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Riley is going to have to solve the swing and miss problem with giving up much on power. He is 5th percentile on that, and 10th percentile on contact overall. As for defense, "decent" is probably the nest way to put it. plays like the diver on Saturday notwithstanding, he is solidly middle of the pack when it comes to turning around routine plays regularly, and on plays with 2+ star degree of diffiulty. He's got decent reaction time, but so-so burst speed and below average routing to the ball. He is 10th percentile on arm run value, though, and 20th percentile on arm strength. Bottom line on him is, he is acceptable in left as a 24-year-old, but the physical skills he has that we expect to deteriorate is going to show up in reduced defensive utility long before his controllable years are up.

I've been thinking about this, too, and I don't think he's as untouchable, or as certain of a long term deal here, as I once thought. He's controllable through 2029. It would be weird to trade him any time soon, since he's a three-to-five-win guy, and I don't expect we will be selling at deadlines for the foreseeable future. Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I don't see what such a trade looks like, except as a challenge trade of our slugger for your established starter. But our organizational depth at outfield as it currently stands might rule out backfilling internally if Riley goes anytime soon, since we are so stacked at catcher and infield instead.

One more take on gerrymandering, this time grading every state for which there are sufficient data. The results generally pass the sniff test for me. Again, take it as you will. https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/

Not according to this. Take it as you will. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-gerrymandered-states

If I understand correctly, Mexicans are required to have a visa to visit the US for pleasure, but can use something called a Border Crossing Card that is unique to Mexican nationals residing in Mexico and functions as a stand-in for an actual visa. I hypothesize that the vast majority of Mexicans use BCCs, so the stats for overstaying visas don't apply to Mexico. Otherwise, here's the latest visa overstay data I could find. It's from 2023. I would imagine it's going to look a lot a lot different for 2025.

Beautiful win. Needed to have it when it was looking a little shaky there. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that we sweep a team that’s given up on he season, and at home.

I was worried from the get-go that Riley was going to get nailed at second. He’s just not a fast runner, at least not at the moment. I would like to have the team evolve from run on everything and make them throw you out, to making better decisions on when to go and when not to.

RF had the ball in hand when McKinstry was about halfway to second. Not a good decision to go, and it didn’t take a perfect throw to get him.

Man, Wendell just went downstairs and took that out. That was a ball.

It’s becoming clearer that the goal is to prevent anyone from ever coming to the United States ever again, I guess so we can become Trump’s hermit kingdom. Next up: restrictions and/or prohibitions on Americans traveling abroad. Book it.

It sounds good to ignorant people. But, also, it takes the spotlight off the Epstein story and all the truly larcenous things he is doing in plain sight that we’re not talking about instead.

Here's an even better one: America’s Drunkest & Driest Counties Based On Excessive Drinking. Are buying Wisconsin? The map above shows the drunkest and driest US counties based on the share of excessive drinkers. The drunkest is Gallatin, MT where 26.8% of people are excessive drinkers. And the driest is Utah, UT where only 9.04% of people are excessive drinkers.

Here's a good one.

The down side of being a good team.

It’s alarming because the people fleeing government to get away from the changes are in so many cases the same people who would fight back if they stayed.

Beat journalism is more than just describing the game and getting player quotes afterwards. Some of it entails hearts-and-minds stories meant to connect fans on a personal basis with guys they read about all the time but will never meet.

fire Harris

By way of reminder, we also had a decent shutout lead late in yesterday’s game, too

Carp knows Wheeler, too!

Colt Keith starting to make that contract pay off! OK, Tarik: you got your run. Now go nine by reducing your reliance on strikeouts and getting weak groundball outs instead. Just a suggestion. 😁

At this rate he'll have 27 strikeouts on 117 pitches.

This is such a clinic. I wonder whether Skubal is extra amped up facing another ace like Zach Wheeler.

The most alarming thing about this is that, apparently, it is impossible to stop it. 1 big thing: Trump authoritarian streak Photo illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images A five-alarm fire tore through the economic establishment yesterday after President Trump ousted the government's top labor statistician, accusing her — without evidence — of "rigging" a weak jobs report. Why it matters: It's just one glaring example from a week that bore many authoritarian hallmarks — purging dissenters, rewriting history, criminalizing opposition and demanding total institutional loyalty, Axios' Zachary Basu writes. Vast swaths of society are falling in line. The Washington Post revealed this week that the Smithsonian quietly removed references to Trump's two impeachments from its presidential exhibit. 🔭 The big picture: The overwhelming, all-consuming nature of Trump-driven news cycles makes it difficult to discern partisan hysteria from true democratic backsliding. But apply any of these five developments to a foreign leader — or even a past U.S. president — and it reads like an authoritarian playbook: 1. Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a 20-year government veteran, after BLS announced massive downward revisions for job growth in May and June. "We're doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony. ... So you know what I did: I fired her," Trump told reporters, without explaining why he believed past jobs reports were credible when they were positive. Larry Summers, Harvard professor and Treasury Secretary for President Clinton. Screenshot via X William Beach, who led the BLS during Trump's first term, blasted the firing as "totally groundless." 2. Eager to shift scrutiny from his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Trump demanded his Justice Department prosecute former President Obama for "treason" over the 2016 Russia investigation. Top Trump aides are engaged in an all-out effort to rewrite the history of "Russiagate" and exact revenge on Obama-era intelligence officials, including through criminal referrals. 3. In his crackdown on liberal power centers, Trump has extracted more than $1.2 billion in settlements from at least 13 of the most elite players in academia, law, media and tech, according to an Axios tally. The Trump administration is reportedly eyeing up to $500 million from Harvard and $100 million from Cornell, paving the way for a cascade of other universities to follow suit. 4. Dozens of Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador's notorious CECOT megaprison say they were beaten, sexually assaulted and denied access to lawyers or medical care, a Washington Post investigation found. 5. Trump's months-long campaign to oust Fed Chair Jay Powell, or at least pressure him to cut interest rates, is still lingering. White House response: "President Trump is holding the federal government and elite institutions accountable for their political games, longstanding corruption, and terrible incompetence," White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said. With regard to CECOT, a White House official told Axios: "These are criminal terrorist illegal immigrants and the American people are safer with them as far away as possible." Trump's consolidation of power comes at the same time he's attempting to unilaterally reset the global trading order — with tariff rates set to his personal whim. Brazil now faces 50% tariffs — among the highest rates of any country — due to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, which Trump has denounced as a "witch hunt." The stakes of Trump's centralized command were accentuated yesterday, when he ordered two nuclear submarines repositioned in response to saber-rattling by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Share this story.

I assume we are responsible for paying the bonuses to Paddack and Montero once they reach those benchmarks, regardless that most of the innings came with other teams, correct?

Because the fans’ intellectually capacity is under the control of a sophisticated media apparatus that’s unmatched in its ability to disseminate propaganda and, fortuitously, in an environment that’s basically self-hermetically-sealed by its own target audience. IOW, Fox News and their fellow travelers have the luxury of being able to tell anything they want to their audience, who will believe anything they hear because they refuse to obtain any information from anywhere else—in fact, it is by now considered practically disloyal to do so. The American RWM learned from the best in the business.