gehringer_2

Jones turning into anything at this point is a definite long shot, but if he has one hot month and it gets us to Vierling, it will be a good acquisition.

not at all, just noting that so far they haven't found the key for him to achieve reproducibly what he has done occasionally - and for the majority of guys it probably just isn't there, which is why there are so few good major league players. It's one of those things you can do an XY graph with one axis being max talent and the other being how often max can be achieved and you can have some combination but you have to stay somewhere in the +/+ quadrant to make it. Manning has shown flashes of high level talent, but has never been able to bring it consistently. He's maybe the opposite of a Holton - who doesn't have great stuff, but is generally steady as a rock at the level he achieves. This is maybe even a better paradigm for hitters, some of whom can have a monster month one every year or two but just can't bring that level to the 162 game grind or have 4/4 days when everything feels right but it's only twice a month - and such guys never really excel

EDIT: Hinch's comment was "Matt just a litttle adjustment away from really helping us" I guess if you call throwing the ball the same way two consecutive outings in a row a small adjustment.....

3 xbh, 2bb in 14 AB - javy buying himself lots of AB for the rest of ST.

I wonder why they haven't worked either Javy or Sweeney out at 3B? Maybe they have.

FIFY

☹️. Chalk that up as one nut the pitching brain hasn't been able to crack. There were flashes of a pitcher in there often enough to tease there should be something there - but he could never hang on to whatever it was he would find when he had a good outing - and the good outings are too rare.

to a degree, but it's inseparable now because in the US class doesn't distribute evenly by race, plus whites with low resources still have more access to social capital recovery by virtue of being more likely to have successful family or social structures to fall back on or because they still live in areas with better social services (since the country is so segregated.) But either way, I doubt America's blacks would begrudge it if the whole bottom economic quartile of America were to be lifted up.

Listening to Tony Clark did not sound promising. I got the impression that if the owners lock them out before the season starts again, the players are going to see striking during the season as their only recourse, and I can't say as I could blame them.

Oddly, I think the 'woke' part is the most important - at least as I envision it. Which is why this 'scrubbing' is so insidious. My observation is that one of the biggest impediments in US race relations is that your mainstream average white person looks out at underclass pathology and doesn't understand it, and that makes it really easy for them - almost forces them, to fall back sort of a subliminal global assumption that there must be something wrong with 'those people' otherwise they should have caught up in all these years since de jure racism was outlawed. And this operates completely separately from the way they interact with minorities in person - where they believe and very likely are, being what they regard as 'colorblind'. But the actual blindness is that most whites know nothing about the history of how the US has managed to repeatedly destroy lower class social capital - in particular in black America, which is what the underclass society actual needs to build to pull itself up. - The history of everything from Wilson purging minorities from the Civil Service to HUD helping to engineer white flight that broke urban tax bases, to bank and insurance red-lining, to surburan restrictive deed covenants, to the drug enforcement policies that criminalized urban youth, to urban de-industrialization, gentrification, and ultimately political resource starvation of urban centers in favor of suburbia where more votes had moved. Virtually every generation America does something to devalue whatever social capital the urban underclass manages to build. We keep sleeping on all the ways we have systemically insured the that underclass stays the underclass. For my money, that is what White America needs to understand, that their probably mostly unconscious political decisions made innocently (in the sense that they saw no racial significance ) in their natural political interests have had and continue to have disproportionate consequences on people they may have no particular animus towards but are hurting none-the-less. But the $64 dollar question is how do you bring society to a raised consciousness of how this nation has actually (not)worked for minorities without turning it into an 'it's your fault' game when the people you are talking to don't see or understood how anything *they* have done individaully is wrong, when all they've done is to be nice to the individuals they meet and then politically just do what you are supposed to do, which is vote in the interests of your district? Instead we are often alienating the people we are trying to wake up - whose support is needed to get out of the Groundhog Day we are trapped in on race.

The parallels to Avila's Tigers are painfully evident.

you hexed Keith.

Why is Max throwing left handed?

depends what circles you intersect. Been a big/growing deal in academia for a more than a decade.

Despite the public "we like where we are with our pitching", they are apparently still paranoid about having enough depth.

that would be interesting to see.

no, it was more than that. You don't get very far telling people they are bad people, especially ordinary people who know perfectly well that they don't harbor any animus toward the minority people they meet on the street and workplace. I think the 'micro-aggression' fixation I saw a lot of that a the 'U' was misdirected - micro-aggression is not the reason there are structural poverty issues in the minority community - and the fixation on that creates a pass for fixing the bigger economic resource issues that don't get addressed because they are harder to address and demand a re-examination of the way we do representative government in a segregated society. That's what is hard to change and why nothing has much changed 70yrs after Brown v BOE. The other is that objectively there was no accountability. DEI had become a cottage industry for a group of singularly unproductive professionals. Ten of millions spent and no actual increase in diversity. If you took the money UM spent on DEI and just gave free rides to a bunch of minority students and even hired each one a personal tutor to deal with the remediation issues, it would have a much bigger impact on actually achieving diversity than any of the constant navel gazing by white people about white people that was going on.

I guess Donnie's genius uncle didn't tell people who go to MIT aren't people particularly interested in working for ATC, and MIT grad sbetter offers than that anyway. But again - it points out the man's basic ignorance about sooo many things. Such a stupid statement wouldn't even have come into the head of anyone who knew anything breadth of knowledge of life in the US.

true - although another issue with Jobe compared to Skenes is that Jobe is probably on an innings limit - he still hasn't pitched even a 100 innings in a season. If you want him to be able to pitch in the fall you might have to skip starts and give him short outings early in the season, which is easier to manage in an MiLB setting. It's early though - it may sort itself out before opening day. With pitchers odds are someone is injured before then. 🫤

I just see Jobe winning ROY. I think he is going to continue to have on and off command days for a awhile, but time will tell.

At this point a likely scenario is Maeda, Mize, Jobe all keep pitching well, in which case you have to think they just start Jobe in the minors - really nothing to lose there as long as the guy who comes north is legitimately pitching well. Jobe would then 1st call back when someone -again likely Mize or Maeda, eventually stumbles.

Tork hit safely on a pitch middle-middle, a pitch up and away, and a pitch down and in. I don't think you would have seen that watching him early last year. ST pitching requires a big a grain of salt, but at least today he wasn't waiting for perfect pitches in the zone.

off to a great start.

it's a weird deal. Nobel set it up so most of committees were Swedish, but not for the Peace prize. That committee is chosen the by the Norwegian Parliament. -wiki

Norwegians choose the Peace Prize - the folks that already announced they weren't refueling USN ships.