gehringer_2

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.

Sure. I guess the way I would put it is that you can certainly 'lose' any individual trade in terms of the outside view - say absolute WAR generated by the two players in some number of following years, but still have won the trade for yourself if the the player you got filled a need and the player you gave up didn't. But OTOH, I think it's also true that globally, you can't continue to give up overall roster strength on too many trades before you find inevitably that you are failing to make your team better overall. Obviously considerations like this take a long time to play out completely but that's what I would take as the generalities.

I think what Altlanta is banking on or at least hoping for is that given that Joe was 27 last season, which is about the time that guys who are wild should settle down if they are ever going to, maybe the corner he turned in '22 is going to stick. Of course if it does they still have to sign him and if he has another good year that could be costly. Honestly, I think this a trade that could go either way, but that's fine - we have more arms than we have guys like Malloy so it's one of those risks probably worth taking. I'd really love to know if Soto was in the conversation in this deal and if Atlanta preferred Joe.

Yup. Didn't see last night but for as much as I've questioned what Walman is bringing I still would rank him above Lindstrom or Hagg. I suppose Lalonde has to get everyone in a game once in a while. Of the group of also-rans from last season Osterle seem to have separated himself from the pack a little - or maybe Walman's hidden talent is that he makes the guy playing with him looks better than he did last season. 🤷‍♀️

meh - lions are playing with house money as far as the Rams pick goes. They won the last freaking SB, anything in the top half is more than you could have hoped for in Sept..

I was never impressed by Beckman or his skills. I found the way he tried to ingratiate himself into UM football tradition that he had been no part of pretty cringy. You hang around it happens by itself, you can't appropriate for yourself. Marked him as grasping climber type - which dovetails with him gunning for Ernie.

I don't think Sinema had much choice if she wants to be able to run for re-election. The AZ Dems have come to hate her - she probably couldn't get the nominination so she needs to try to build an independent brand. Probably too late for that now though. At least Bernie has an ostensible position that give him an excuse to separate.

Keystone drops 14,000 barrels of oil in a Kansis creek. Nothing to see here. That line in the Great Lakes? Why worry? Here, have a stock option. You'll feel better. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/keystone-pipeline-shut-after-oil-spill-into-kansas-creek-2022-12-08/ 7 spills in 12 yrs of operation. Yeah - I know the US corporate and legal system isn't structured to do it, but people should be going to jail over shitty operations like this. That's the only way to stop it.

But arms dealing is not exactly parallel to the Italian mafia. The mafia has roots, persistance ,family, geography that all stay behind when the don goes to the slammer. When he comes out, a lot of those same people are in a lot of those same places and families still have standing. The arms business is more transient and transactional plus the production and tech landscape is a constantly evolving target. Bout may eventually get back into the business because that is what he knows, I'm was just saying he's not going to be any kind of immediate asset

if we had one of those.......

CSX stock is held 75% by institutional investors. Seems unlikely much pressure came from those quarters. I suppose you never know. Does Vanguard has an ethical investing ombudsman?

then again, people act like Bout is some kind of prize for Putin to get back - maybe, maybe not. He's been out of circulation for 10yrs so it's not like he can show up tomorrow and start making it rain for Putins army by Tuesday. Otherwise he's just another creep.

This is a bigger thing than I think most people credit. When you have two people in the booth, they spend a fair amount of time talking to each other and when you can't tell them apart, 'conversations' don't make any sense. Add that to the fact that you often are listening to a game in a noisy environment like a moving car or while you are working around the house, it's just a bad recipe. Whatever thier individual qualities, whoever paired them was a sonic idiot - a person with no actual 'ear' for sound at all.

you knew this was going to be plead down - and it probably would have been for any ordinary citizen whose hue was light enough.

Let not forget that Bout has also actually served 10yrs already.

I don't remember if it was Smith or Day who in an interview prior to last season estimated OSU's NIL spend at $13M

The world is full of corporate types who meet the phrase "born on third base and thought they had hit a triple" who inherit a good situation and start to believe it was their own briliiance and decide to remake everything in their own image. Straight line from A->B where B=Fail. TBF, the industry probably saw the writing on the wall that AM radio was dying long term and were desperate to do something that might change that but picking the best thing in their portfolio to screw up wasn't the move.

exactly!

Hard to have lived through the Monaghan era in A^2 without concluding he was a total jerk. Was very sad when he bought the Tigers. He was sort of like the precursor to guys like Elon Musk. Worked really hard at one thing and did it well and immediately thought that made him competent in a bunch of things he knew nothing about, but he came from less educaitonal background than Musk so it was worse. Then he went a bit off the deep end with his Catholicism. Luckily that more or less led him to removing himself from the public scene - at least in MI.

Bo may have been 'beloved', but I think there was already scepticism about Bo going to the Tigers because he already hadn't seemed much of a fit as a manager in his short term as UM AD. (lots of people were left scratching their heads over his treatment of Frieder- he reaction was frankly ridiculous- it's not like it's some big sin for a coach to take a new job - Bo seemed to have forgotten he did it himself a few times!). Fans can love a guy and still believe he is in the wrong place with the wrong ideas.

How many will actually find landing spots?