gehringer_2

25 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

 

Easy enough to understand if Miller assumed Dunn had touched the ball  - and since Dunn was  signalling to Miller to pick up the ball why would Miller think anything else? 

1 minute ago, gehringer_2 said:

WTF is the Pentagon going to do with coal? Sit off shore of the South China Sea and chuck chunks of it at the Chinese PLA?

I take it back, I have just the answer, they can fill up all those warehouses that DHS is buying that have no other good purpose.

1 minute ago, pfife said:

Socialism

 

WTF is the Pentagon going to do with coal? Sit off shore of the South China Sea and chuck chunks of it at the Chinese PLA?

7 hours ago, Shinzaki said:

could this benefit Joseph?

 

here's a link to a more complete story

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/11/joint-cartilage-aging.html

 I would guess the trick here is getting it to grow where you want but not where you don't want.

1 minute ago, Tiger337 said:

I agree, but it wasn't looking good for Olson even before we learned about the surgery today.  

Labrum used to be Sayonara for a pitcher but the surgical techniques get better every day so we can hope.

43 minutes ago, Shinzaki said:

Olson had labrum surgery on Feb 02 Done for the year and possibly forever 

yeah, nice to see JV in the old English D again but I'd rather have a healthy Olson.

3 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

Right, the one on one batter/pitcher match-up is what makes baseball unique and that is where the tv cameras are usually focused. Pace of action had been a problem in baseball more than lack of action. I think the pitch clock (which is really just enforcing rules which were already in place) has made games significantly more enjoyable to watch.  I do would like to see more balls in play, but that doesn't mean pitchers pitching and batters batting is inaction.  

but that wasn't the actually the point I was trying to make, which was about the raw visual stimuli value of watching something. If you are a baseball aficionado like us, watching  a pitcher delivery a high leverage pitch has suspense and drama value and maybe we even appreciate the movement on the ball, but there still isn't much visual stimuli value there compared to a ball in play, where people are moving around on the field, possibly athletically, and compares still less to the kaleidoscope chaos of a snap in football with 22 guys in day-glow unis going every which way at high speed. All to say that to love baseball, you have to know baseball. The entertainment value is less in what you are seeing than in your understanding of what you are seeing means at higher levels of abstraction.

6 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

I get that. Maybe we shouldn't be electing representatives who do not receive 50.1 percent of the total vote. And maybe that's where ranked choice voting comes in, and possibly move to multi member districts.

That said the whole system needs to be reformed. Expand the House, add states like Puerto Rico and DC if you want. I really don't know. 

expanding the House would be a good step toward getting actual democratic balance back. And an anti-gerrymander rule that says re-districting must drive toward minimum boundary length. It's a simple rule and would cut down on maybe 80% of the abuse. The bigger problem  is the Senate. I think a good system would be to have a 100 member Senate reapportioned by population but all the Senators in each state continue to be elected at large state wide and each state guaranteed only one. Or maintain two per state minimum but raise the total to 200. That would still be unbalanced but less than now. Of course to get there requires major Constitutional surgery, expanding the House does not.

23 minutes ago, Shelton said:

Yes, that is what I was saying was nice. Over the course of the year for 20 bucks per month you would get all three teams. Seems like you won’t be able to manage that now that the tigers will likely be offered directly for that same rate.
 

If they can manage to provide the wings and pistons in the winter months for a total of 20 dollars, then whatever April overlap occurs won’t be all that noticeable. But I bet both wings and pistons packages, however they are provided, will cost more than 20 total when you combine them. 

any announcement from the Pistons on what they are doing?

15 minutes ago, RatkoVarda said:

maybe ranked choice is the way out,

but the GOP pours huge money into Jill Stein and others every POTUS election, hoping to peel of 1-2% here or there; that is money well spent by them on their useful idiots 

this is a good point. Third parties here do get coopted for the purposes of the other main parties too often.

5 minutes ago, lordstanley said:

 

Snoop was a UM Dad at one point.

11 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

At times I wish there were more than two parties in the US. I'm not sure given our DNA whether it would work, but would go a longer (than now) way to stop the Party Purity B-S we're seeing now. 

But that would go along with things like ranked voting and multi member districts. 

third parties have their primary value in parliamentary systems where they can be the swing votes to form a majority coalition if no party wins a majority. We don't have one of those. One party is going to win the presidency on its own in almost every possible election scenario. Doesn't leave national 3rd parties much potential leverage. In the US third parties can have a working presence in local Govs where seats on city councils can have swing leverage. We had a functioning third party locally in A^2 through a few election cycles in the 70's. Collapsed when they tried to go state wide. Democratic Socialists of America are alive and well in NYC.

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

Pot is not addictive, period

Yeah.  I think people are guilty of a lot of sloppy semantics. Human beings can and do become habituated to any behavior. Those issues can and are addressed successfully by people all the time. The dividing line between that and addiction may sometimes be somewhat hazy, but it exists.

53 minutes ago, RedRamage said:

I think CTE/Brain dAmage is kinda like Climate Change these days... Most people acknowledge that it exists, but there's big questions with many different views about how big of a deal it is, how much the NFL is responsible, and what we should do about it.

I don't think there's any question that the NFL knew about the brain damage dangers earlier and covered it up. I don't know how much they are or aren't trying to cover up information these days, but at the very least I think more people, including players, are aware of it.

I also don't know how much what the NFL (and NCAA) are doing to try to minimize or prevent damage actually does prevent damage, or if it's just window dressing. At least they're trying I guess?

At the very least I think players are going in more aware of the dangers here, which is a positive step.

The big change is that higher awareness has led to getting guys off the field when they are concussed and keeping them off till they are symptom free.  The clinical question is how much difference does that actually make to whether continued high impact activity still causes long term damage. Maybe a lot, maybe not much. The assumption is that it does,  I don't think the epidemiology exists to adequately resolve that question yet.

