gehringer_2

yeah - I think election polling in the US is still largely missing the boat on the issue. The hardest question in US politics is not figuring out who supports whom, it's figuring out who is going to vote. I think the swings in voter participation are larger than the opinion swings in the electorate. For a long time we have had this model where there are dems, repubs and indies, and changing the minds of the indies swings the election. We all tend to talk in those terms all the time. But what I think may be more true is that you have dark red and pinks and you have deep blues and powder blues. And what really swings elections is not whether you flip any reds to blue or vice versa, but how many of the pinks and powder blues show up to vote. It's not a matter of changing minds, it's a matter of changing motivation. Understood that way the great success of the GOPs cultural fear politics makes sense.

Hill hasn't hit a lick in Toledo. Thinking that ship has sailed.

I wonder if the Tigers 'discovery' of spin has contributed to this. In Fulmer, Faedo and Jobe they opted for guys whose breaking balls were their calling cards, and conventional wisdom has always been that spinning breaking balls is what is hard on UCLs or in Mize's case the split, another high strain pitch. Obviously I'm concerned for Jobe.

I think this is pretty accurate. The danger is that Al has done the worst when he's been under pressure to 'do something' at the deadline - as in JV and JD. I'm afraid he is going to end up making a poor trade out of desperation to be doing something.

Cook is always skeptical about apparent Democratic strength. And he's been largely correct.

the thing is, trading Skubal at this point is probably pointless. Trades by nature start out as a zero sum proposition. The way they provide value is you either find a team in distress willing to overpay or you deal from an area of excess on your team to fill a gap. Starting with the 2nd first - there was point this season went it looked like the org did have excess starting pitching depth - but that is long gone now. Faedo, Manning, Mize, Wentz were all possibilities at one point who are questionable now and Turnbull's return to effectiveness is also open. So trading Skubal leaves as big a hole in the pitching as the position player that returns is going to fill, unless 2) you can rob a team in distress. But the truth is that in recent years teams have pretty much refused to play the 'all in for this run at the playoffs' game as much as they used to, plus by nature that is a scenario where the team that is willing to overpay - at least in theory, wants to do it in prospects since moving their established players runs counter to the aim of making a run. So there you are back to the rebuild paradigm. I tend to think they are stuck. Producing present tense net improvement in a very low value roster through trades is very hard unless you are dealing your own prospects a la DD. Al had the right idea 5 yrs ago - you rebuild through the draft supplemented by free agency. He was not wrong, he just hasn't executed. Pivoting to a strategy that probably won't work just to change things up isn't going to help that.

in that sense true, but my meaning was "not a war we decided to start" - as in Iraq.

Yeah - big swing. But I don't think he swung at anything as bad as some of what Javy has swung at, but then again, he wasn't facing an MLB quality slider either!

I've thought Harbaugh was a nut ball since he was a student, am I only allowed to say "What a nice guy - but gee, I do disagree with him a bit"? Criticism of what a person believes is by nature 'personal' so my question is where is your proposed line in this case? Clearly advocating university action against him, doxing etc, crosses the line, but I would say that in political criticism 'snide' is absolutely in play as it usually related directly to implied hypocrisy. And it's also rich in Harbaugh's case who has always been so quick with snide criticism of other coaches and opponents.

I'm as curious as the next guy regarding what the Tigers will do at the deadline, but my base assumption comes from the other direction than the Rosenthal story. "The rebuild is over, we aren't moving our young players for prospects..." I think that still applies in the minds of the Tiger front office. My guess is that for good or ill, they still believe in this team and are writing off this season's outcome as the confluence of a bunch of terrible luck and "wait till next year." That being the case I'm not going to be surprised if they don't do much. I'm actually not sure what you can do when there isn't a single player on the roster to 'sell high' on other than maybe Greene, or Carpenter and/or a reliever. So I tend to agree with the idea that the BP is where a move(s) may come. Plus Al has shown a propensity to trade relievers in the past.

