gehringer_2

Has to be odd to lose a year from two athletes in the same town to shin issues in less than 10yrs.

Goalies are definitely odd ducks. Really didn't see Ned collapsing like he has this season.

As Rob had oft made pointed reference to, the Ilitch org had a lot of grand plans on the table when Little Caesar's went in and so far almost nothing has come to fruition. Apropos of your question though, there were announcements last week that some work in 'District Detroit' is now supposed to begin. Skepticism is warranted. OTOH, there has been a lot of residential development around the ball park going up John R, and to the east, they are going to fill in I-375, UM/Gilbert/Ilitch are going to develop one of the blocks on Cass, the city's first large new building in years is rising on the Hudson's site, and recently the Penobscot Bldg ownership finally changed hands. The point of mentioning this is that at its nadir, virtually every old Detroit landmark bldg was in disrepair and declining. But almost all have now been brough back, the last three big ones were Book Tower, which Gilbert has put a ton of $$ into and is close to reopening, Michigan Central, which of course was reduced to a hulk and that Ford is completely rennovating, and lastly the Penobscot, which never got to the point of closure but where the ownership disregard had left the building almost unrentable. Having these major buildings back in productive service is huge for the city, not only because they generate tax revenue, but because as each one is rehabbed it decreases the overhang of low quality/cost rental space and bids up the value of the whole business district. And of course no-one was going to build anything new downtown until the empty buildings were full again. Its the life of the buildings in the business district that is the ulitmate pull for downtown residential development. The latter can't continue without the former. Iif nothing bad happens (e.g. another pandemic) I would think the area around the ballpark could be peaking in another 10 yrs. We can fairly bag on Ilitch for the lack of development around Little Caesar's so far, but TBF, the old Man's (and Ford's) commitment to putting the sports venues back into mid town probably had a lot to do with giving other developers like Gilbert the confidence to take on the projects they have. It all goes together. My memories of downtown stretch back to the glory days of the Sheraton Cadillac hotel, the Christman Village on the 12th floor at Hudsons - right through to going to school downtown in the 70's after the riot burnouts and the following years of collapse. It hasn't recovered to where it was in the 50's/60's, because Detroit will never be the richest city in the country like it was then (pretty close anyway), but downtown has come back a looong way from where it was at bottom. Unfortunately, the recipe for downtown is actually simpler than for the thousands of residential blocks around the city with only one or two houses left on them.....

This is correct - and to follow the logic, if a team can make enough incremental moves that are all in the forward direction they can certainly get pretty good without making any individually splashy moves, but it's a lot more work to do it that way. Like most things, money and effort are always somewhat interchangeable in the results obtained. Do the Tigers now have that kind of high energy high productivity management? Beats me, but I'm pretty sure that is the approach they think - or hope - they can get better with.

Ironically enough, this statement is transcendantly false in baseball. In the first 6 yrs of his career, Aaron Judge put up 26 WAR for a total cost to the Yankee's of ~18M. What is true in baseball is that *old* talent costs you money - lots of money, while young talent is unbelievably cheap. Ergo, it is quite possible to win in Baseball at lower cost than the other guy by simply having a younger team than the other guy. That is certainly what Avila was aiming for and failed to accomplish, and what Harris is also undoubtedly aiming for, and has yet to accomplish. In fact, any baseball ownership not intent on that same objective is probably not very smart (I see you, Texas Rangers!), which is why it is hard to do in the face of the active competition of 29 orther clubs (OK, 28). Still, I don't think anyone is going to stop trying.

Ooops. So it looks to me like these were the stacks from utility boilers that were retrofitted with a tail gas scrubber, which is what the the fifth untapered column appears to be. Once the scrubber was in service the stacks would no longer be in use. So they managed to take out the scubber. If you have seen the Edison Monroe plant over the years it used to have two very tall stacks there were taken out of service via replacement with shorter cyllindrical srubber towers in a set up similar to what this appears to be.

I suppose there is risk in that Elmer is unfinished and will make mistakes, but he contributes to puck possession in a way Zadina, Suter....etc don't, so I would be willing to play him in front of them.

also a very good point. Though I am old enough to be at higher risk, my health and pulmonary fitness is such I probably was not. I also did the full routine of the 1st 4, then got COVID anyway (hanging around college students will do that....), but also very mild, so am also giving it 3-4 months before I go for the currently available booster.

That's a small OF, he might end up their CF.

Revisit this post in March when the budget is actually committed and you see what it bought. At this point you're dumping on the shopper while he has just pulled into the mall parking lot. The critique may be justified by the eventual outcomes, but at this point it still just guesses about events that have yet to happen or not happen. If you are skeptical about Harris that's fine, but you could say that in one line and save the rest of the typing.