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

There will never not be political parties. There will always be a move to organize and fund, if for no other reason than to centralize the donor class into a cohesive unit to achieve their governmental aims. There must anlso be a basis for caucuses to form, and membership in a party-like structure is the easiest and cleanest way to form those.

Unless the alternative view you’re describing implies that political parties will devolve into a corporatized trust structure? That, I could see, at least in some dystopian short-term. But the idea that politicians could all be solitary free agents flitting back and forth between caucuses seems fancifully naive.

I agree some structure seems to be an organic necessity, but the idea that structure will continue to be based on the free association of a significant proportion of the ordinary citizenry certainly does seem to be in danger of extinction. If you look at PAC money - which already dwarfs party funding power,  you can guess where the future is going.

1 hour ago, Shinzaki said:

Been watching wings hilights from the 90's and 2000's to get my hockey fix.

 

That Federov kid could really skate...as could Klima.  Shame Klima had...issues,,,that forced him out of town

you almost wonder if the game isn't played so fast on average now that you see less bursts of all out speed because players don't have enough left in the tank by half-way through a shift, or they worry more they'll end up out of gas when the play reverses before they can get off.

18 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

That is a sobering and not particularly edifying projection. 

The CF projection for Javy is interesting. I think the probability he get 35PA out there is almost zero - I think he is either going to get put out there for an extended run or not at all, so I guess I take I'd that number as the average of a dumbbell distribution.

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

I was skeptical.  But it appears they already have these in China.

Your unwanted gold may be recycled into cash at a gold ATM

 

so the downside could be the typical American vandalism imperative to try to sabotage the device by feeding it some material deliberately compounded to screw it up.

3 minutes ago, Shelton said:

I will never understand the idea that a ball in play is required to qualify as action. Who doesn’t love the art of pitching?

Thank-you Jimmy P from where ever you are.

10 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I don't see football as having a lot of action though

If each team sends 40 players to the plate in a game, 80 PA, maybe 20 are K's so 60 balls in play, most of which are completely routine outs where only one or two players even have to move. There are a lot  pitches thrown, but nothing happens on most pitches.

A football game may have >120 plays from scrimmage, plus a dozen kick offs in which 22 players are all going every which way in an incredibly complex scripted dance.  Most plays involve some one running for their life, or leaping in the air, and then someone getting brutally tackled. I can understand people not finding the action appealing, but to me the visual input level from the field much higher than baseball. But agree that dead time is an increasing problem in football. The game takes too long to play the hour and there are too many commercial breaks that are too long - IOW -the same problem that baseball moved to address recently. The only thing that keeps me watching football anymore is that I can DVR a game and watch it in half an hour without missing a single play.

2 hours ago, tiger2022 said:

In about 5 years all sports will be behind a pay wall.  They are potentially locking out a whole generation of younger fans who will decide they'd rather not spend X-amount to watch sports when they can do other stuff with their time and money.  And almost anyone under 50 does not have cable or direct TV or anything like that.  

Baseball really needs to reevaluate their model for the future because it's a sport where mainly older people watch.  I know of very few young people that will watch a baseball game.  Not saying there aren't younger fans, but baseball isn't like football, hockey or even basketball.  There is a lot of standing around and doing nothing during a baseball game. 

 

I've said this before, (but not recently so I'll repeat myself 😉) a baseball game does generate a certain amount of situational dramatic tension, but as you note, on a baseball diamond people are mostly standing around, so it's basically not particularly visually interesting to watch for the action in the way football or hockey or even tennis is. Which is why it's my contention that its popularity as a spectator sport has always been tied to the fact that playing baseball at some level has been a common experience for a larger part of the population than any other sport. Golf is similar in this regard but even more so. Do you know any non-golfer that watches golf tournaments on TV? Compare mentally to how many football fans ever played any football.

In the past, growing up *everybody* played some baseball. That makes it the sport where the most fans have the highest degree of vicarious identification with what the players on the field are doing. Thus if the popularity of baseball falls as the older fans die off, it will be because fewer people in the population left played the game in their youth (or still play it as softball). And to the degree greed reduces relatively free media access, the rate at which its popularity may fall can only increase.

40 minutes ago, oblong said:

I’ll eat fish and salmon but it doesn’t bring me joy and is never a top choice.  It’s usually for a “light night” when we have to be good. I do like shellfish though. I would eat that every day. 

I think the biggest thing is that fish does not keep, and Americans are used to meat meaning beef, which you can leave thawed in a fridge for a week and still be perfectly fine. Once a piece of frozen fish thaws you literally have minutes to start cooking it if you want to preserve its quality. And then you have the insane practice of American grocers that receive their fish frozen (as virtually all fish is shipped frozen) and then thaw it out to sell it to buyers that take it home and freeze it again. By the second thaw you might as well toss it as it probably already stinks.

2 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

Hand to the face to start it all.

 

Ok - didn't pick that up - I thought maybe there was a head butt by one of them.

44 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

Duren will get a game.  Stew could get 3, his repeat offender status will hurt him.  

I couldn't see what Duren did, I only saw him back out of the confrontation. Stu definitely in trouble though.

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

Seafood is the worst.  I'm a picky eater and there are a lot of things I don't eat, but most of them are either not healthy or they can be replaced by something else which is just as healthy, so it doesn't matter.  I eat reasonably healthy, but seafood is the one big healthy food group I am lacking.  I can't even stand the smell.  I know somebody is going to suggest a seafood that isn't too bad, but I still won't eat it.   

I'll give people a lot leeway on seafood because it's hard to buy right and harder to cook right. You normally can't get much of anything that's edible from any chain grocer like a Kroger.