gehringer_2

Alec Baldwin off the hook for now - charges dropped. Interestingly, some evidence apparently emerged that offered some support to Baldwin's contention that he never pulled the trigger. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/arts/alec-baldwin-charges-dropped-rust.html

I'll check it out.

there isn't much precedent in recent memory for a 'full-employment recession'

there was a lot of failure in the early experiences with Ti. The problem is Chloride, and the weird thing - and probably the reason it was hard to figure out initially, is that Ti is very resistant to sea-water and Chlorides of all kinds - at room temp. The trick is that if you have even a trace of Cl present and get the Ti hot enough, you're going to get a failure. Even the sweat from a welder's hands can do in a weld on Ti.

The underlying trend for stocks has a steeper slope than for bonds. A long time ago when I knew even less about it than I do now, I Fedelity guy in a class explained that businesses borrow money to make more money. The money they borrow is at bond rates, if their return on equity (basically refected stock prices) isn't better than interest rates, they are out of business, so on a very global view, stocks have to do better than bonds long term because they are always making investments with ROIs higher than interest rates. That overall result is separate from variance/volatility effects. But course individually, some companies make investments that don't pan out, they go bust and don't pay back their loans - so the higher return comes with more risk /volatility for any individual stock.

My recollection is that they were pulling the plug mostly to cut expenses, that they knew they were going to lose, didn't particular care. I don't remember it being a 'tank' that had a high pick as an objectve. I don't think the Tigers in those days had ever drafted well enough (not in the least because they would never pay top $ in the pre-allotment day) to even consider 'tanking' as a rational long term strategy to get better.

LOL. Actually I give SpaceX a certain amount of credit for changing the paradigm on vehicle development. Real engineering development always takes place as a balance between two extreme approaches - build it exactly right the first time, and build a bunch of prototypes, test them and learn from the failures. In rocket work, it's always been the first, either because you aren't going to test a Minuteman with a trial run on Moscow, or because you had one chance in ten years to catch the orbital mechanics of an outer planet at the right time, or because the design was going to have a man in the loop at a relatively early point in the development so the failure risk had to be driven down. The thing is that there is a point at which the process becomes so meticulous it's actually more expensive than just building and testing - and maybe blowing up a few prototypes. In an age where we don't need a man in the loop until very late in the process, if ever at all, the early designs don't need to be human safe. SpaceX figured this out and worries much less about blowing things up, and so far has done some good work at lower cost as a result. It's is ironic because today simulation capabilities have gone a huge way toward reducing the need to test so many prototypes, but even giving that, SpaceX argues you can't always assume that a build, test (crash!) program is going to take longer or be more costly than the cost of hitting perfection on the 1st build.

I think if you look at it in terms of analysis of variance, you can at least show that in the limiting case, streakiness is bad - as follows: if every team scored exactly their average number of runs per game (variance ->0), everyteam would defeat every other team with a lower average runs scored every game and lose every game to each team with a higher runs scored average. The team with the highest runs scored average would win every game - subject only to integer round off error because the averages would not necessarily vary by a full run. Introduce increasing variance into the averages, and the winningest teams can only increase their losses. At the other limit, (variance -> inf) it will be true that if every team has a huge variances in its runs scored, all team records will converge toward 50% no matter what the difference in the overal scoring averages because all wins and losses will end up being the result of random noise being larger than those averages, and thus will distribute toward uniformity. It would seem the real world has to exist between those two limits. (that fact that the exponent on the pythagorean win prediction formula is about 1.83 rather than infinity captures all this) Now while I take the argument above as pretty reasonable, the practical question is how much of the net variance in team scoring is temporal player performance variance vs the natural chance randomizing inputs in the game (non-uniform balls, bats, weather, fields, umps etc.,etc.) . In baseball we know those effects are big, bigger than in most sports given the geneally narrower disitribution between winning and losing records between baseball and say basketball or football. And as noted player streakiness is also averaged out within the team because there are at least 9 players contributing to offense each game. So while I think the directionality of the logical argument is clear - it's not at all clear what the level of significance to the effect is or how to tease it out with any reliability.

It's a conspiracy!

this goes back to the discussion the other day. Are streaky totals actually worth less than consistent ones? One on hand, it's absolutely true that you can only win each game once. If you have streaky players you will have situations were they combine for excess runs you end up wasting in routs. The counter point is that you have 9 guys hitting so one player's heat will normally be at least somewhat balanced by another going cold. Even there you will suffer some cost in terms of batting order optimization - though probably not much. And of course you can end up with the 2022 Tigers where everyone runs cold at once.......😭

That analysis could have been cribbed from Westmoreland in '67.

Wasn't Max a guy that complained hard when they banned SpiderTac? Guess he meant it.

Green is a plus defensive CF, which means even at a 700 OPS you are probably happy to start him. He's putting that up now at age 22 and still has plenty of upside to improve over his next 3 yrs and 1000+ PA. Could he burn out? Sure, any player can at any time. It's true Tork's situation is different. At 1b he has to produce more with the bat. BTW he shares the team lead in RBI. I don't know if it's fans everywhere or just in Det, but sometimes there is a real tendency to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Riley isn't Mickey Mantle, he's a bust!, Jerod Goff isn't Mahomes, bench him! You can win a lot of championships with a good depth of good players and zero superstars.

I think this make sense. You have to remember to separate the money from the masses when you look at the operation of the RW in the US. At the grass roots there is plenty of actual embrace of racism and what is effectively fascism - though the true believers surely don't even understand the term. But on the money end, it's still all about taxes and deregulation. The money people don't really like Trump, They know now that he brings too much risk and chaos. They don't really want to see everything come crashing down, they just want higher profits. Fox is run by Murdoch. An alternative to Trump that can win is at the top of his agenda right now. Of course he'll still take Trump's side if the alternative is a democrat with a corporate tax plan, but until then Fox will give GOP alternatives to Trump plenty of love.

Proposed MLB rule change: Any batter runner executing a cartwheel between bases counts for two runs if he/she subsequently scores.

Good for him. But the caveat with Candy is always staying power. He's has 20 hits in 18 games but 9 came in one 4 game stretch last week.

You just need more Flag lapel pins and Fox news in your life MB.

Desantis has a shot -- as long as there is still a chance Trump could be in jail...... .....

Hey!

Is "strong feel for the game" a euphemism for "no standout skill"?

Shoudda walked Ramirez!

You can see what scouts loved about Torkelson's power. Tork's swing reminds me of Trout in the way he holds the bat with both hands all the way through - sort of old school. But Trout uses more leg kick to generate his power. Tork put that ball over the bullpen while hardly picking up his left foot. He'll probably never hit like Trout overall - not many ever will - but the comparison of the power he generates with a similar swing but less motion shows you how strong he is compared to a very strong hitter.

As Dan might say, he's got a little pop in that bat.

He was trying to get to Naylor before bringing in Alexander, which would have been great if it worked. AJ just got a little greedy there. They've been on a role, I guess he hoped luck would hold.

that really wasn't necessary. Not sure what more kind of signal Hinch was looking for there.