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If I had to guess about a Tork trade one way or the other, I would guess that Harris would trade him for players with a future rather than players with a past.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to suggest I knew anything about measuring that, just that it is a thing like everything else that has the potential to be measured. I would think a catcher's ability to work with pitchers would affect the performance of the pitchers, in that a catcher who is great at it gets more, maybe even a lot more, out of his pitchers than other catchers can. And who knows, maybe some of these Ivy League astrophysicists or quantum algorithms researchers, or whatever they are, that organizations hire for their data science departments may have gotten to that somehow. I would think it's one of those seemingly ethereal things that, if someone has cracked that code, they would hold it for ransom. In any event, if/once they have cracked it, then it could be reduced to a component in the WAR formula along with the other four components I mentioned, and I'm sure there are a couple or three other components to evaluating catchers I'm not even thinking of, or perhaps have not even heard of.

I’m kicking myself a little bit for not paying more attention to Aurora Borealis (“At this time of year …”). I was in Menominee that night, which means it probably would have been even more spectacular watching it up there, but I just wasn’t aware of it because my wife and I were on a driving vacation, so we were missing a lot of daily news coverage.

I watched it for maybe a couple shows and I crapped out, basically because cop shows were never my thing. But I was very impressed with the innovative way they started out building up one of the characters to make you believe he was going to be a main guy throughout the series, and then toward the end of the series premiere episode they unceremoniously killed him off. That got my attention. I may give it another whirl.

What ever happened to indented paragraphs? 🤔

Isn’t this exactly what WAR is intended to address? How many wins does your bat adds, your defense adds, your baserunning control adds, your framing adds, your handling of pitchers add? I’m pretty sure they don’t have the measurement for all of these locked down, but in theory, you should be able to add all these up for every catcher and come to how many net wins each catcher is worth, no? If a glove-first catcher adds 6 wins on the defensive side of the ball but loses 4 with his bat, that should net out to 2 wins. Compare this to a bat-first catcher who wins you 6 games with his bat and loses 4 on defense, that should net out to 2 wins as well, which would mean they are a wash. In terms of wins to the team, they’re even. At that point you’d have to consider other aspects, such as, pitchers almost certainly don’t want to throw to catchers who lose bunches of games while he’s behind the plate no matter how well he hits, so a team might take the glove-first catcher, or even a glove-first catcher who nets out to one less win than the bat-first guy, just to keep the pitchers happy, and besides, the team can work on the catcher’s hitting, because we see a hitch in his swing we think we can fix with an adjustment and then some cage and soft toss work. I would think those are the kinds of criteria organizations probably make decisions on all the time.

I don't know how much we can count on Liranzo making the big leagues as a catcher. I have read there's been some improvement, but if an offer for a better catcher presents itself, even if the stick is a step or two below Liranzo, the Tigers might jump on the opportunity. But this "might" is based on imperfect information.

Cal Raleigh is going to win the award, but the second banana in the Verlander trade is looking better and better. If Jake could come within shouting distance of being a league average stick, he'd be a legit All-Star. Too bad he'll be 30 next season.

You have your alternative, then.

I like this idea. The only problem is that this would be only a drop of water in the firehose of horrors.

The whole mid-Atlantic coast says "impordent" over "important" or even "impor'an'".

That's the advantage of Catholic Mass over evangelical services. The entire Mass has been honed to a very tight script, the homily being the only improv opportunity. The risk for Mass is not discomfort, it's boredom.

I'm not at all saying he would mop the floor with her. All it would take is one bad exchange, and she is not immune to that. The bar is super high for her. In fact, she's the only one with any bar at all.

I’ve been thinking for weeks now about whether Kamala could sit down with Joe Rogan, and I came to the conclusion that it’s a humongous risk that could go completely upside down for her, so she would not do it. Three of the fairly likely outcomes include (1) she has an inadvertent screwup that makes her look bad, (2) he checkmates her on a point and she looks weak; (3) she gets into a scrape with him and she looks petty. In all three of these scenarios Rogan makes hay on it in the final weeks leading up to November 5, and that could motivate the part of his base that wouldn’t care about voting otherwise to sprint to the polls to vote for Trump. Another likely outcome is that the interview falls through and Trump blasts her for chickening out. The unlikely outcome is that Kamala has a good sitdown and gets Rogan to come over to her side, for which his subscribers would start abandoning him. None of those scenarios get her votes from Rogan’s subscribers. They make up the core of Trump’s infantry. The only upside I can see is that she wins the news cycle with Rogan, which might or might not end up as a push.

The funny part about this post is that the Rangers are still, right now, the reigning world champeens.

They went on strike during my age 10 season, but hey, at least I got division title out of it.

That’s so ironic to me because I hated disco for the way it was basically white people ruining funk.

I don't think Harris is going to say anything publicly that would cast aspersions on anything related to Javy, whether it's effort, performance, or potential. Doing so would be bad form and send the wrong message to the team. He is always going to say, "we look forward to seeing Javy make a strong comeback in camp" and never "Javy is mos def dunzo here."

The Yankees are the only team I truly dislike, and I will root for literally any other team to beat them in every circumstance.

As I think more about this, maybe the context is that internal polls would be more likely to show them way, way ahead in preparation for the blizzard of lawsuits claiming election fraud.

Consider the source. I think it's a sunshine account.

Go Guardians! Beat Yankees!

Oh, I don't know—there are still a few Al Avila-level front offices still out there. 😁 Anyhow, I was just parsing the language is all.

Harris is a 180 from Avila, in that I despaired for the state of the franchise almost the entire time he ran it, and with Harris the limit appears to be the sky.