gehringer_2

LOL - the 'development' loan trap looks pretty much the same whether the banker is the US, the IMF or China. China is going to find out the hard way the same things the West found out the hard way. Your leverage has a limit. Ultimately the clients will default and the only result of that will be Chinese bankers mad at the Chinese government. And poor people on the ground in those countries stay just as poorly off as before the cycle started.

Either last year or the year before Dickerson talked a lot about some test/study work done on how much the wind takes off the travel of a hit to the OF. IIRC, and I probably don't, but someone probably remembers, the number was something like a 10 mph winds shortens a fly by 20 ft. So it would be hard to say it never happened since you might get a 30-40mph wind gust. But the fluid mechanics at the stands will be complex - in fact in a double deck stadium like Tiger Stadium they directly block head winds as the ball gets closer to the fence. Might also sometimes have been that the wind was blowing from the LF corner and a ball the fielder thought was coming down to him got blown laterally further toward the RF corner and so catches the upper deck stands. I think this what was going on that Dickerson had been reading up on - it has been a couple of years: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2018/10/23/understanding-the-meteorology-of-a-fly-ball-may-help-baseball-teams/?sh=9f651a86a5c2

this is certainly true. To me that is the great weakness conuming your news from a passive device like a TV - it's too self-contained. If I see a by-line about something on the net - if I have any interest - I can easily find some primary source that lays out the facts and/or background with the minimal 'interpretation' that may give me a totally different understanding from that of the blow-dried Bob reading copy on Action News, or worse the arguing marionettes on cable. Not that the net can't be bad. Certainly you get as or more misinformed on Twitter as anywhere, but at least you have to option not to be.

You mean he doesn't support work requirments for whistle blowers too?

bingo

true enough - but it's a big bureaucracy - the ability to make fine level adjustments is probably lacking. Hard rules tend always to err to one extreme or the other. In the absence of rules you need judgment, and the freedom to apply it, which are antithetical to any bureaucratic ediface. Heaven forbid someone with authority goes off the rails or just makes a mistake, you end up in court, and USNews finds out about it before the rankings issue. 😱

The question is how much you can trust the OF's perception? I would guess that typically he is still moving back when he sees ball drop in the upper deck and probably mis-judges after the fact that *he* would have run into the lower deck wall before he got to the to ball.

HaHa, we have everything in this market economy worshipping society except effective competition? Who'da thunk? High profits should drive the entry of new competitors into high return industries. But the Corporate world has been so good at rent-seeking from governments that they have succeeded in lowering actual competition by the establishment of legal environments favorable to the biggest players to the point were competion disappears.

this is not the whole story on this issue. I read about NIH's issues with Wuhan very early in the pandemic and it was not in any RW media. It was all there in the new sections of sources like 'Science' mag. If you want to rag on the MSM for being illiterate and lazy on scientific issues, I won't quibble, but I think it's far more a matter of ignorance/incompetence than agenda. The problem is that anyone well trained enough in science to be reading sources like "Science" is probably working in science rather then being a journalist - because it pays a lot better! So that's a whole social/economic issue for a nation with a free press and scientific/techincal society to confront. In general the scientific/technological reporting on *all* questions in the US media is abysmal. Ask anyone who is relatively expert in a technical field if they ever seen anything in the MSM about their specialty that isn't rife with errors and misunderstanding and they'll likely agree they don't. Interestingly enough, way back in the day, one of the very brightest classmates of mine who was a science major ended up being the Science editor for Newsweek for many years, because 50 yrs ago that was a good gig. Not so much anymore apparently.

It's a sad ending to a career. When an old person declines fast, it's relatively easy. When they decline slowly, it not unusual to end up in a situation where by the time the need to make a decision is clear, it's already too late for the person to be able to self assess adequately to make that right decision. Then it gets ugly as the assessment has to forced.

