gehringer_2

HaHaHa. Any fool is safer to have the guns gone than to try and manuever his 50yr fat slow rear end, shaky hands and failing eyesight to 'protect his family' by trying to take down an assaultant who is younger, faster, is probably better armed and has all the initiative. Other than that, you go with that strategy. Good luck being the *maybe* one in 10 who end up lucky enough to come out on the better end of that confrontation. In the real world the facts are clear. You are far more likely to end up with your own wife or child or neighbor dead at the hands of your own weapon either by accident or loss of your own self-control than you are of ever taking on that scumbag immigrant. Those are real facts, not your Man-Boy fantasies.

Kreidler can't get well fast enough. The bloom is off Maton's rose. MLB pitchers have a book on him now. Sub 500 OPS since the middle of April.

but will he have to pay for his own blue checkmark?

Schoop as the PH was kinda waving the white flag, doancha think?

Damn - If you could guess that was going to be caught, Tork could easily have tagged up.

Lorenzen, Rodriguez and Wentz not a bad 1-2-3 for now. Between Manning, Skubal, Turnbull it could get to 4 guys better than Boyd. If you can get to where Matt is your worst starter, that's not a bad staff.

2nd pitch was perfect, the third one was on him.

Yeah - you start a LHH against Beiber - except that Maton is pretty much a pure FB hitter and Beiber had him a hole before Maton even left the on-deck circle.

Naylor doing at least as good a job hitting the buffet tables as the ball anymore...

do they spend enough on statisitics staff to have the data to support a lot of shifting? Like Rob said, how much is winning a couple more minor league games worth when it doesn't really contribute to player devel anyway?

who knows how long it will last, but Torkelson is one confident hitter right now.

BTW- Torkelson is 9 for his last 26. Probably the best week of his career.

PFFFFFT!

I've been cutting back one dimension at a time. First the B body GM wagon that carried the 4x8 with the gate closed. Then the short minivan that carried it with the door open, to the SUV that still has 48" wide but is so short I have to put 2x4s under a sheet of walllboard so the end sticking out doesn't break. But when this SUV goes I will be out of the 48" carting life. Any wall board in the future is going to be delivered.

ugly AB this time though. 🤮

Yup - Hostage taking seems to be standard playbook. But the commercial interests have to know it's a terribly counter productive economic policy. You can't do much business when no-one will come to see you.

Hmm- That's interesting, opposite of what I might have thought - On the assumption that close games are most often low scoring games, maybe in low scoring games the granularity of one run is what introduces the misfit.

I think the other dynamic at work here is that while everybody knows that everybody else is running intelligence under diplomatic cover, and it's tolerated, the level of tolerance of it has a lot to do with the perception of where the overall relationship is headed. From the time Mao passed, the basic outlook of the West toward China was that there was an evolution underway that was moving China in a good long term direction, and it's that hope that raises the tolerance for other irritations in the relationship that remain. Xi has put an end to all that. We now look out and the perception is of a China moving in the wrong direction. There isn't any light at the end of the tunnel anymore so decreasing reason for a US or Canada to tolerate old status quo petite aggressions.

I don't think SY is either. If pulling the plug last season told us anything, it's that he's willing to play a long game, and it looks like his base strategy preference is to build from the blue line out.

it might be interesting to test if a team's per game run differential variance corellated with the prediction strength of its pythag. It's easy enough to postulate a team where therere is a big drop off between the front and back of the BP, or who are strongly handed enough that they get shut out a lot by LHP for instance, so you end up with a disproportionate number or blow-outs and/or shut-outs, which in theory could make the teams pythagorean signal noisier than aveage.

I figure you more or less have to draft in pretty much the same ratio as the roster and it will probably work out in the end. Ptichers get hurt more, but hitters seem to be less projectable so you are going to lose more of them on their performance ceilings. Maybe the practical question would be just looking at 1st round strategy. Most everyone past the 1st round washes out anyway, but it is a reasonable question to ask if you should skew your highest picks toward or away from pitching - basically the question is whether your internal data tells you that your hitter projection uncertainty is less than your pitcher health projection uncertainty.

If you make them hard for the young to obtain, moderately expensive to maintain -(reg and licensing fees) and then put a buyback bounty on them you will start draining the supply and in a generation there will only be fraction as many out there as there are today. It took us 50 years to get where we are with guns, we cannot reject movement in right direction just because will take us a generation to get out of where we are.

yeah big question marks. Rodriguez is a solid pitcher but I don't think we can bank on him winning the Cy Young in a walk, which is where he is about now - and Manning's inability to stay on the field is looking chronic. OTOH Wentz is threatening to turn into a useful piece of a rotation and 50 IP at Toledo might bring Turnbull's command back to a serviceable level. So many questions. LOL -I know everyone is really down on drafting more pitching, but you don't anywhere without it either! You're never going to fill a 13 man staff purely via acquisition.

Wasn't A-Ray down in a FLA retirement community or something? Maybe father time got him. I do remember he occasionaly let his rightwingedness slip, but not often. Was Mr Krabs his avatar?

Congrats!