gehringer_2

1 hour ago, CMRivdogs said:

He's made it trashier...

 

Apparently Real Estate Tycoon Trump has never had to take care of an old building. Old buildings are always falling apart a little bit here and there. You fix this, you fix that, you don't bulldoze a wing because it needs to be spackled.

1 hour ago, Shelton said:

In youth travel baseball “sub” players often wear #99 (it’s the extra uniform without a name that most teams have for such situations), so I could see workman leaning into that in an ironic way. When he was selected in the rule 5 by the cubs I remember him (and his wife) being kind of salty about the whole situation, so I feel like he might be doing a bit. 

yeah - that makes sense, but you wonder about him nibbling the hand that feeds him here - even if it's a pretty little nibble. Maybe at this point he feels like he's good enough he can make a secure career in AAA for some number of years with or without the Tiger's support, and whatever time he gets in the majors is playing with house money.

7 minutes ago, guy incognito said:

Uncommon[ly Stolen] Valor.

I think he's finally gotten so besotted that he's starting to cross lines with real costs. The Jesus pic, and not\w this. There isn't much that GIs hate more than this kind of thing. 

So on the ESPN Tiger site right now, Buster has an interview with Boras. So what Boras says is that the deal here is that they did not use an arthroscope on Skubal, they used a new micro device (come kind of fiber optic micro canula) that isn't much larger than a hypodermic needle. That is why they are looking for less than 'std' return possibility. The story is the new even-less-invasive-than-a-'scope treatment tech provides a possibility for faster recovery.

8 hours ago, oblong said:

Nothing speaks to an org's confidence in a player's future than handing out a uniform #99... of course maybe that's what he wanted.  But also of course, #99 is Wayne Gretzky and it's famously unique to him so.... not sure I like that either.

 

8 hours ago, chasfh said:

I feel differently about the Tigers giving him #99:

I thinks it's odd enough that there must be some subtext to it.

30 minutes ago, chasfh said:

The idea would be to discourage the spin race by making it practically impossible to spin the ball as we see now. I might even say that spin rates have gotten so high that there must be pitchers who are overtly trying to break the record for highest-spin rate, just for the recognition.

Along with the softer ball, probably keeping it simple and just lowering the stitching would be a nice incremental trial to do. And while I know this one gets little or no support, I would move the mound back the equivalent of maybe 3 mph which is about 18" (~10msec@97mph). If I've shuttled my digits right, that would make the time of flight of a 100mph pitch equal to the current time of flight of 97mph pitch across 55ft. Those things would just take you back part of the distance to conditions that already existed in past and so shouldn't create too huge a set of dislocations.

3 minutes ago, chasfh said:

If being critical of Israel, and not co-signing onto the resolution flatly equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is itself anti-Semitic, then the Republican campaign to set the bar at "you can be either pro-Israel or anti-Semitic, choose one" has been wildly successful.

I'm sorry I don't remember where but I just read a long piece about the generational divide in the US wrt support of Israel and the journalist's report that in his survey of Israeli opinion people realized it was a problem but thought it would be transient. I have my doubts. 

37 minutes ago, chasfh said:

redistribute internal mass outward toward the cover of the ball, to increase rotational inertia without changing total mass.

this is an interesting thought experiment. You have two effects to consider for two balls otherwise with equal size and weight but different spin moments, The first is that the ball with more spin moment will require more energy from the hand to impart a given revolution rate - more moment would mean less spin imparted *if* it is true that the rotational energy supplied by the hand is at saturation/max - I have no idea if it is or not. So now you look at the second effect, which is that the ball with higher moment will lose rotation more slowly in transit for an identical amount of surface drag (since the balls are otherwise the same), and thus will still be spinning faster, and still breaking more, out to 60' 6" ft. So one key is how much does the spind decay in transit with the current ball? Is it a significant % where a change could make a difference; and another possible key is whether a pitcher can spin a harder to spin ball just as fast at release or not, and if not how much less? (i.e. is the spin moment of the ball a limiting factor in the pitcher's ability to spin it or are other factors more significant) And then of course you have whole second set of questions as to what effect trying to spin a harder to spin ball has on arm health. Does the extra resistance protect the arm more or the extra stress applied damage it more? Highly multivariate system.

33 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That said, this would be a challenge because strikeouts for pitchers are as important to them (not to mention as marketable to the business) as home runs are for hitters. It's all about burnishing the personal brand. You don't get featured on Quick Pitch for inducing ground balls to second for an out.

The thing is, even if overcome that and you do restructure the game so that globally, a team would be more successful (and know it) over a season because it would have a clear improvement in injury experience that would be greater than the value of more K's to the staff, will the pitchers themselves still *always* see it in their *immediate* best interests to strike guys out if they can and damn the risk to themselves? Thus for instance even go to private coaches if their team decided not to do pitch maximizing work with its staff (just as an extreme theoretical example...).

