chasfh

I understand the point you had hoped I might draw. I just don't think this was the best evidence you could have provided.

I signed up for Vic Tanny (the one on Van Dyke in Warren) in February 1989 because of Cher. No, really. I had made a New Year's resolution to get in shape. A month later I'm sitting on my couch drinking beer and chomping on shelled peanuts. Not a good getting-in-shape regimen. I was flipping through the newspaper and I saw a big ad for Vic Tanny, featuring Cher in her sexy workout togs, pouting at me and intoning, through the headline: "You promised." Stopped me dead in my tracks. She was right. I did promise, and here I am getting fat on peanuts and beer, with shell crumbs falling all over me and the couch. I felt disgusted. Well, that was it. That's all I needed to go to Vic Tanny the very next day and sign right up. Anyhow, as I remember, the deal was I pay a chunk upfront, maybe $200 or so, and if I remember correctly, $72 a year for life. I was making under $20,000 at the time, so this wasn't nothing, but I thought, well, this is an investment in me, in my life, so I'm gonna go for it. Best part is, the deal was transferable to any Bally club in the US, so when I moved to a bunch of different states over the next few years, my membership still applied. And every year, the invoice for $72 would come, and I would pay it. It was great. At least until one year, after I had just moved to Chicago, and I got a bill for $99. I called into customer service to tell them they made a mistake. No they didn't, they replied; the $72 annual deal had a six-year cap on it, and now they were allowed to raise rates as they saw fit. But I was told when I signed up that it was $72 a year for life, and I'm not dead yet. Shrug, they replied, we don't remember telling you anything like that. Of course I had long since misplaced my copy of the contract. D'oh. I kept it anyway because $99 was still a good deal. Then it became $149 the following year. Then $199 after that. Finally it got to $299. Eff this, I thought, I own a house now, so I'm getting my own equipment. Which I am still using to this day.

Get the biggest TV you can afford. Once you get to a certain age, the older you get, the farther away it looks. 😂

See, now that's the opposite of my experience with dealers, which is that they want you to finance the car with them because that's one of the two key ways they make money (the other being service). That said, I've paid cash in high interest rate times and that's worked out better for me. This time around I took the 0.9% deal. If inflation is going to stay at 5+% for much longer, it'll ed up being a good deal for me.

And to this point of yours, I believe the current thinking on actual implementation of "robot umpires" is that the pitch will be recorded when it passes the middle depth line of the plate, basically, 8½" deep. I think this makes a lot of sense and would help mitigate the 3-D effects that Edman85 is referring to, i.e., a hard downward-breaking curve that might clip the bottom front electronic border of a 3-D zone and actually bounce off the ground before reaching the catcher; or an eephus pitch scraping the very top back of a 3-D zone that only a batter with a tennis racket could get to. I think this will be the best way to handle it, and pretty obvious as I think more about it. After all, I believe one of the goals of ESZ is to get more balls in play, and allowing hard-breaking pitches that ESZ would call a strike in a 3-D zone which are practically unhittable would undermine that goal.

This may not be exactly to scale. 😏

I'm on Central time, and I can't stay awake for some of them.

Not pretending a thing. Just implying that a ball that clipped the strike zone would have ended the inning had it been called, but it wasn't, and seven runs later ... Also not blaming Astros' seven runs on a blown call. Baseball is a game of events that lead to later events. Just an interesting what if possibility.

You gotta see this to believe it.

"Vic Tanny". Funny. I still remember Bally as a pinball machine. In fact our euphemism for the numbers match at the end of a game was "bally", as in, "Hey, got a bally! Free game!"

In Boston’s defense:

I don’t care what Dave Dombrowski would do. He is apparently no longer the guy the current Tigers front office wants to emulate. Thank god.

My feelings about the playoffs are evolving. I like the extra baseball that comes with more and longer rounds, but I have long left behind the notion that the team that emerges at the end is the best, even if they are the “champs”. But much of that extra is also coming in-game as they stretch beyond four hours even for matches that are not particularly close. Literally half the nation are unable to see the final out until the calendar has turned to the next day. But, to Lee’s point, do game length and end times even matter for people for whom games are not much more than prop bet opportunities? The World Series used to be unifying events for the sports nation, even when the games all aired during the weekday. Now people can come in and out of games as the mood to gamble strikes, not unlike coming into and leaving in-progress blackjack games in Vegas. I’m sure Baseball is studying minute-by-minute gambling results as closely as they do minute-by-minute Nielsens. It’s not an accident that Joe Buck is promoting prop bets opportunities in between pitches now. Wait until Shep does that starting next year. Through it all, the games are still there to watch from beginning to end for those people who still want to—or at least those who can keep their eyes open for. The number of people who want to do so do seem to be dwindling, though, as Baseball moves decisively into a future where a game is less a four-hour story to savor than it is a series of discrete events to wager on. Manfred gave away the whole game when he revealed his conversation with Adam Silver. I guess I’ll just have to remember that as the game continues unimpeded down its current path here in Biff Tannen’s America.

Extra rounds do add to the gambling, crypto, and NFT revenue, though.

I'm not sure we have to find a catcher. We're not gonna win next year even with Realmuto, and we have what we hope is a potential All-Star in Jake who's coming back in 2023. We can't sign someone for more than a year, the market for catchers is for shit, so what are we doing, then? If anything, you might pick up a non-tender or a cut in March. Otherwise, stick Haase and TBD out there for a year and hope for the best.

Yup. Sub-replacement.

Sure, that first part is possible in general. But it would take a lot for a long time for me to come around to trusting a person who, as oblong says, is a zealot in one direction and immediately becomes a zealot in the polar opposite direction. Of course, if you take this particular thread at face value, this guy is a lying sociopath who manipulated his way to Twitter fame using tactics similar to that of TFG, and who deactivated his feed when he got in trouble. So the answer in his case is "no real convictions". This strengthens my anecdotally-based impression that this kind of sudden 180 smells funny.

Pass on Maldonado. He can go be a 35-year-old sub-replacement catcher on someone else's roster. Bonus: he's 1-for-24 with nine strikeouts in the playoffs for the Astros.

Wouldn't the Supremes have to overturn their own decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts to rule against state vaccine mandates?

Anyone who can be that easily swayed from one extreme all the way to the other has either zero integrity of convictions, or have no real convictions at all. They haven't thought anything through, so they can be swayed way back to the other side just as easily. Basically, they're in it whatever the thrill of it is.

Perfect summation.

Call Tyler eight seven one-oh-oh for a home improvement date.

To 1984's point, there is a distinction between "masterminding" and "Inciting". Trump definitely incited the riot. The thing that distresses me is how the right wing media are whitewashing the riot, which we have clear video evidence of, as being a peaceful protest, and how much traction that gaslighting is getting.

I could agree with Picture ID only in the narrow circumstance that (1) state-issued ID is free; and (2) the state proactively delivers ID to every eligible voter in the state, as opposed to requiring people have to schlepp anywhere and jump through any number of bureaucratic hoops to have to pick it up themselves. Also, to do it right, a state would not be able implement their voter ID requirement until the Federal Elections Commission had reviewed their situation and ensured that every eligible voter had been delivered their required voting ID. Of course, the devil is in the execution here. I can see any number of states failing to carry out the obligation adequately, or challenging the proactivity or free aspects of it in court, essentially, having to give it away for free. But my point of view is, if the left have to compromise in order to address a phantom problem, then the right at least has to implement universal free ID delivery.