gehringer_2

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

So adorable how the "[the justices would] be shocked at how well organized and secure [elections] are" poster proceeds from the assumption that they are honest and impartial actors.

The way the system is supposed to work, findings of fact - like how an election works, are supposed to be established at the trial court. Unfortunately, that's a distinction that often doesn't make a difference in the end, because the Justices are still using their own belief system and the 'facts' they hold within that belief system, to make their judgements on matters that in theory are only about 'the law' of a case, but never really are.

In a technological age where the Justices are often totally ignorant about the real world context of what they are deciding, I wonder if the fact that appeal courts are not tasked to retry the facts of cases almost becomes an impediment to good outcomes.

The fans have themselves to blame for ticket prices. Teams are going to charge the price that exactly maximizes the tradeoff between price per ticket and number of tickets sold. The only way to force ticket prices down is to not buy them at the current price. If the players were all working for free, teams would still be pricing the tickets exactly as they are and just pocketing the difference.

Payrolls follow revenue, not the other way around. Teams that already have optimized their ticket prices cannot raise more money by increasing them in response to paying higher salaries, rather the salaries they pay follow the revenue they have been able to generate. Thus the teams that generate the highest revenue have the highest payrolls and the teams that cannot generate those revenues cannot just raise raise prices to compete by paying higher payrolls, they must find a way to be competitive (or fail) on a lower cost basis.

Now to some degree there is a way around this if putting a more expensive team on the field creates enough additional demand in your market for tickets and TV so that your revenues rise more than your expense, but since there can be a several year lag between when a team gets expensive and when it's fan base grows, if it does, it's can be a risky proposition. And some towns just aren't going to care much even if you win - (Miami?)

3 hours ago, romad1 said:

Unrelated but related. 

Workers who fall for ‘corporate bull****’ may be worse at their jobs, study finds | Business | The Guardian

I think this describes a lot of MAGA. 

I think this is driven by the combination of FOMO coupled to a lack of intellectual time/energy to spend the time parsing though complex syntax to see if there is actually anything there. The short version would be - "I don't know if any of that make sense and it's too much work to figure out exactly what if anything it all means,  but if I don't get on board I may miss something."

The real problem is when the people spewing it believe there is something to what they are saying when there actually isn't, when the concepts fall apart as soon as they are pushed into clear light.

Keith as a RF is definitely "out of left field"

😉

3 hours ago, Motown Bombers said:

 

"At this point it’s hard to believe the President isn’t just trying to manipulate markets out of desperation."

You don't say?

it would seem there still has to be shoe to drop on cable system fees. If we are still going to get the 25-26 Wings and Piston seasons on Fanduel, and now are going to get the '26 Tigers on DSN, I find it hard to believe we well get both through this June without a pricing increment. I remain pessimistic but willing to be pleasantly surprised.

4 minutes ago, ben9753 said:

I'll never get the hate people have for Boras. It's big money business, 100's of millions of dollars on the line. His job is to make his clients the most money possible, and he's obviously very good at his job. Why does he get so much hate?

It's not the player, it's the game. Boras is acting inside the system created by the recent CBAs. I don't like that system because I think it's bad for fans. I don't how much influence Boras has had in the creation of that system as I don't have any way of knowing the degree of his influence on what the union has bargained for over the years. I wouldn't be surprised if his influence was substantial though.

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

I think which organization makes the offer matters more than people think. If Arte Moreno were to offer Skubal 10/500 to come to Anaheim and the best offer he were to get otherwise is 8/400 from the Tigers or some (other) perennial contender, I’d bet he'd take the smaller offer to give himself a better chance to win a ring. In a case like that, the marginal utility of the extra hundred million dollars would simply not be enough to consign himself to the second division for the remainder of his career. He's not Mike Trout, after all. 😏

Sure, it's reasonable to assume that he would only consider the subset teams he regarded as competitive. Of course that doesn't mean he wouldn't use an offer from a team he had no intention of going to as leverage!

48 minutes ago, romad1 said:

Don't blame the bomb, blame the guy sending the bombs. 

