives. There’s a long and storied history of that in that part of the country.

Sadly, this is not unlikely.

Gotta have someone out there for garbage time.

To be fair, Michael Lorenzen may have been coming off injury, but he also was coming off two lackluster years, he signed with the one and only team interested in him, and he got torched in two of his first three outings for us. Now that's been put together three solid starts since, I think it's safe to jump onto the bandwagon for the moment.

I found it interesting that the Tigers have a boatload of weekday day games at home and the Cubs, the team that always celebrated sunshine baseball, have almost none. I chalk that up to the diaspora watching on TV, since the Yankees and Red Sox also don't have weekday day games outside of holidays.

Yes, in 2022, although that was after the vertigo and the ear infection, and before the Achilles problems and the mental health issues.

Maybe Matt Gaetz for MTG. No, seriously. Power couple thing. Possibly some NRA lobbyist for Machine Gun Boebert.

The way I remember it, it wasn't whether Paredes could stick in the infield at all—it was whether he could make it as a middle infielder, which I don't think anyone outside the Avila brain trust thought was a real possibility. Everyone else thought Paredes was always going to be tracked into being a third baseman. As for where we are now, not sure what that means exactly since we are in a much better spot overall than last year, but that rarely turns on one player alone in any event. I think with 20/20 hindsight we can safely conclude we would be far better off today with Paredes at third than with parade of quad-A players there. On your other point—did Tampa know something about Meadows? I've wondered that as well. I haven't found anything prior to last year that reported that Meadows was dealing with mental health issues, but then, nobody in sports ever talked about that before literally last year, so that doesn't mean nothing was happening. And even though Avila was anything but the king of due diligence, I'm not sure how that could come up even for the most diligent trader. Unlike physical health, you can't see mental health. And Meadows did play most of 2019 and 2021 with decent production. So we can probably chalk this up to weird luck, although there may always be something in the back of my mind about that.

There’s no way to actually know, maybe unless you could somehow OOTP it out, but I feel that Paredes would have done better under Hinch/Harris than under Grifol/Avila. I didn’t love the trade at the time because I thought Paredes was better than Meadows straight up so it was a lot to give up, but I also thought it was defensible based on where we were and what we were trying to do coming into the 2022 season. We all thought we were on the brink of contending, and it seemed like we needed Meadows more in left than we needed Paredes at third. But now it’s been almost a year and a half and with Paredes getting comfortable and heating up for Tampa whereas Meadows may literally never play again, we are already losing the trade by a substantial margin, and I can’t envision any scenario in which that flips around and we end up winning or even tying it. I wonder if Tampa locks up Paredes for cheap at some point, like a 7/70 deal or something.