gehringer_2

MBN knows Wings will probably keep him in GR way longer than he'll ever want to be there once he gets there, so why be in a hurry?

He's a young man compared to Arenado or Goldschmidt though. 😉

Hmm. There is nothing at this link. Did Elon kill it already or is it suspect?

While I think history argues that as many FA signings are busts as are winners, the one thing I have come around on is don't try to scrimp. It's the 2nd tier guys like Zimmermann and Baez where you get burned trying to save money. IOW when looking at FA's I think the downside risk is far more important than the contract cost in the value equation. You are better off paying higher dollar for the player that is most likely to produce than hedging on the cost side and ending up having to write it all off. TL,DR version - if you are going, go after Bregman.

And the other side of the same equation is that to the degree that Covid deaths occurred in older populations that like your GM had already dropped out of active voting, any political effect is proportionately reduced.

I can believe there is a lot more back channel contact between Israel and Iran than might be assumed.

IDK - Journalism freed from commercial constraints used to work for the television networks. Newspapers have pretty much always needed to make a profit so I don't know if we conclude that alone is the issue. Maybe it's more that ownership has become more politically monolithic along with more concentrated so there is just less divergence of world view among the publishers?

You'd think that if there was a state where it might have had an effect, it would be FLA, but the effect may be drowned out by volatility in the Hispanic vote.

Coincidentally enough - I just heard Steve Schmidt talking to a long time Dem pollster and his numbers really do have it reversed. Among those that have voted in all 4 of the last federal elections, Harris is at 55%. Among occasional voters, Trump is up by 5% (49-44 IIRC)

Goldschmidt could be interesting. Old, terrible season overall, but a 784 OPS in his last 300 PA might mean he's still got a bit left in the tank. Is he willing to play less than full time? On the - side, he was walking at a career low rate.

LOL - Elon must be really worried about his boy after his performance the last two days, my twitter feed has very suddenly gone all MAGA in the last hour!

our school board is non-partisan and the financial and personnel management by the board has been a disaster so I had to really drill down on those. We also elect judges in MI, but at least half of them end up running unopposed. The Partisan ballot was pretty easy - I can't even imagine voting for any GOP candidate until their party looks a lot different than it does today.

I think this is usually the case. There are 180 million non-voters and I think more of them have D tendencies than R, so in recent cycles getting as many of those people as possible to decide to show up is always the battle. But the voting habit is slowly getting better on the blue side as evidenced by turn out for Obama and Biden. And part of that is predictable because it's class related. The college educated and the old have always voted in higher percentages. Now starting from the new deal, the old tended to be democratic and the college educated Republican. As the FDR generation that were the 1st to receive SS and were completely loyal to the party of FDR died out, the old vote shifted GOP and for a while the GOP had the best of both, the old and college educated both trended GOP and both were more reliable voters than Democratic cohorts. But today's GOP has mostly lost the college educated vote. And as that group has gone democratic, democratic turnout reliability improves.

was going to make the same post - I don't see the trump voter as being reticent anymore either.

The problem for the Tigers is that other than 3rd base - assuming Jung ends up back at Toledo for more development, you don't really have an obvious wide open spot to give a good RHH you bring in 500+ AB. Harris notes correctly that they are too left handed but three of their LH bats are everyday players, maybe even a 4th if Sweeney continues to develop and even if he doesn't javy complicates the situation at SS until they know whether he can contribute.. So to me unless you are bringing in a 3b like Bregman, the likelihood is going to be they pursue more platoonish guys like Canha again.

Allred taking it to Cruz tonight. If debates matter - which is always questionable, Allred should have helped his cause.

Meme steal for the day:

Technology casualty. Double line spacing and variable kerning to justify lines on both ends. When we wrote long hand on individual sheets of paper, who wanted to waste a line? When its print on a screen and the printer does 20/sheets per minute or it never gets printed at all, it's hard to beat the look of blocked paragraphs. Printed books still use indents, but they probably still care about page count.

Pretty terrible call on Seider to negate a Wings PP.

LOL - After last night, the MAGA may or not care if Trump drops dead and they get Vance, but the media investors apparently do!

Probably good strategy there.

I don't think anyone is ready to give up on Dingler after 84 AB. Any hitter needs 500+ AB to know what you have. I was only questioning whether it is all *that* much different for catchers. Heck - Mike Trout had an 89 OPS+ in his 1st 135 AB. I probably shouldn't have used the expression 'out of the gate' when I really just meant as compared to the normal progression for hitters.

and I think it's fine that managers want to take hitting pressure off their catchers so that they don't let their ABs impact their concentration on their catching job, but that's a bit different than saying it's because they are catching that they aren't able to be more successful hitters. They are the hitters they are.

it's beyond ironic that for Biden the mind is there though the body is failing while with Trump the mouth is still robust but the mind behind it is sclerotic.

<rant_on>I don't know how much I buy this great dichotomy. It strikes me as much about justification for not finding catchers that can hit. The big part of being a good catcher is managing the game/staff and that is almost all soft skill. Hitting is a hard skill. The time spent on one doesn't really impact the ability to spend the time needed on the other. There are plenty of catchers who can hit and who did it out of the gate. And there are a ton of good defensive catchers who played for years until they had catching down cold but never became better hitters. It's OK not to value hitting that highly in a catcher but just be up front about it <\rant_off>