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Point taken on Pena, but I think the rest stands. It could be said that Mize and Manning and TORK! and Riley are gifts to Harris, but I don't think it necessarily follows that, if any or all of them inevitably become All-Stars, It's because Avila chose them to come to the Tigers. All four of them were the players anyone else would have picked in those circumstances, and it took the organization tanking for years for us to get them in the first place. Plus, the high draft picks and international signings that flopped under the prior regime was legion, and it's not inappropriate to posit that were Avila still here, any or all of these guys might well have flopped in his system, too. And of course, Al Avila also made some of the worst trades in recent history, liquidating All-Stars and future Hall of Famers for almost nothing but damaged goods in return. Although who knows, maybe that will be proven wrong by Jake Rogers and ... who else? So I'm still not convinced that Randy Smith was much worse than Avila was, but if anyone else insists that's the case, I'll agree to disagree on it.

I don’t see how Avila left this franchise in substantially better shape after he was ****canned than Randy Smith did. At best, it was the same, as far as I can tell. Even those vaunted slam-dunk everyone-else-woulda-taken-them-too draft picks Avila selected, like Mize and Manning, aren’t guaranteed at this point to be any better than Jeff Weaver and Kenny Baugh were thought in 2002 to become. Riley (#4 prospect in Baseball America in 2022) and TORK! (#5 BA 2022) might end up being better sticks than Carlos Peña (#5 BA 2002) whom Randy Smith left us—might be—but again, no guarantee. Even if they are, otherwise, the system Avila left behind is, at best, no less a shambles than the system Randy Smith left. I think in practical terms, the comparison between the two is a push.

Not only that, both Francisco Cordero and Frank Catalanotto had good years that could have helped us in 2006.

Sounds good, although that might make it hard to tell ours from the A’s or Nationals.

Again, totally normal public company behavior. I’d like to order 100 shares, please.

So Tusk is essentially admitting out loud that he is using the checkmark system to reward people he likes (like Lebron) and punish those he doesn’t (like NYT and NPR). Yup, totally normal public company business practice. Where do I go to buy stock in that?

Didn't know where else to put this, but ... uhhhhh ... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/?location=alert

More than a few retail workers I would see every week with beautiful eyes, very captivating, then when they could take off the mask it was like, oh wow, that regresses the face to the mean a bit.

I don't remember that the accepted wisdom in 2003 was that the Tigers were trying to lose, like the 2023 A's seem to be, but it was 20 years ago and I may have forgotten, so I'm open to the evidence if you have it.

I don't think so. WAR already takes into account that most runs will either be in excess of what's needed to win this game today, or else will be wasted because his team already loses this game today without or without him. That's partly why the rule of thumb evolved into, for every ten runs a player plays above replacement, that translates to one win generated for the team all by himself.

Really the only person who knows whether this is true or not is Scott Harris. 😉😅

This is true of literally everything Scott Harris does. We still enjoy the speculating.

Lol The best part: the guy who proved Lindell wrong was a Trump voter in 2020.

Streaky or not, it still all adds up to a solid 109 OPS+.

I think it's that too, and they're both related.

I think a big part of this is that there’s no longer a cohort of people alive that has the 1919 Black Sox scandal as part of their living memory.

That’s a .333/.333/1.333 slash line. I’ll take that from the kid all year. 😉

The difference is that A’s management has basically run that team into the ground for business purposes. The front office that put together the 2003 Tigers were actually trying to win.

I wonder the diseases we are calling COVID as an umbrella term is in the process of morphing into taxonomically different diseases, but we don’t know that yet because the research on it is so new.

He’s the favorite son basically because they think Democrats are getting their nose out of joint over losing the Kennedys, or some such thing.

We can if the nomination takes place today. Does it?

Legislating to the so-called strength of your personal marriage is definitely constitutional, right?