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I like your idea of lumping together the west coast teams, and I think you might be able to add Arizona and a Vegas expansion team to that. That’s eight Pacific time teams you could put into two divisions, maybe within a time-zoned conference. Maybe SEA, OAK, SFG, LAA in one division and LAD, SDP, LAV, ARI. That would leave the other 24 teams back east, including an expansion team in Nashville, with all but one in the Eastern and Central time zones. If they were interested in evening travel out, something I’m guessing is low on their radar, I was wondering whether there’s a way to set up divisions for the 24 teams that would create as close to equitable travel as possible. Putting NYY and BOS in a division is a no brained, I agree, but putting NYM there too would create far too easy a travel situation for those teams. I’m thinking a way to even that out is to put Central and Eastern teams in a division together. For example, maybe: NYY, BOS, CHW, MIN NYM, PHI, DET, CHC BAL, PIT, CIN, MIL MIA, TBR, ATL, NSH TOR, WAS, STL, CLE COL, KCR, HOU, TEX I didn’t think the configuration here through for more than a few minutes or measure distance, but as an example, if Baseball wanted to even out the travel more equitably, this might be a way to approach that. Nothing can be done about all the miles out they have to travel out west, especially Seattle, unless maybe they put a team in Portland instead of Vegas, which, lol.

Is that ban enforceable, or is this one of those outlawing abortion laws on the books just waiting for Obergefell to be overturned?

Welcome abroad! 🎉🎈🎆✨

I want to like this unreservedly, but I've been alive and aware for the last six years. I'll be impressed only once they do show up and have to field questions live. Hopefully on TV. Wouldn't that be a gas!

All your points about catchers being a specialized position, versus the seven other positions, are valid. Catcher is a specialized position versus position players, such that the need for good offense from the position is the least of all eight positions. Even so, it's not closer to pitcher than it is to shortstop, or second base, or center field, or any other position. Here are the average wRC+s by position for 2021: 1B: 110 2B: 94 SS: 97 3B: 95 LF: 99 CF: 95 RF: 105 😄 89 Even though catcher wRC+ is the worst of the eight positions, it is not so much worse than the others that it warrants a special dispensation from hitting. Contrast thus with the wRC+ for pitchers in the 1972 AL, which was 6. Not, that's not a fat finger typo—it is the number six. I would be shocked if there were a serious push to use designated hitters for catchers.

Absolutely. It is because the pitcher's skill set is so intense, unique, and necessary that they never work on hitting, so they evolve into terrible enough hitters that it makes sense to DH for them. These days, kids who are identified as pitchers gifted enough to seriously consider a professional career stop basically working on their hitting altogether.

The same thing cannot be said about catchers, or shortstops. What can be said is that catchers and shortstops are important enough among position players that teams will give in on the need for great hitting from those positions if they have superior defensive skills to make up for them. The same cannot be said of first basemen or left fielders. This is a key basis for the concept of the defensive spectrum.

Yes, non-zero, meaning not zero possibility, meaning yes it's possible. I'm just wondering whether they will take a hack at trying to even out the problem on tremendously unequal miles traveled among teams, or whether they're gonna lump that whole issue so they can have the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Phillies in the same division for the benefit of that corridor.

Since the geographic realignment of the leagues has become a non-zero possibility, I've been wondering they could do it in such a way as to be fair about it to as many teams as possible. If you wanted to even out the miles traveled as much as possible, I don't think they could simply create eight divisions of four teams all of which are the closest to one another, because that would give the best teams clustered around New York and Chicago a big advantage on travel, since they wouldn't have to travel nearly as much as teams in out west would have to. As it is, today, the Cubs and White Sox travel only half the miles the west coast teams do. I'd be interested in seeing how they can balance fairness in miles traveled with time zone management, or whether they'd be like, eff it, just cluster them and be done with it.

I remember they said that thing about speeding up negotiations, too, but since Baseball waited something like six weeks to provide its first proposal after implementing the lockout, I don't take that too seriously. I actually haven't seen any polling about how the public regards who's at fault here, but I could see people siding with the players if they've been following closely how the process has been going.

I’m guessing the owners initiated the lockout because they reason that if there is a work stoppage, the players will get the blame. That is working to some extent.

The burning of police stations. Try to keep up. 😏

It occurs to me that the false flag idea of Ukraine precipitating the war through aggressive action is designed to convince the Russian people and who cares who else.

Soto may simply not want to commit to Washington at the moment. He may not like the direction they’re going there, at least yet.

Looks like the CDC is finally catching up with us.

I just googled "occupy wall street burning down police station" and I'm coming up empty on that one. But I did run across this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-day-of-protests-occupy-wall-street-faces-police-violence/

Yes, all this, and also, a key difference is that there is a clearly defined chain of authority that occurs at the college and professional levels in which abuse of officials is redressed in some form of sanctions for the abusers, which by extension also means that the very threat of sanctions usually acts as a check on abuse before it even happens. I don't know for sure whether that exists at the Little League level, but it sure didn't when I was trying my hand at umping.

My impression of promotion/relegation is that it works best in a table-type league, where all 20 or 22 or whatever teams all play each other twice. Maybe p/r could work a division-oriented league if you move teams among divisions as other teams come and go, but in a country as geographically vast as the United States, they might get a little hairy. The English soccer pyramid goes something like 20 levels deep, and it’s technically possible for a team to rise all the way from the bottom of that pyramid to the top in any many years as it take to leapfrog levels. An American baseball equivalent might be some town team in Battle Creek eventually working its way up from many levels down to the major leagues in the space of a few decades. I believe that might be technically possible in England even today.

Funny you should bring up this exact thing. Some forty-plus years ago, as a skinny teenager just getting over pimples, I umpired in Warren’s Little League (or WVAC league, the non-affiliated local equivalent) for a few weeks when there was some dispute about a call I made and one of the coaches said he was going to “meet” me “in the parking lot”. He didn’t but it shook me because, who knows, with another person at another time in the future it might go different. I told the umpire supervisor about it later that week and he basically said yeah, you gotta have a thick skin to be an umpire here, not everyone is cut out for it. So I cut myself out of it. One other thing I clearly remember is that the lippiest team of kids I umpired was a girls softball team made up of middle schoolers (actually, at that time, junior high school students). Not only did their coach not control them, he was laughing and egging them on egged them on. I ask him to control them he said, in essence, “what, you can’t handle a bunch of little girls?” That was another data point in the case for “later for this shit”.

Maybe when that war is over that crew can come over and help my city replace the the old lead piping under the streets. The city just took over a year to do a one-mile stretch of Armitage, and they left the street looking like the surface of the moon.

You went totally there! 🤣

I don’t think Palin could ever have gotten the following Trump has. I can’t think of any right-winger who could, given the sum total of Trump’s various attributes. He’s a unique bird in the scheme of things.

Cash money will do that.