gehringer_2

yeah - that hardly cuts it in a town that watched Chuck Daly mix and match nightly on the way to a championship.

The caution is that the bird in hand rule always applies - you never end up having nearly as many good options as you think you had when you let any >2 WAR player walk because you think it will be easy to do better. It just never is.

and Trout following in Cabrera's footsteps not only in being a generational talent but also in getting paid big dollars to be injured..... Which is a another reason that spreading your funds across many good players can work out better than putting huge dollars into one or two superstars.

unless you already have a really deep team like the Dodgers, I think that in baseball the same dollars spent on two good players will get you more winning differential than spending it on the best player that comes on the market. Or IOW, the economic are that being at the very top as a player is worth more to you in $ than it is to your team in wins.

QFT

some of these are pieces of a more universal college culture - stuff than transcends any particular teams or games.

yup - the progressives carried the Dem narrative through most of the Trump years but they are getting serious pushback from the more "mainstream" side worried about building out the coalition enough to overcome the structural advantages the GOP enjoys. The Dems have to win several % more than 50% to hold power in Washington and the realization that all the "demographic inevitability' talk that the Dems thought meant life was going to get easier has turned out to be BS. The progs don't like the idea they have to trim their sails to bring in people they don't like anyway, but the other side risks becoming nothing more than a replay of Bill Clinton's "GOP Lite" if they can't do better than Manchin's and Sinema's bottom lines. That push/pull is generating lots of heat currently. And since the Dems have lots of liberal arts majors in the tent on both sides, we get lots of words..

Of course we will probably never know which way Hinch is lobbying Avila on Correa. We can probably be sure he has no objections to him if we land him, but if we don't we'll probably never know if the reason was because Hinch asked them not to try.

There seems to be a divergence of opinion about him. I'll be curious to see who's right. I've said before I think he's a 'natural' baseball player in terms of having good instincts - but that and $3 will get you a Vente - he still has to hit.

that's sort of bizarre.

that is a simplistic reading though. I didn't really care enough about the incident to attempt a deep read about it, but the question is whether Hinch's GM had his back or not. My uninformed understanding is that he did not. If that is true, and I'm not claiming it one way or the other because I admittedly don't know, then it had little to do with 'weakness', but only with his decision to stay in the job or quit - which is a different set of questions - but still a valid set to ask.

FWIW the infection rate among UM students is 1/3 the background rate in Washtenaw county. Granted that's just one piece compared to the total including EL-HI. And mask discipline here is 100%.

did it? or did they just have a really strong recruiting base and series of good football coaches in Moeller and Carr (at least before Carr got bored). I know it's all the psycho-drama stuff that makes sports interesting, but TBH I think it all pales compared to the three things that dominate a football team's success: recruiting, coaching, and injury luck. Sure coaches use all kinds of material for motivation, but if if it's a good coach he'll make up his own new slogan if the one on the wall when he gets there doesn't do anything for him.

are we the only state with schools?

that's certainly a likely possibility but the figure is *supposed* to be 1st shots.

MI cases still creeping inexorably upward 3.4K/day over the weekend. Good news was 250K vax's last week. Best week since August. But case rates mid state are just ridiculous - 50/100K to pushing 100/100K in Ogemaw.

Can't I give this more than one like?

Thank-you Admiral McRaven.....

LOL - IIRC, when we moved to MN they still hadn't computerized the DMV, and that was 30 yrs after 1970! They were just working on it in the late 2000's. It was a strange outlier since in general government services seemed far better there than in MI.

If Paredes makes the team.

HaHa - I don't know - it would be an interesting battle in futility!

I generally agree with the career arc theory saying that guys that got good late will get bad early, but in Candelario's case, IIRC correctly there were some recurring issues with his wrist that may have been impacting his performance. He actually looked like a pretty promising hitter in his age 23 year and then kind of regressed. Was that injury or not? I'm not arguing it either way, the team has the records to better make that determination but I would put it out there as a factor to add to the decision matrix. Some guys hit their stride late for unique reasons other than the career arc paradigm - JD for instance.

Linkedin is terrible.

Yeah - Candy looks kind of frumpy physically. OTOH - Beltre was a good example of a guy where you'd be misled if you judged his defensive longevity based on the fact that he never looked cut.

I can't tell from your pick how tall the fence is. I'm guessing this is like a 4 footer? If so the deer could go over easily enough I wouldn't think they'd bother spending the energy to push. Coyote? Canids are natural jail breakers. If my perspective is wrong and it's 6ft+ then i could see deer. But it's funny, in our area - where there are a ton of deer, even chickenwire normally keeps them out of places. Our local deer don't seem to have much tendency to work past barriers.