So maybe to continue along where this reasoning leads, you have not only make contact less damaging, maybe you have to make strike-outs much harder to achieve - at least against a larger % of the batter population, so you'd be where the game was when you had to pitch to a Stan Musial and you knew you were wasting your time trying to K him - all you could do was try to keep him off balance enough so he didn't barrel it up well. Two possibilities come to my mind in this direction: moving the mound back to give hitters more time to see pitches; and lowering the stitches to reduce achievable break. Pitchers would have rely more on change of speed and location sequencing to keep guys of balance for barrels as opposed to 'here it is you can't hit it' swing and miss.

22 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Congress can expand the house

More seats would also reduce the electoral college imbalance created by the Senate. I'd like to see them go to 500 reps. Nice round number but not that much harder to manage than 435. Even better would be floating the senate to 200 with the additional 100 seats allotted by population. Much bigger lift of course - but it's on my list with the Constitutional amendments to reverse CU and gerrymandering.

1 hour ago, CMRivdogs said:

I've just about come around to accept the idea of multi member congressional districts, Or some sort of proportional voting and representation. cut the number of districts in half or thirds, then vote for multi members. Or something close to that. 

The current system is wrecked,

 

 

yup - the difficulty with proportional systems is that they drive toward a net 'at large' system were people are not attached to particular geographies. That can be good and bad, but I think the bad outweighs the good. As an example of the worst result of at-large representation you had Detroit, where when the City's Black population started to grow at then end of WWI, they shifted to at-large election of all city council members to preserve an all white city council. That outcome was not only racist, but resulted in a politics were no-one spoke up for preservation of neighborhoods. Believe it or not, it took until 2009 before the charter was finally changed back to a district system (mostly).

1 hour ago, Edman85 said:

I want as many purple and competitive districts as possible. Safe seats beget corruption, extremism, and lack of accountability.

As long as states have odd shapes and unequal population density distribution, maps are going to be weird and gerrymandered in some way. Extreme partisan gerrymandering is no good, but gerrymandering itself is a necessity.

You can generate a politically neutral algorithm to create districts weighting integrity of existing political boundaries against a drive for minimum total perimeters and you can create a fair system. The key is the perimeter value. When that becomes extreme that is the key to recognizing manipulation. Force a map with limited total perimeter and you will do away with the ability to do more than marginal manipulation.

31 minutes ago, buddha said:

we can agree to disagree on that one, but there are plenty of folks who would make a similar argument to yours.

the constitution gives the states the right to determine how their elections happen, which includes how their congressional reps get elected.  this may come as a surprise to you, but politicians acted in bad faith in order to draw those districts!  lol.

what do you mean by "one man/one vote" argument?

It's a fundamental constitutional principle that every voter has equal rights, every vote must be given the same weight. If you *deliberately* manipulate districts to effectively vitiate some votes in favor or others that seems as straightforward a violation of the principle as I can imagine. Certainly one that should transcend any state's constitutional election management options. You could argue that the VRA already set a precedent by playing fast and loose with the principle and I wouldn't disagree with you. Sometimes no good deed goes unpunished.

He didn't wear it at Toledo, or at Erie  before he was rule 5'd either.

He was wearing 14 with the Hens and no-one on the current 40 has it. Wore 27 before his Rule 5 but that's now Sweeney's.

55 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Change the ball to deaden it so as make contact less damaging than it is now?

this seems like the only answer - you have to find a way to make swing and miss, and thus in turn pitching itself, a less important part of the game overall.

42 minutes ago, buddha said:

i hope so.  its killing democracy.

we've argued about whether this SCOTUS is sane or not before, but there is such and easy straightforward one man/one vote argument to be made to outlawing any attempt to draw districts to favor outcomes of any kind that I don't see how SCOTUS can be defended on this issue at all. They made an ideological decision for bad government when there were easy good government options available to them that would not have required any objectionable legal gymnastics to have arrived at at all. These are terrible people and there is no way around it.

I think it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that all the tech that allows pitchers to learn to maximize velo and spin is also teaching them how to put maximum stress on their physiology. Seems almost an inescapable conclusion, but how does any team or even the game as a whole get out of the "arms" race they are in?

Power brick with a mag charger is the ticket for traveling. Depending on how many phone charges you can get from it you probably only need to charge it every 3rd day or so and if your traveling by car all day, pickup a 12V->usb C charger (a few cars now have them built in) and recharge the brick while you're traveling.

14 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Hinch is out of bench players, except for Jake. 

15 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

What this game does not need is Kenley Jansen giving up a 3-run home run in the ninth. I hope we don’t have to endure that.

So --- Jake pitches the 9th?

interesting McG goes to short, Workman to 3rd.

A guy throws 5 straight balls and Keith swings at ball 6 he can't do anything with.

you knew that after calling up everybody and their brother in front of him, something like this was bound to be the result.

and he hit a pretty tough pitch to do it.

Anderson will not follow Madden with a quality start in relief tonight.

too easy to pitch around Riley there.

So Drew Anderson has been the loaded chamber in tonight's game of pitcher Russian roulette.