In a vacuum, the ball would travel as a parabola, so it would not come down any steeper than it went up. Given the air, it slows down as moves outward so it does come down steeper than it goes up. Add head wind and it will get steeper still, but you'd have to posit a wind strong enough to virtually stop the ball's flight to get that steep a descent. This does happen all the time on infield pops, but they don't leave the bat with much forward velo to start with. I had a computer model for slow pitch softball pitch trajectories that I could probably modify for this but I don't really have the spare time to spend on it right now. But think about it this way: As an OF, how many balls have you seen that drop uncaught that don't still bounce strongly toward the wall or fence? Because that's the condition of a ball coming down that steeply - when it hit the ground its bounce would be have to be virtually straight up if it had no forward velocity left. It would drop in place like a uncaught IF fly.

this might be the single biggest difference between the Univeristy I experienced and today. When I was a student, attrition was sky high - I may be misremembering but I believe in the Engin School only 50% of admitted freshmen left with degrees. Of course this was the Vietnam era, and the college deferrment was enough to keep the incoming classes full enough they didn't care. There were little or no student services and nobody paid any attention to whether you were flunking out other than the people sending out out the probation letters. But today retention is a huge concern. Schools get seriously dinged on their rankings for it and losing the investment you made on a student you spent the effort to screen for admission is considered bad economics today, so attrition rates are a fraction what they were, and today an undergrad student has to work pretty hard to fall through the cracks, there are all kinds of people paying attention to when students start to fail, lots of rockets go off and resources are marshalled. Still doesn't always make a difference(!) but I always get a kick, and a personal sense of cognitive dissonance, from seeing a tenured prof in angst over a failing student even all these years out from my own experience!

'holier that thou' is one way to read it, but the institution has a vested interest in making transfering difficult - or at least as rigorous as what you experienced, because if they didn't, they aren't going to have any underclassmen. Whether insuring they do makes any difference to good policy for society writ large is debatable, but it's pretty easy to understand from the standpoint of the institution. In fact the freshmen I see also do a lot of course shopping outside the U and are always on the lookout for what the U will accept in terms of work done outside. That's just the reality today, but the U has to walk a line between being a PITA to the student body about it or risk becoming a degree mill for work done at other schools. However that all ends up affecting athletics is collateral damage of policies formulated without any particular focus on athletes.

Lorenzen does that also.

HaHa. And Chris Licht trying to turn CNN into FOX just when Murdoch's deciding to start moving to something else. Of course we will have to see what.

Of course for a ML baseball player, you could be slowed by an amount that was imperceptible to you or anyone else in 100% of ordinary life and it could still destroy you as an MLB hitter.

LOL - I had no idea it was a day game - glad I missed it I think. One the bright side - If Eduardo is going to have an off day it might as well be when they get one hit. 🤷‍♂️

Beck has a byline about Flores on the Tigers site today reporting that Flores had lost about 4 mph off his fastball earlier this year and they were tyring to figure out why. He's gotten some of it back but is still a couple of mph short of his 'normal.' I don't think that is that unusual for a young pitcher. Hopefully his finds his mechanics and gets back on the track he was on previously.

Maybe Madden? I wouldn't give up all on Flores yet - but it's sure nothing like it was a couple of years ago when Manning, Mize, Skubal and Faedo were all on their way up.

Hinch is channeling the ghost of Sparky Anderson. Sparky always seems to give guys off when they were in the middle of hot streak. I think he had a theory about it but of course it wouldn't make any sense to anyone else even when he explained it. Seriously - it's a LH pitcher. I don't know if I like the strategy though. Until recently Riley hasn't shown much platoon split - but if you don't let him face LHP, a platoon split will become a self-fullfilled prophecy.

Yeah - compare to Cricket bowlers - who do mess up their shoulders but not their UCLs.

and the other possibility - which would 'absolve' Tampa, and Avila too for that matter, would be if what has happened to Ausin is COVID related. Again - we don't know the details of his life history, but if this is something that he had no previous history with, some form of long COVID is as reasonable a speculative trigger as anything. IIRC he did have a pretty bad case didn't he?

yeah - Lakeland is bad. Dingler still has the team in HR from a rehab assignment.

When we lived in MN the suburb dividing line was our back fence. They had the newer (and mostly bigger) houses but our school district was one of the top in the state. Made for amusing real estate marketing.

Agree 100% - I don't think they make the trade if Riley is healthy. Of course looking back we can say with some evidence that Riley wasn't going to do much in his first few hundred AB so that pinning hopes on him last year would have been a mistake anyway and could have led to some worse decision later in the season if the pressure had not been removed by them falling completely out of contention. Oddly - in the long run it looks like it's going to turn out better that they were able to give a not very productive Riley (and probably Torkelson as well) full time AB in the 2nd half last yr.