gehringer_2

then we better make a LOT of NOISE about how BAD an idea the GOLDEN AB IS.

I've learned to enjoy baseball with less expectation about the outcome. Haven't gotten there with Hockey yet though! And darned if for a change I don't have to for football!

Gee, wouldn't it be terrible if the GOP actually faced the fact that Trump was *their* problem? Yeah, no - what am I thinking?.......

and the more unrestrained the rich teams get throwing money around, the more likely the above becomes for everyone else.

exactly

I'm sure the people at Henry Ford Health love seeing the same ad format they adopted show up in this.

so if Bobby Witt singles and the two guys behind him walk, you take him off third base and send him up to bat again?

It's empty rhetoric in any case. The US can't do anything to Hamas any harder or more effectively than Israel has already been doing. The only impact US involvement would have is if the US gave Iran an ultimatum on the theory Iran could force Hamas, but I'm not sure that's still a good theory at this point.

Yup

I'm sure that about now Biden is channeling his inner honey badger.

Nope. He's 36 and has a reground hip. Resigning him smacked more of hope than wisdom. This season Yzerman's decisions on who to pass and who to pay have largely come a cropper.

this should at least be interesting for a few days.

Matt has has started 23 games total in the two years since finishing his DL stint for TJ and he's 34 this upcoming season. If you are Cleveland you probably decided not to overspend on a guy that will probably spend half the season on the DL.

There is something to this. Speaking completely generally (i.e. ignoring the obvious political tie-in) the globalization and instantization of communication means that we can see the variety and extremes across the whole planet everyday, and since we don't really comprehend the scale of the whole planet very well - everything does get more 'normalized', seem more ordinary that it probably should. The culture should eventually absorb that change but the change happens faster than the culture processes it.

I've thought since last year that we'd get more out of Seider if we played him a little less. I think Lalonde runs him out of gas.

It's complex, of course. To raise US wages and restore the middle class, it would be helpful if certain types of manufacturing is reshored - but not just anything. The kind of manufacturing that can support high paid workers is mostly capital intensive processing were each worker manages machines or automation that leverages his hourly output to support a higher way. Things that are mostly handwork - like light assembly, will not pay the kind of wages to make a reshoring effort worthwhile. So how to you do it? Tariffs can create the pressure for it to happen, but investment and tax policy can be just as effective. Along the same line - a better take than just stand alone tariffs is to tie them into a system to recover the externalities that companies often do offshoring to avoid - such as pollution control, site remediations requirements, resource depletion, labor standards. You could group these kinds of things under the heading of 'leveling the playing field.'

yeah - that's a great myth. Things get better in small increments when people keep plugging away to make things better, they get worse in big chunks when people start breaking stuff. I think we tend to think this way because the feed our selves such deep fantasies about America's history: "We are a revolutionary nation". No, we are not really. France's reign of terror was revolutionary, Leninism was revolutionary, Cuba was revolutionary, the Chinese cultural revolution was revolutionary. What happened beginning in 1776 in the American colonies was actually a fight more to keep things the way they were - they way they had gradually evolved in the colonies while the Brits weren't paying that much attention, than to change things. It was the Brits who wanted to force the colonies to change - to pay more to support the Crown and accede to more direct rule from England than where things had evolved. It was more a war of conservation than revolution. Which is why the outcome didn't look like France or Russia.

The closest we get to Soto is if one of his flights between coasts passes overhead.

I hear ya, but I still wonder if loss of Walman's quickness is part what the PK is suffering from. Edvinssson may be a better player overall at this point, but matching him with Seider on the PK may not be the best way to get to the most loose pucks first, which for all of Lalonds technique talk about the problem, is the root of it. And TBF, the problem on the PK is at least as much two forwards out there. And they probably have no-one more effective than Edvinsson to play on the PK now - they have to hope that his anticipation gets better as the season goes on so he can play faster than he does now.

It the kind of preening the league should never have allowed to get started though. Players are exhausted and emotional at the end of a game and it's stupid to allow 'graceless winner' behavior that just increases the likelihood of 'poor loser' behavior.

Interesting question. I can't anything about the luxury tax that says anything more than that it's based on player salaries. The Luxury tax in baseball is pretty useless because it kicks in at too high a level to have any real benefit to small market teams. It's designed more to be a disincentive to rich teams than create any serious levelizing of revenue. I would think the LT need to capture at least 20-30% of the richest teams' revenues to become a serious equalizing force. So far I don't think the tax has ever cost the Dodgers more than ~10% of their revenue in one year. The 'TrueBlue' site estimates the Dodgers have paid a total of $85M in luxury tax over the last 3 yrs - their revenue is over $500M/yr. Ohtani's contract could drive that higher though.

I can understand Walman not being what they wanted, but not letting players go before you've identified how to improve yourself at the position vacated.

I was not at the game today, but I WAS as the '69 game - first college football game I had ever attended no less. It was one payoff for living with an older sister for 16 yrs

Now why would I ruin a perfectly good euphoria doing that? 🤔

OK - raise the mound back up an inch or two and the pitch angles stay exactly the same. Problem solved! 😉