gehringer_2

right. Any team that loses it's best pitcher is likely to get a lot worse, depending how bad the pitchers that work those innings in his place turn out to be. Given that the depth off the end of the Tigers rotation is hardly stellar right now, that means the Tigers would probably take as bad a hit as any team from losing a Skubal. But of course the fact that it's true of any team doesn't make it any less true for the Tigers.

I remember flying to Cleveland a few times (don't ask why the company flew us from Det to Clev....) in these little twin engine turbo prop Convairs that seated about 15 - door to the cockpit open (not sure they even had a cockpit door actually), flying low and bouncing all the way there. Way more flying 'experience' than I ever needed.

yeah - In the NBA, trading for guys you don't want just to get the *cost* of their contracts is one of the weirder things in pro sports.

we can agree to disagree but I'm really curious as to what sense in which you think this is true. The NFL cap is $279M and every team is below it and the team furthest from the cap is $50M away, which is also drastically smaller range than across MLB teams.

and one of the things they do not share is that NFL teams hold their QB and mid market team baseball teams don't hold their stars. You can argue it's by choice, but when a significant percentage of baseball owners make the same choice and it turns out they are all pretty much in the same income tier, then calling it a 'choice' instead of a recognition of reality is... generous.

got to save ‘Murica from SOCIALISM! 😱

It's counterintuitive, but the arguments and lack of resolution in the old system may have produced frustration but it also drove interest. By comparison, the playoff is rigorous but boring except at the very end. The problem in the old system was that there still it had gotten to where there were too many bowl games no-one wanted to see, which is still true people want to see them even less.

I think it's pretty well established at this point that this is exactly where they are and intend to stay. Team building by trade/FA will stay at the margins of the main effort.

what you are talking about is the AAU - not amatuer athletics but the American Association of Universities. Traditionally, the B10 and P10 were AAU schools that played major college football. AAU member schools was a main dividing line between the P10 and B10 and the other D1 football conferences. The screw up was that Nebraska, which had long been in the AAU though not in the B10 or P10, got bounced from the AAU in 2011 *after* they had been invited to the B10, leaving some folks with egg on their faces. AFAIK Nebraska still hasn't gotten back in but supposedly is working on it.

#1 line -2 on the night. Never a good thing.

And the saddest thing is that the one good thing we could do in Vz, which is force Maduro out, is probably not even the way Trump sees it. He'd rather have a dictator there he can pressure to line his, Jared's and other ally pockets than see see a actual popular government come to power that would tell the US to go pound sand at that kind of demand.

yeah - the rule is really pretty simple - stay away from relationships with anyone on your direct reporting chain. I mean that still leaves 50K university employees if you are Larry Lonely so how hard should it be?

I don't mind a #1 for a player that is at least average quality and has at least 5-7 good years left - that's a good return on a middle round #1 if you had the pick. But it's worth noting what we are talking about here can be achieved at a lot less cost than Hughes would have been.

I don't believe this is objectively true. The stars of the NFL are mostly the QBs and teams are very successful keeping their star QBs - at least until they are no longer wanted! It does make it harder to keep a lot of expensive players, but that's what drives parity. But any NFL team has an equal shot at signing their most important player, and that is not true in baseball.

In the NFL the cap helps mid level guys move but gives each team at least equal chance to keep their biggest stars. When teams are up against the cap well payed good players teams don't need badly are cut loose and go improve other teams that have more need at that position and so are willing to use more of their cap space on it so it drives parity. In baseball half the teams can't compete economically to keep their stars so they end up the most mobile players and mostly to the same rich teams. Anti-parity.

If he thinks he's getting economic rights back in S America by force without keeping a standing army there he hasn't paid much attention to history. There probably isn't a Venezuelan alive that won't back even Maduro if it comes down a choice between that and US 'gunboat' diplomacy.

just a guess. It surely wasn't because we were getting much from Duren!

every dollar the Federal government spends on healthcare for ordinary people is another increment in the political necessity to start seriously controlling health care costs in the US. That's a big gravy train you are threatening with billions of dollars of campaign contributions connected to it. Now I'll grant you that is not an argument about the public's interest at all, but since when did that matter in modern US politics? Today it is everywhere and always about the campaign money.

I agree. They are finally near a turning point with the blue line corp. You have two excellent, one developing and one generally decent Dman. Get the third pair just to the point of "not outright bad" and that will be a big swing.

I think this is true, but in the NFL some of the teams that held that 'super' status have been GreenBay, Dallas (before the Tx economy exploded), Kansas City, New England. So while I agree with the idea that having era dominant teams that fans can get to get familiar with is good for a league, I don't believe it is necessarily true those have to be the perennially richest in a league or get there by poaching everyone else's players and that they therefore have to be the same teams for all time. Also, super teams that drive interest do it even better when stars stay put, and the current system in baseball is an absolute team continuity destroyer. That's a semi-separate issue than the pure economics but inter-related. Imagine if the basic agreement in the NFL had made it impossible for the Chiefs to keep Mahomes or NE to keep Brady

I've gotten to the point with Trump where I hope he lives long enough to see his name taken off every single thing he has polluted with it, and that will happen.

you need an old style line-printer to go with a LLAMA so it can spit out its results.....

now, can they still pass it whenever it finally comes to the vote or will Trump bludgeon a couple of them into submission before then?

also true. And of course the events that made what happened in East Europe possible when it happened were tied to the ones happening in Russia, which is a whole 'nother history. For a brief shining moment the Russian state lost its taste for brutal repression. Seems to have now regained it in spades however.