4 hours ago, Motown Bombers said:

 

The Persian Gulf is only 100 miles wide over most of its length. You can't make the Gulf safe for shipping just by controlling the Strait, you have to defend it across the whole South Eastern coast of Iran.

according to gameday, the first pitch to McK was almost middle-middle, was called a ball, but not appealed. Did the burn their challenges?

Rockies return the defensive favor by throwing out a Tiger I never heard of at the plate. It was a hit for McGonigle though. 

Tork getting his warning track power swing down pat tonight....🙄

Holton gives up a couple of loud ABs. One scores, Nido erases the other on a CS.

top of 7th TTBDNS

Three times now the Rockies PBP guy (who is terrible BTW) has said McGonigle is starting at Toledo. Go figure.

Just now, IdahoBert said:

Flaherty pulled after 81 pitches and starting to look like he was getting in the groove. “He’s working on things…” Got in 4.2 innings.

great K/BB ratio, lousy WHIP

Parker's bat coming around some.

48 minutes ago, Screwball said:

Bonus porn. Crude looks like the reciprocal; WTI light sweet.

The talks announcement came out, the inside traders already had their bets down. Now it will take day or two when nothing good happens for that bit of false optimism to evaporate (or for everyone to figure out the announcement was purely a market play) and the S&P will resume its down trend and WTI will float back up to $100.

Petzold's prediction today was that Mize would be the guy to fall out of the rotation, I'd put my money on Flaherty. I know everyone loves his peripherals. but I'm not persuaded the ability of his outcomes to lag his peripherals isn't more than just bad luck.

This should make Lee's day (at least the news comes late so there isn't much left to it)

Quote

Major League Baseball names Polymarket exclusive prediction market partner

msn_polymarket_announcement

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.....