gehringer_2

There was a story the other day (ESPN?) about the Royals to the effect that they are working a program to try and improve their pitchers' health - one the things they are pushing is to get their pitchers to use more change of speed to their advantage - i.e. don't throw max effort all the time. I could only think of Skubal as I read that and wished it was something he would do. I've always tended to the belief that one of the reasons JV lasted so long was that he used his top end judiciously early in his career - always a lot of variation within his 4 seam fastball - though in a recent interview I saw, even JV himself has wondered whether he would be able to have the same success pitching the way he did when he came up if were coming up today.

maybe. Hide is relative term. Especially a business with as much real estate as Amazon. You can shift profits or losses into real estate holding entities, You can manipulate who gets charged what on property expenses and which div leases to which till the cows come home. Again, I'm absolutely not making any claims about Amazon here except to defend my skepticism that they could get away with a lot before anyone caught it . Standard reports and SEC filings just don't go into that level of detail at the individual facility or division level. I'll hold that almost any large corp can do a lot of things that no-one would notice or be able to figure out, and more to the point would be perfectly legal/acceptable but still obscure an accurate interdivisional reading. And in one important sense that's perfectly fair; an investor can only buy an interest in the whole company anyway.

LOL - my grandfather (about 1000mi east of italian), always sprayed down his driveway on summer days!

LOL. You could say the democratic party contains its multitudes. Hopefully some of them are dead.

Diversified companies have a lot of leeway in where and how they book expenses and overhead, what divisions carry debt and admin, real estate, investments, etc. If they are honest, they play straight, but it's naive to think they can't present a skewed picture if they want to and still be close enough within the rules. Just as an example the F100 I worked for for a while forced all their profitable divisions to carry expenses for top management pet project acquisitions. They had some very Milquetoast terms for it in the financial reports but it was basically a large interest expense shift.

I guess Hinch must be envisioning PH'ing for Torres against a RHP.

it bothers the majority of people, which is why the MSM media isn't actually in the MS any more and why its influence has shrunk to near insignificance.

yup - We can hope Torres puts up some big numbers, but C & 3B are going to be weak bats along with CF any day Riley isn't there.

True - at least not in the sense of what the normal rational person would call 'qualifications'. You certainly have to meet the bar on a number of criteria to be appointed by Trump, the rest of us just don't recognize any of those criteria as relevant to the jobs they are being put up for.

So they say. I always take statements about where a diversified enterprise *says* they make their profit with a grain of salt though. It's in Amazon's PR interest for people think margins are lousy in retail and that they are a great hi-tech cloud player. While I don't strongly doubt those things are true, they are so much in Amazon's interest for us to think that way that even if it weren't, they'd be moving numbers around to make us believe it. That's just a sad truth about standard US corporate ethics.

The thing Putin needs to be careful of is that no-one should ever trust or rely on Trump holding to any position. On some whim he is just as likely to reverse course throw *Puitn* under the bus and support Ukraine as keep on his current course. He is utterly untrustworthy, from any direction. It is the natural consequence of being a totally transactional person. Since he believes in nothing, since nothing outside himself is of any importance to him, he simply doesn't have any actually loyalties, commitments, or any of the normal character properties you expect a normal person to have. Putin may think he has a long term ally, for Trump such a term doesn't even have meaning.

Old Boy network I guess. All you ever hear from the old guard hockey commentariat is what a great guy he is.

Luck for us, e-tail retail is not like 2 nanometer semiconductor manufacture; barriers to entry for e-commerce is pretty low. If Amazon starts faltering in a major way, they will have plenty of competition nipping at their heals.

You will know if this real or only a PR gloss by whether a couple thousand people are let go.

Maybe under the old roster rules you let guys come up and get acquainted in Sept, but definitely not so much anymore.

boo-hisss!

Dodger stat page says Snell has only worked 4.2 innings in ST. Expect a short start?

and it's worse than that, because the way American corporate governance works - extracting every nickel quarter to quarter, US corps won't do what the Japanese did and plow those profits from a protected market back into building world class cars to sell around the world. Nope, what will happen is 1974 all over again - poorly built, behind the times tech, crappy cars in the us market. Coming to a dealer near your soon:

So, Diane?

Got a point there.

yup - when I counted the roster earlier I forget to subtract Madden and thought they still had one more guy to cut.

Stock market bouncing up and down almost every day driven by the administration's tariff plan de jour. It they had done some of this in an orderly manner....

I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but I'm tired of hearing about how close Florida or Tx might be. When the GOP loses one in either place I'll pay attention.

Petzold reporting that Chafin is going to go to Toledo and try to work his way back. I wondered if he would hang 'em up if he didn't make the team.

So I've got 13 position players: Dingler, Rogers Carpenter, Greene, Kreilder, Margot Ibanez, Baez, Sweeney, Keith, Torres, Torkelson, McKinstry and they still need to get the pitching down to 13.