Rotation may not be looking so bad by Sept - maybe Skubal, Manning, Rodriquez, Brieske, Turnbull. Of course by the time they are all back to take one final turn in the rotation before the season ends, they will have already lost 95+ games.

If you wonder why the gentle rustle of the river water seems to be getting louder, that's the waterfall you're rushing toward....

"Unintended" is both incorrect and too generous. Predictable, understood and judged irrelevant is more accurate.

They shouldn't, but is Chris I. willing to do the homework to find a guy he has to look for? We can only hope. I'd still put the odds higher that he just tells Avila to hire his replacement and move upstairs. Path of least resistance.

Also - another mansplaining for his absent wife.

Housecleaning can't come soon enough. Sadly there is no "Yzerman obvious" candidate to ride to the rescue.

well, at least the coup de grace came quickly.

why do managers and coaches always have to get ahead of themselves? You have a reliever that hasn't come back out a 2nd time since June 5 (when he lost) and a game you might be able to win and you can't help changing it up.

well, he didn't

you can't make it up

the hybrid power plants are supposed to generate around 1000hp. The cars have a minimum weight (by rule) of about 1700 lb so 1.7 lb/HP or 60 hp / 100 lb or less depending on how much the car is over the min weight. LOL - I remember when if you got under 10 lb per HP you thought you had a hot car 🚙.... 🚓

If the super conferences are not more selective in who they admit, they defeat their own purpose. You end up exactly where we already are with divisions within the super conferences that will look suspiciously like the old conferences. Keep in mind the prime economic driver is the schools that generate the ratings not wanting to share with the neer-do-wells. More total money nationwide means nothing to the powerhouse schools if dilution to more schools means less money for them individually.

I had actually wondered the opposite - whether the Chief leaked it as means to show the reaction to Kavanaugh/Barrett in a kind of jujitsu This reporting argues the opposite of course. Not sure how a leak would solidify Alito's position other than to show 5 Justices has voted that way so a different opinion in the end would prove some kind of 'manipulation', but would that have mattered to Roberts? IDK. Not to mention that Alito's mind is such a morass of ideo-religious illogic that trying to find rationality in his opinions or behavior is probably futile.

PR move purely. This is one of those things which is taking advantage of the Public's innumeracy. 20M barrels is about 1 DAY of supply. That's not nothing, but's really not much either. It seems like a huge number, but only because people don't have any clue about the actual scale of many of the things they regularly talk about. If you can do something trivial and get credit for doing something "HUGE!" then why not?

OTOH, he's probably bitten off more than he can chew this time which means this is possibly the optimum time to stop him decisively enough that he either a) burns up his military enough to neuter himself, b)burns enough support inside Russia to fall. If the West fails to take of advantage of this opportunity the next time the strategic situation may be far less favorable. There might not be a large strong population ready to undertake the fight, he might have learned enough not to make the same tactical mistakes again, the Chinese may strengthen his military tech to where the Western weapons differential won't be as decisive. It seems naive to think Putin's malignancy will in anyway abate if the outcome is a loss of 20% of Ukraine and a temporary military stalemate. The 'risk of everything' is inherent to Putin's existence as leader of Russia and he will continue to leverage those fears against us until he fails sufficiently, or he dies. And in the latter case there is no guarantee his replacement won't be as bad. Does this have to end with Ukraine whole as of status quo 2013? I don't know. But it should end with Putin's army clearly and unambiguously defeated at least to where it's the Russian side that is suing for peace. Plus, for once, this is not a war of our choice, it's Ukraine's war of necessity, and after all the times since 1953 that we engaged in conflicts of choice we started for the wrong reasons in the name of people/cultures who in the end weren't interested enough, there seems something unseemly about the idea of now failing to support Ukraine in a fight they do desperately want to win and when they are fighting much more for the ideals we usually only claim to fight for when our real reasons were oil, or political ideology or other economic expediency.