gehringer_2

I'm sure some are more than others - which is the problem. But you also see umps not give away the outside and it's the same catchers behind the dish, so there is certainly an ability level to not being conned.

Newspapers used to make their money on want-ads, which had nothing to do with the news either, so maybe appropriate.

Haberman has not been the NYTs finest hour - but if IRCC, she started out as a freelancer - another symptom of a system making choices without money to back them. I'm fine with people lobbying the Times to change their coverage - I think a lot it has been silly, breathless, vapid, but people do have to remember that the bottom line matters there as much as at Fox, they write what sells to their readership. If you are selling writing that is always the bottom line.

Framing may matter at the the top/bottom of the zone, but any umpire worth his salt should not be influenced by where the mitt ends up inside/outside - he should have the line of the pitch judged before it's in the glove and it's mostly the outside pitch that umps are giving away - so I don't really think it's framing. I agree framing probably makes life harder for the ump, and when they first started doing it I remember saying the umps should tell the catcher that if he has to move the ball after catching it I'm just assuming it must have been a ball. That would have put an end to framing before it ever got off the ground. Water under the proverbial bridge today....

I guess the Times can view itself as having certain public service obligations - but they also have to stay afloat in a business whose economic model has pretty much collapsed in a generation. At 50,000 ft it's a little unfair to say newpapers have some greater obligation to political outcomes in a system that won't even make websites pay them for their content. The NYT has a reader base that knows they aren't going to vote for Trump, don't really care about him, have already dismissed him and the need to know anything more about him than they already do. If those are the people paying your monthly bills, those are the people you are writing for. And it's a false premise anyway. The low information voter, when they finally do start paying whatever attention they decide they should before they vote, is most definitely not going to be subscribeing to the NYT in any part of that effort.

It's quite possible that the Tigers approach to hitting can't work for Javy and on the wrong side of 30 he can't change - so he's is caught between trying to be a good trooper and do what his coaches want him to do because they think it will help him, and the fact that he's a pure reaction hitter and has to just clear his head and swing away. Plus the reality that with that long swing he may have been doomed at 30 anyway as soon as he lost a few milliseconds off his reaction time, whether he wants to change or not.

I don't know Hinch's dynamics in a this kind of situation. From my observation over the years, most players end up coming down on the Magglio side - you have to ease back and stop pressing - stop trying to "do too much" to break a slump, but Hinch has a level of subliminal intensity about him - which in most cases is probably a big virtue for him, but that make me wonder if doesn't put more pressure a young guy like Tork playing for him, even if he doesn't mean it to. For instance, does he have that gift for getting guys to loosen up that Leyland had - which can help when a player is slumping.

There was a lot of public push back over Afghanistan, but hard times after the Soviet collapse and 20 yrs of Putin have created a different Russia from that one. But that is not to say Putin cannot drive Russia to collapse. The problem for the West is that total collapse will not be a good outcome, you want the regime to collapse before the country does - not so easy to see the path to that. The West's strategy is based on the Russian army collapsing eventually - and any armed service will eventually, but of course that requires Ukraine not to collapse first. It's purely a political economics question. Modern warfare is foremost an economic battle and the West's resources dwarf Russia's, but Russia (well at least Putin) balances that by being willing to put all their resources into the fight while the West wants to win on the minimum required investment. Missing on that calculation is where disaster lurks for Ukraine.

this bothered me though: this was Tork, quoted by Petzold last week. I don't think you can give away any AB where a pitcher can hit his spot 3 times. That's a solid recipe for only winning games against the worst pitchers. Sure, you hunt zone when you are ahead in the count, but you have to start adjusting your approach from 0-1, at two strikes you've given the pitcher too many ways to get you out. And if you watch the Tigers, they seem to fail on an inordinate number of AB where they are up 2-0, because they are looking for perfect and pretty soon they are 2-2 and then out of the AB. Your BA when you get to 2-0 should be huge. And it's especially dumb for Tork, because he has the power to "do damage" just fine on an outer third FB (IIRC, 6 opposite field HR last season) if he sat on one at 0-1 when he *knows* that is where he is going to be pitched. But so far he won't. The 'approach' doesn't even give himself enough credit. Everything you do in a AB has to be directed at not getting to two strikes, esp 0-2. All the numbers tell you that. If the Tiger's are willing to go to 0-2 to swing the bat at a strike, that is why they are an inept offense.

I have to think the wide zone is driving down scoring. I don't think is was any accident that in the Yankees series there were almost no runs scored in the two games where the K zone was 30" wide while the one game with a normal zone generated a dozen runs.

is the sclerotic nature of Russian command and control going to be able to adjust to improving resourcing of the opposition, or are they in effect going to get rope-a-doped - committed to a set of objectives that will become untenable?

one would like to think an international kid who's been a pro pretty much since he was 16 would have a better chance of holding steady mentally. The thing is, even if he has his head on right - that doesn't mean he may not have holes in his swing and if he does MLB pitchers will find them. The second hundred PA will tell.

apparently Foley has been rejuvenated as well.

and Wenceel keeps hitting.

yeah - that was good to see. Maybe just a little 'dead arm' syndrome he worked through.

you never know, but one difference is that despite the way Edwards treated his wife, he was a more appealing personality than Trump. I think the other aspect is that in the Edwards case the prosecution spent too much time on the affair - trying make Edwards seem like jerk I guess - instead of providing the evidence that he actually broke the law.. This prosecution has a lot of good black and white evidence - does not appear to be making that mistake.

this is the functional shift in approach that Biden is attempting. They recognize that the political difficulty of raising taxes for new transfer payments is pretty close to impossible. It's going to be a big enough lift just to increase the FICA cap to put Social Security back on a better footing in the near future. So instead do everything you can to push wages for the lower half of the economy. It's easier to build winning political coalitions for those things. Even if it is somewhat inflationary, increasing economic equity is simply more important to holding togeher the fraying social cohesion in the US than another 0.5% on the inflation rate.

Maeda, now Miller. Seems Foley is likely to be next. Were we talking about trading pitching for bats in another thread? Silly us.

'burned' is a the correct term here, not 'wasted', that is unless you are a Minny fan...

remember how quaint it was when they made the effort and paid professional writers like William Safire to compose sophisticated dog whistle rhetoric? Good Times......

The two RBI walks he worked were impressive - he doesn't easily lose his nerve.

FWIW - there was one story that said the thing he did to his shoulder sliding into the base was going to take 2 yrs to heal "completely", so possibly a continuing deficit there - at least coming into this season.

Hinch probably will, but I would not - I still want to see him use the more of the field and be more aggressive on FBs middle to outer third. Even Gibson complained today that Tork takes too many strikes.

Interesting. Have assumed so far that it was mostly about Keith's move to 2b blocking him there.

any kind of background noise at all about trying Jung at SS? It seems like a if a guy can play 3B he's got some arm, and if he can play 2B he's got a little glove, and your system's need for a SS is close to dire, it might be worth at least an audition.