In the early 2000's they were studying low yield nukes for bunker busting because they had pretty much given up on the idea that any conventional weapon could work on a properly hardened deep target. Eventually that was spiked because you couldn't get the warhead deep enough to contain a massive release of fallout - which was the initial thesis. So they went back to the drawing board on conventionals. According to reports today they are using a new intermediate size GBU72 because GBU109 apparently wasn't enough. 

The big bertha GBU-72 has limited supply and can only be delivered by the B-2, making it massively expensive to use. Dropping each of those probably costs more than digging the hole it collapses.

I'm pretty confident the mass media reporting about these things conflates maximum theoretical potential performance with likely real world outcomes.

9 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Trump says Iran would have had a nuclear bomb within.....wait for it.....

Two Weeks!!

I guess those GBU57 "bunker busters" must be much better for making CGI promo videos for the military/industrial complex than making effective holes in the ground.

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

 

I guess the markets did not like the ultimatum 

 

He's backed down today in another bid to freeze the markets crashing, and the fools have fallen for it every time. The constant "I'm attacking/I'm negotiating" is certainly a pure pump and dump scheme to keep lining his and Jared's pockets. 

10 minutes ago, 1984Echoes said:

It has nothing to do with Skubal remaining a Tiger for life because that's not his goal. (IMO).

I agree '84. Which team is not going to be the major driver of the decision - it will be the value of the contract.

The Tigers are/will be as much in the running as any other team, A player returning to the same team is not at all at cross purpose to Boras/Skubal establishing a new contract level, only taking less than max value would. So it won't be Skubal putting the Tigers out of consideration, the Tigers will take themselves out if they decide they can't/won't make a competitive offer. I think that latter is inevitably what will happen. While anything is possible, esp since something completely new could conceivably come out of the new CBA that changes things (but note that 'conceivable' does not imply at all likely), I don't see Chris Ilitch walking away from the 'sustainability' mantra he recites at every chance and I don't see how paying Skubal what some team surely will offer would be within Chris I's version of 'sustainability' for the Tigers..

Of course at the end of day, to the fans, whether the player excluded the team from consideration or the team excluded the player from consideration is a distinction without a difference to the outcome.

1 hour ago, Tenacious D said:

Days away from Opening Day and I have no clue where I’m going to be watching games.  I have Xfinity when I’m in Detroit, but spend half of every week in Chicago.

What am I supposed to do?  (Asking for a dumbass)

I have directTV. I have seen unequivocal statements that DirectTV will carry DSN, but they also tell me that it be on the same channel number that currently belongs to fanduel. But the Wings season - as well as the Pistons, remains on fanduel for a few months after the Tiger season starts, so the some total of information I have been able to find appears contradictory. Well, possibly not. There are two fanduel channels on DTV so maybe one of those will convert, in which case the Wings and Pistons will not able to broadcast simultaneously for the rest of the season, which doesn't seem like it can be right.

Nor have I yet seen anything about the price tag. Fanduel carried a surcharge of something like $6/mo.

17 minutes ago, 4hzglory said:

He wasn’t a competitor anyway, there are AL and NL ROY

D'OH!

good point! 

I suppose Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh they won't burn the year even if they think he could be a candidate.

Sure they lose the year anyway if he won anyway, but a team can always delay a call-up long enough the player doesn't get enough AB to be likely to win, and if your team is not likely challenging for a playoff.....

...is apparently going to have one less competitor for ROY. Konner Griffin re-assigned by Pittsburgh.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/48271759/pirates-reassign-heralded-prospect-konnor-griffin-minor-league-camp

1 hour ago, SoCalTiger said:

Ok so the argument against McGonigle making the team is he needs AB’s against off speed pitches but will he actually even see any good pitchers in AAA that can command those pitches??

It will be interesting to see how easy it will be for pitchers to get a guy out with a lot of breaking stuff who won't swing out of the strike zone. Even in the majors there aren't that many guys who can throw breaking stuff consistently in the zone.

8 minutes ago, antrat said:

This is one of my bigger pet peeves with these Trumpers. They refuse to see their own hypocrisy. They flip flop to follow Trump's flip flops. They have no inherent philosophy except to own the libs and praise Diaper Don.

