gehringer_2

All things being equal I'd love to take a flyer on Pettersson but in the real world the Wings are too talent poor an organization to have the luxury to take that kind of risk. They are no position to make an investment that has that much possibility to blow up.

Remember the 1st time they called Elmer up they put him out there with Ras and Sundqvuist - sort of a three trees line? I would have liked to see that play out a little longer. Something about being out there and not being the biggest guy seemed to work for Rasmussen.

Tork's a little off

yup - the ball goes up and starts getting blown but then straightens up as is comes back down to where the wind is more effectively blocked. Makes it really confusing.

some guys just don't do it when the have the chance - those are guys you tend not to win with. So much of sport is the ability to perform in the moment.

Fetter's visit was one batter too late.

Why are Hanifee's numbers pretty good but my feeling when he comes into a game so bad.

I don't even get the point for the activist. The proof she's not a serious person is right there if she can't think her way to the conclusion that she has more chance of her views influencing policy under an administration of her own party. Again, it's the primacy of the gesture, the performance, the public bow, and the ego massage associated, and the lack of concern or maybe understanding, of the actual outcome. And in the end she is only the reflection of the same intellectual rot infecting her constituency, which is just a slice of the larger messed up in the head and heart US public.

The cost of politics as performance.

All you can reasonably do is hope for rain, or maybe damaging hail ...and brimstone.

It's not even amusing anymore as it's become so predictable.

Oh - no doubt at all. The comedy is in the need to have announced it, which goes rather straight to Rob's point.

He had his chance to stand for Academic Freedom, instead he gets his freedom from academia....

Class may be an obsolete anachronism from an age of elitist power structures, but it's one virtue is that it's still something you cannot buy. Trump will go to go to his grave without ever having succeeded in buying or bulling his way past his nouveau-riche status.

the set-back was for sure a bad sigh. OTOH, the imagining is good enough today you'd think they should have had a decent idea of whether surgery was indicated.

well, aint' that right friendly of 'im.

LOL! - serves him 'effin right! Tried to lie down with the dogs, got a bad case of fleas!

Someone is always hurt. Multiple roster crunches are generally anticipated for each one that materializes. It reminds me of payroll budgeting. One you get to a couple of dozen FTEs in a org, you are never going to keep them all filled all the time, so with luck they don't figure that out up the chain, and you may get a bit to play with in the personnel budget.

maybe we can persuade Lee or Chas to do the research - but it is my statistically totally unproven but none the less firm belief, that depth in a baseball line-up will get you more production than the same total wRC+/WAR etc mal-distrubuted in a small number of huge stars. And I definitely believe that beyond that it's more cost efficient, the marginal cost of the best baseball players generally exceed the marginal value of how much better they are. I'll admit that is probably less true for pitchers, but the injury risks are so high for pitchers today I don't see how they can be rationally valued anyway.

you can win an election on not being the other guy, but you don't build anything that way. 2020 being the example. Biden had the core of new democratic approach on economics, but his party wasn't really interested in it and in the end he was too out of gas to be a major change agent. In 2024 Harris basically ran on cultural progressivism, which I think is great but clearly doesn't win elections in the US, and her economics was basically old school democratic 'give away more stuff' promises that fly in the face of a deficit approaching 3rd world country levels. That combination just didn't move enough people to say "Yeah! Those are the long term goals we aspire to!" - ergo - there was no party ideological/policy adhesion (for enough people) providing immunity against the Trump reprise.

typical democratic 'gesture' politics. Maybe if your party came up with a political plan to offer voters beyond "not Trump" you might get more traction. The Dems have gotten themselves into the odd position of being an out of power party that is somehow the one defending the status quo. But too many people don't like the status quo, which is how Trump has won elections.

LOL - I'd change your syntax there to "have beaten everyone" because we know the truth is that if any baseball playoff series was repeated the odds are pretty close to 50/50 the other team would win it the second time around.

the only time I had a strong "would rather face" feeling was the 2006 series. I wanted the Mets because I thought we matched up better. We'll never know if we would have matched up better against them or not but we didn't handle StL very well!

Tiger fielder's have shortened this game to 24 outs for the Sox.

And I think we are at a point where the money matters. We've pretty much lost the noblesse oblige class of wealthy people willing to bankroll civil society, but today's middle class still is not awake to the fact that the responsibility is now theirs. And it doesn't have to be political money. Support your University, the ACLU, your library system, buy your local newspaper, there hundreds of places that middle class monetary support can help protect civil society from the caprice of a rogue Federal government.