gehringer_2

I wonder sometimes if Yzerman looks back and feels he was brought up too early - even though he manifestly was not. It's true he may not have been a complete player when he came up, but he was still way too good a hockey player to be in the minors. Is Yzerman's stance that a player has to be 100% complete before he comes up? That's saying a player can't get better after he gets to the NHL and his own case denies the truth of that. I mean it's one thing if you think playing a rookie D in the playoffs is going to cost you a cup, but the Wings simply are not in that conversation that they need to be that conservative about guys making mistakes and learning on the job.

Agree to disagree a bit. He had 7 pretty good years - I guess one can argue semantics but I just wouldn't call that a 'might have been'. Even with the abuse issues he was a 'was'. Can't really know since we don't have modern data from that era but after 7 years his velo may have just started down which happens to a lot of guys irrespective of abuse issues. He certainly got himself into trouble, can't argue that, but I will leave teasing out chicken and egg between success, failure, frustration and substance abuse to you if you want to take that shot!

Still, he stayed the league for 15yrs. It's a natural view to look at guys who explode onto the scene but then fall back as 'might have beens' and sometimes it's certainly true. OTOH, sometimes it's just that a lucky season comes early in their career instead of later, when it's more likely to be dismissed as a fluke because by then there is a track record. The counter example would be Rick Porcello. Nobody calls RP a 'might have been' because of '2016 because it came out of the blue later in his career, but we might have called him that it he had had that season in 2009 or 2010 and then gone on to the same rest of the career he did.

A team isn't likely to go from a poor D to a great D in one off-season. The Lions are a good team, but in the end it's still likely to be injury attrition that will be the difference between which of the good teams survive to end up still standing after December.

Yeah, Landry was probably good enough to win in that day's NFL, but the Lions never built a complete team under WCF. At best it was a star player here and there but never a fundamentally sound or deep team.

agree. A day is not a big deal per se, but a starting pitcher is on a 5 day progressive regimen to prep to throw 90-100 pitches. Upset the regimen and if he goes out there feeling at all unsettled/abnormal you can end up with an injury too easily. If he was a guy with several long seasons under his belt who had pitched long enough to understand his own body better that would be one thing, but Skubal can't be that guy at this point.

If you start with nothing, it usually takes work and smarts to get ahead. When you start with a small fortune, the nature of the capitalist system makes it very hard to lose it. With the kind of money Trump was gifted you have access to types and methods of investment that are virtually guaranteed to grow a small fortune into a bigger one. Trump's singular brilliance has been having the gall to totally game the US legal system as the stop loss on his mistakes. He's the poster child for why legal reform in the US is desperately needed. We have gone so overboard in the name of insuring access (i.e. US Judges are pathologically indisposed to rejecting meritless cases that they should) that instead we have a system illegitimate cases clog up and legitimate ones can't get timely justice from.

I'm not looking for anyone to get fired, but clock use and pacing have been terrible. It seems the staff is working on a play calling schedule that is convenient for them instead of one designed to stress the opponent or create on field advantage. That is just amateur coaching and is the one thing I am most disappointed to see after the Harbaugh regime's strengths at this stuff (and I say that not even liking Harbaugh). Was Moore not paying attention or did he decide none of it was important? That and the fact that every time they send in a play from the sidelines late it's a bust. They are either falling for feints by the defense or are just incompetent.

with Skubal, they are also worried about the jump from last year. Two yrs ago he threw 117 innings, last yr 80. This season he is at 192 could easily have another 30 in front of him if they stay in it. And nobody really knows how much risk that is or isn't.

that kind of social pressure functions in person - and probably social media is a contributing reason to why it has broken down. It's easy to be a jerk at a keyboard. When no-one at the table will talk to you in person in the real world that's a much different story. Social media is fundamentally permission because there are no consequences in most of it. Plus I suppose it's another thing where ti's better to win the battle before the human is an adult.

On a more global level I would say that shame is something this culture has swung too far away from for its own good. We've moved away from many forms of sexual shaming that needed to be discarded but somehow threw out the baby with the bath water on the social acceptance and even lionization of all kinds or retrograde and anti-social and bigoted behaviors along the way that cultural shaming is a primary mode of keeping in check.

who needs fake math? The real math is plenty bad enough.

and again, you literally have to have zero power of analysis of reality to hold that view. Alas that is exactly true of way too much of the population.

Exactly. And while it's been fairly argued that shaming people who don't see that difference is bad strategy for the Harris campaign, it NOT bad strategy for their friends and acquaintances to at least try to set them straight.

On D they have a poor secondary, they constantly lose contain on the edge. Receiving core is Loveland and the 7 dwarfs and the they don't have a QB. They have a coaching staff that changes them into losing plays most of the time and can't manage the clock. Other than that, nothing much to be concerned about.

players getting beat on the play tend to draw flags.

earlier in the drive, before the 3rd down, they took way too much time. When you are running the ball successfully pace is important to keep a D on their heels and M took all kinds of time on a play when they should have come to the line as fast as they could. Almost the reverse error as against MN when they didn't use the clock when they should have. Poorly drilled and managed team. Have to be able to do the fundamental nuts and bolts stuff.

by my informal record keeping, every single call they have made from the sideline to change the play has failed.

If you are going to give up a bunch of runs, might as well do it when you are being shut out.

They never had enough pitching. They were lucky that Petry and Wilcox each had their career year at the same time. When the best a wannabe championship org can do to shore up their pitching is Walt Terrell, you have an org which really isn't serious either within their farm system or on the market.

Nah - she may have come to hate him, but even that isn't stronger than her personal grift. If he goes to jail and losses a bunch of civil judgments, the value of her pre-nup may follow the same fate as $DJT. She's gonna vote for whatever preserves her $$$.

Sparky was a great clubhouse guy and he was fine managing his offense, but I didn't think he never had a good sense for pitchers. After Roger Craig left he never made up that loss.

even a Maize and Blue fan can give OSU props on this one. They are moving all classes to 'asynchronous' for one day - meaning not in person, for election day. Making sure 60K will have time to stick to favorite son JD Vance..... https://oaa.osu.edu/election-day-asynchronous-learning#:~:text=Ohio State will have a,first week of autumn semester.

Yup. The things people would have noticed the most are consumer goods and electronics and they come in from Asia via the West Coast. I know it would be tough for the kids at Princeton and Yale to miss the deliveries of their new Bimmer's though....

I don't think Hinch will walk Ramirez, just not in his DNA. I think he should, but I don't think he will.