Trump has this animal brilliance at hypnotizing his supporters into simply accepting a retcon of everything that has ever happened in the past each time he speaks. Think about the monumental contradiction in the claims that we and the Israeli's bombed Iran's nuclear capability to smithereens in June, but then we must turn around in March and fight another war because they are "2 weeks away" from 'the bomb'. This is not some trivial difference of opinion on a debating point nicety. It's life and death reality for thousands and chaos for millions.

You can't have a mind that functions at anything like post Neanderthal level and still believe anything Trump vomits into his social media sewer,  yet here we are. 

there is always a tweet.

18 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

I will agree with you on Keith if the numbers are the same in two years.  
 

Right now he’s still a maturing player and the expectation is there’s more production to develop.   Hes not someone that any sane organization would give up on at this stage of his career arc.  

I think it's quite likely that Keith is going to get better as a hitter, maybe a lot better. I also think he is evolving into a DH. If his power improves I suppose he would be a candidate 1B, but watching him even there, I think his movement has yet to become fluid or natural.

So I suppose it depends on how the team sees its offense/defense balance. Will they make room for him on the diamond regardless, give him a lot of AB at DH, or move him and his very attractive contract which could bring back pretty good value?

And of course it's always a matter of what the alternatives are. If Tork flames out, 1b is gonna be Keith's. No brainer there.

25 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Here I am a woke ****lib with my solar and EV not needing gasoline. 

That's one of the ironies. Trumps idiocy is going to do more than speed the adoption of non-hydrocarbon fuels both here and around the world than any monkey wrench he has thrown in attempting to prevent it.

Whatever fever dreams Trump and Hegseth had been imagining, in reality, what they have accomplished so far would be the following:

• brought a leadership into power in Iran that is more radicalized than ever
• Left the Iranian people with a worse government and worse economic prospects than they had before. And poorer people do not make better revolutions.
• increased the risk to US citizens around the world to terrorism
• vastly weakened the US ability to deter China from attacking Taiwan
• Slammed his base in the Red US agricultural states again with dramatic increases in the price of fuel and fertilizer.
• Vastly increased Russia's oil income and thus its potential for mischief.
• Destroyed whatever semblance remained of a Western security alliance.
• Guaranteed that every rogue (and for that matter) non-rogue regime redoubles efforts to get into the nuclear club before Trump decides to start another war - this should do wonders for the Pakistani and possibly N. Korean balance of trade as customers line their pockets for nuclear tech.

What do we learn, Palmer?

42 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I don't believe that Parker by necessity should make the team, but I do believe that the Parker decision should be disassociated from the Kevin decision, and I think it will be.

I agree that the decision on whether McGonigle make the team is independent of the decision on Meadow, but I was referring to the linkage being in the outcome about where he plays in the field the most being dependent on whether Parker is on the team. I think he will get more time at 3B if Parker is the regular CF. I may not have been sufficiently clear there, but I will stand by that as more precisely rendered.

2 hours ago, Tigermojo said:

Do we really need Javy is my question. He could quickly become the weakest link on the team. Obviously they will let him play but if he does decline, will they cut him this year?

If he declines, but he happens to be having a decent Spring, he may or may not turn out to be more productive than any combination of Meadows, Perez, Jones. At any rate, they aren't going to eat his salary if he's playing decently. Of course he could fall apart, anyone on the roster can, or be injured, but I think you cross that bridge when you come to it.

1 hour ago, Motown Bombers said:

 

American History repeats itself like a bad record. I'm old enough to remember when it "we have to destroy the village to save it."

16 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Supposing this is the case, the question would be, is it better to have McGonigle start every day at third, McKinstry/Javy platoon at short, and Colt float around DH/3B/even 1B; or Colt still at third, McGonigle/Javy at short, Javy also at CF in case of/in place of Parker, and McKinstry super-sub especially since Wenceel is probably gone?

Hinges mostly on a decision on Parker.

5 hours ago, GalagaGuy said:

 

Of course, just to clarify, in Donald Trump's world, there is only one innocent person to begin with, namely him. So the statement is unchanged on the substitution "He can no longer hurt me."

Now that that is clear, carry on.