gehringer_2

In the end, it's not justice to hold Penny responsible for a tragedy not of his making. There has to be a better way of keeping Jordan Neely from acting out threats in a public space then having him run into Daniel Penny. Again, it goes back the fact that in every functional society, the expectation of order in public spaces is the norm and Americans are no different in sharing that expectation and demanding it be met.

In the end, you can only stay ahead with fewer $ if you have more brains, and eventually the dollars will take the brains away from you as well, so you need a management/scouting pipeline as well.

I don't know if this is more a WOW or a smh? The guy does all this meticulous planning before the fact and then doesn't ditch the gun and paperwork after the fact? Well, I suppose if the guy was wired right he probably wouldn't be murdering people.

what saves baseball is that as long as the playoffs allow in enough teams that that some med/small market teams have to get in, there is always a reasonable chance that the 88 win StL team will beat the 106 win NYC team and that will generally be enough to keep fans interested. Plus the divisional structure - the Central divisions in both leagues have only one really big market - Chicago - and it's split, so that guarantees the midwest a shot in a short series against the coast. But bias toward high salary teams in the playoffs is pretty clear.

the huge contracts will continue as long as the money in the big markets is available, the money is available as long as the media rights fees can keep increasing - i.e. the ecosystem doesn't collapse because viewers reach the point where they won't pay. As long as the big markets can afford to outbid places like Det, they will. A contract like Soto's - or the one Skubal will get if he stays healthy - is suicide for a team like the Tigers. Ilitch can talk a good game about being willing, but the $ are not there in this market when push comes to shove and the league isn't going to allow teams to operate at a loss. Doesn't matter if the owner has the money - the team still has to be solvent.

relevant to this story.... there was a piece in the Atlantic recently about police work - a long interview with a researcher who studies police manning and crime rate questions. One of the ancillary points that the story raises is that to an increasing degree, what the public is demanding is more *order* in public spaces, but the problem for law enforcement is that the things the public wants enforced are mostly not illegal - at least anymore (things like vagrancy etc), and if the police push in those areas, they get only get in trouble, are accused of harassment, etc. As a society we have not done a good job of recognizing that disconnect and figuring out what to do about it. We basically have a legal regime where we can't get what we want inside the system we have created. I think cases like Penny's are a direct result of this.

this is the thing. I can't see any of M's draft eligibles playing and I'm sure the same will be true with Bama. It's going to be two hollowed out shells of teams. Well, for the same reasons at least we know M will have it's starting QB....😂

Unless the sports media ecosystem (i.e, the money machine) totally collapses, Skubal is gone. The only question is bite the bullet and trade him while you can get a good return or take the performance and accept the comp pick as consolation.

Going to the other extreme, do you think Koufax would be elected if he had finished the same career in 2019? I have to doubt it given how short his career was and what we know about Dodger Stadium park factors. I think there would at least be a lot of grumbling.

as long as the media money keeps growing. Given the Diamond bankruptcy it's less clear to me that it is still growing, but then again, It wouldn't bother me if a few teams went under -- as long as mine isn't one of them....¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I like Carpenter enough as a player, my bigger concern is that like Riely, he needs to stay on the field. Shoulder and back issues in successive years are not what you like to see in a player's CV.

True, but as I understand it, the league doesn't let owners subsidize their teams by just throwing in cash because a team running at an operating loss would lose market value, which would hurt all the other owners, and they don't like that. The Mets will have to cover those costs out of their own revenue and in NYC they certainly should be able to do that.

LOL - I have no idea why at this point - it's lost in the past, but I have a residual memory of intensely disliking John for some reason (probably just because he played for the Yankees for a while!) - so assuming whatever I can't remember was actually a good reason, he can go pound sand. 🤷‍♂️

Tiant just because he was such a presence/personality in the game. I don't mind giving guys credit when they end up being a big part of what makes the game what it is. Sure, it's not quantitative, but you know it when you see it....😉

LOL - so they are going to have 5, maybe 6 yrs of a rougly replacement level player that costs them $50M/yr. Kewl.

I'm OK with both. Sure, Parker was mostly a beast early on, but I'll give him some credit for leading the league in total bases at 34 and 35, so his 30's weren't as complete a flameout as some.

absolutely - an injury with a repair that doesn't have a slam dunk outcome. Without proof he will still have a SS arm, you basically have to hedge on the possibility you are looking at adding a RH LF/DH. Tigers have taken on rehabs, but more like Flahery, where things were further along. His performance may have still had some way to go, but there was a pretty fair indication his was physically sound. OTOH, they dumped Boyd when he wasn't going to be ready to evaluate in ST.

It's always struck me that if you are going to kill someone in retribution, you want them to know it, and this guy was shot in the back, but the other take on that would be that in the end the killer decided he would lose his nerve if he faced him.

agree they are two players in very similar circumstances - I'd give the nod to Sweeney as being in a little stronger position just because I think he held down his fielding position better.

Supposedly Russia has gone as deep as pulling T34 rust buckets out of storage to send against Ukraine. But Airplanes are a different animal. You can get some utility out of a tank with half a dozen things wrong with it. The possibility of getting any of the older mothballed airplanes in the air again seems pretty low. But it also becomes a systemic bureaucratic issue. No-one want to take responsibility to a decision to get rid of the stuff because while the risk that it was the wrong decision may be incredibly low, the credit in the org for it being the right decision is zero.

well, the good news with Sweeney is that in his 1st 55 PA, he OPS'd 540, in his final 65, he OPS'd 725. That's too small a sample size for much of anything except to say he did show some adaptation and that the first couple of weeks of scouting didn't immediately find some hole in his approach to exploit. From what I saw in the way of prospect reports about him, the early thinking was the bat would play, but there were doubts about his defense. In his short audition I thought the D looked OK, so if the Tigers also believe in the bat, I won't be surprised to see him start next season as the regular SS.

he should have been able to ramp up to fairly high training level if he is getting close to being cleared to play. But along the way you are thinking you hope they don't him play without having been through contact drills in practice - etc...

once healed there isn't much residual risk with a long bone fracture. One would think xray would give them a pretty good idea of where things stand with the bone....

what odd here is not so much that stuff becomes obsolete, but that they don't go ahead and just scrap it out. The record of ever bringing anything out of these dead storage facilities is so thin it seems silly to keep them up.

Probably true for Trump himself and maybe Elon. But the larger class of people that pay the $$ to support the GOP - people like the Koch's for example - need a system that works.