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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.

I would agree that people who have been touched by such violence, and have actually buried children as a result, are far more likely to set aside all the niceties of liberty and give it all up for safety. I would not agree that makes up a majority of people living there, not even a slim majority. The news media may make it sound like Detroit is one big dystopian minority-ruined wasteland in which everyone who trods its ground is inevitably going to be murdered there, and I'm sure any number of posters here would affirm that belief. But I would bet more people who live there would not want to unilaterally disarm against their idea of a jacked white suburbia that has been hostile to them for decades, so granny down the street can feel marginally safer. This is all hypothetical anyway, since there will be no handgun ban passed in America anyway. Well, not at least until the Trumped-up fascists take over. 😉

So ... there's a chance they might lift the mandate after Thanksgiving? That would be a plus, since I fully expected it to last into next spring.