chasfh

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.

Remember how she came out of nowhere two months before the election? Seems like they thought they could sneak her in as a progressive pick before voters could vet her. She revealed herself as both a lightweight and a right-wing kook pretty early on, so I can imagine that she kept some moderate Republicans home on Election Day that year.

Is that what that was about? Something from twenty years ago? Weird.

I wonder whether a lot of the appeal of soccer, outside its simplicity, has to do with national pride. The World Cup is the biggest sports event in the world outside of the northern part of North America. It's a chance for little countries to upset big countries on the pitch. It's pretty thrilling from that perspective.

I'm rewatching The Wire, which I haven't seen since 200-something. It was in 4:3 SD when I first saw it; they've reformatted it to 16:9 SD since. My wife, who is staunchly anti-rerun and will never view anything a second time, even something she hasn't seen in decades, expressed surprise that I would rewatch The Wire because she knows I don't like "cop shows", meaning network procedurals. Procedurals are mostly standalone shows in which each episode is its own story where a crime is introduced, investigated, and resolved within the 44 minutes allotted it. They invariably also have model-beautiful and -handsome law enforcement officer characters; cartoonishly-evil sociopathic criminals; super-advanced technology providing instantaneous information about anybody anytime; and swelling musical cues signaling viewers, "hey, pay attention, this is an important scene". The Wire has almost none of this (outside of, I guess, model-handsome Idris Elba). They have law enforcement characters who look like everyday people; morally ambiguous characters on both sides of the law; investigations that go in fits and starts instead of a straight line up toward a solution); and, mercifully, practically no musical bed under any of the dialogue. Best of all, they seem to have cast exactly the right actors to play the roles. The performances are astonishingly good. I don't like procedurals, but I love The Wire, and I'd recommend anyone who hasn't seen it watch it, and if you have seen it, rewatch it.

Yup.

What the hell are you even talking about??

How do progressives support Eminem?

“Hoodlums”. Huh. He might as well have called them n-bombs.

…

Perhaps the investigators have started banging on their door so now they’re preparing to cooperate.

If it's baseball you want to watch, ESPN+ is going to have dozens of college games every day available to watch starting on Thursday.

They were relied upon?

Uh huh

Baseball won't lose me over this, or over the lockout. The only way Baseball can lose me is through a game-fixing scandal. Were it to ever become clear that Baseball has fixed, or does fix, games for who cares what reason, that's the one way they can lose me. As far as diehards like me are concerned, since Baseball knows they can't lose us so easily, they know they can do basically anything they want to the game and we'll stick around. We might not be happy with the changes, but we'll still watch. That's why they call us "diehards". I don't think casual fans care enough about the game to get into a snit about dramatic changes like two-month playoffs or shortened seasons or things like that. Those things are an affront only to baseball history, which they have no sense of. I think a lot of them like baseball because of its romantic nature as America's summer pastime, so I think what puts those fans off is the very lockout we are experiencing, since it is undermining their romantic ideal about the game with business concerns they couldn't possibly care less about. I think those kinds of fans will peel off in great numbers if the season is severely shortened or canceled, just like they did after 1994-95. As for the gamblers, the constituency Baseball appears to be catering to the most anymore, they basically couldn't care less about the game except as a betting opportunity. They'll come to baseball to bet on it when it's available, and when it's not, they'll just go and bet on other things until it comes back. I suspect Baseball could reduce itself to nine rounds of Home Run Derby and they'd still come around to bet on it.

Neither have I seen anyone here say that.

I'm starting to wonder whether Baseball's true goal is to reduce the regular season and expand the playoffs. Maybe start late in April, end in late August after 120 or so games, then have a two-month playoff extravaganza among 16 teams. They could make each round stretch out across two weeks by having more off days. They might be able to talk down teams like the Pirates and Rockies into giving up 21 late-season home dates, with all its attendant expenses spent to draw sparse crowds, in exchange for a commensurate cut of the playoff money even for Or maybe they could make it like college basketball conference tournaments, where every team makes it to the playoffs and they have March Madness-like seeding: #1 plays #32, #2 plays #31, etc. Maybe give the top seed a 1-0 pre-play series lead and still go best-of-seven. This would add an extra round and make it easier to fill two months without stretching out the off days. I would not care to see anything like this. I could see Manfred and the owners doing something like this.

I prefer position players both hit and field.

But only one of whom pitches.

But ... but ... double switch!