I will certainly grant Biff's point that if you were young and healthy with good lung function and no co-morbidities, COVID was very, even very very unlikely to kill you. This was the case from the beginning. But again, that misses the concept of trying to keep yourself well so that the people around you who are at risk are thereby protected. In a society with no sense of social cohesion or sense of responsibility to one's neighbor's, that's how you play. If that is the society you want. Also granted that by the time Omicron got here, the infectiousness of that strain was so high that even a good vaccine couldn't prevent spread, but that's an after the fact argument - the vaccine did limit spread before Omicron, which was generally less severe, and which arose after most fatalties had occurred.

and if Doctors are to be believed, most them were unvaccinated. I suppose the entire US medical establishment could be conspiring to lie to us.....or not.

If that's what you think it was supposed to be, you either didn't listen or listened to the wrong voices. A vaccine is a tool, not a be all or end all, and as far as vaccines though out history go, the Covid vaccines worked damn well. You couldn't even make an intelligent guess at how many people early in the pandemic - when the strains were most virulent, did NOT get infected because someone they came into contact with had gotten the shot. It's the height of some kind of anti-intellectual hubris to look back after the fact at a pretty substantial scientific feat of prevention and blow it off exactly because it worked. But as Rod might say: carry on with your bad self.

Wings get a point. Suter is the worst defensive forward on the team. For a big guy, Sundqvist spends a lot of time getting knocked down. Berggren ready for more ice time. Daniels said Soderblom is on the ice today at GR.

Yeah - I think a LOT of people have gotten a good way out over their skis for the Lions to be favored in this game. It's the NFL and 'any given Sunday...' and all that, but I still don't see the Lions being favored.

Of course ironically enough, the critique of many Christians of many other Christians is that they too easily compartmentalize their faith.....

LOL - more than 'some' I would say! Unless your memory reaches back that far you probably can't imagine how straightlaced things were then. Remember the Beatles were originally attacked for 'long hair' in early 60's when they were barely wearing it over their ears. In 1968 we were literally only a couple of years past it being 'controversial' for grade school boys to wear jeans or tennis shoes to public school in Detroit - had to be slacks and leather soled shoes. You played the National Anthem with a band/orchestra or sang it acapella and sang it straight - period

there is very little reason to take any public display of patriotism seriously as 9 times of 10 it's just another grift.

Right. Basically the three - Harvest, Spring and Winter Solstice celebrations go back in multiple places as far as anything you can call human farming culture. Hadn't heard the 'Mithras' title but "Saturnalia" is also a well known name of solstice celebrations from old Rome. No doubt that when Rome became Christian the easiest thing to do was re-appropriate existing cultural habits with new religious interpretations. The idea of the re-interpretation of old rites into new paradigms is as fundamental to practice in Christianity as the Passover->Easter connection.

If you don't see the difference in how you approach the analysis of each shooter, that's a YMMV, I'm not going to argue it with you. Then again, I guess I don't really see what what the point is of the complaint about how things are classified. If your complaint is that crime related murder in Chicago is too easily accepted I won't disagree, but WTF, the dirty truth is that mass shootings are accepted just as much. Sure there is more press and hand wringing about them, but the actual net social inaction on both is about equal so I'm not going to give American society any credit for its 'thoughts and prayers' on the one while it still sits on its ass on both.

Alternate history is always up for grabs because who really knows? I guess the inverse view would be that maybe the anchor of a star pitcher leads to different management decisions, though with Monaghan that's probably assuming too much, but then again, a star pitcher could have produced a different dynamic around the cost/sale of the franchise - maybe we never get Ilitch ownership?!?

and as always, the disclaimer that the complete rendering should be: "down to one pitch and not named Mariano Rivera"

True, you can't ignore years of control in the value proposistion, but purely on a pitching bases Joe was probably a better pitcher overall last season than Soto. Now maybe we can say a lot of Soto's blow-ups were in non-save situations that Hinch was brave/foolish/stubborn enough to have put him in, but just by the eye test, when a guy has lost his breaking ball and is down to basically one pitch, his results, even if good, are on borrowed time.

It makes sense from the standpoint that they are events that at least possibly have different antecedents and solutions and thus can reasonably be separated. Certainly the guns are a common factor to all of them and all can/should be treated together as foder in discussion/policy around guns, but once you pan out past the immediate issue of the weaponry, the antecedents of murders commited as part of street crime - particularly those related the illicit drug trafficing which is basically profit driven crime, and those of the crazed gunman, where the motivations are deeply personal and possibly pathogical, diverge pretty completely. Thus separate classification on that basis seems logical.

It's not even much of an 'always.' As I have the story it started during WWII when the country was at all out war and there was a lot of question about whether the games should even be played and half the players had gone off to serve. War ended, the habit stuck but the underlying reasons were gone. At that point it did become mostly a 'commercial' exercise in several ways. So does someone want to claim the state of patriotism is any better today than it was in 1940 before the anthem was sung at games? Crimony - we have the leader of a major party talking about tossing the Constitution while wrapping himself in the flag. What kind of faux Patriotism does that represent? GMAFB.