gehringer_2

Tork has been worth his weight just in the number of bad throws he has already saved. I've only seen him lose one so far and Jeimer and Javy have both had him working hard most of the time. I don't know what kind of glove Pete Alonso had with the Mets last season but with the Cubs Javy had Rizzo at 1st. If he threw in Chi like he throws here, Rizzo must have saved him a lot of errors as well. Javy's not uncatchable wild, and clearly the arm is a cannon, but he almost never makes a straight at the chest throw to 1st either.

Going into today's game, the top 9 Tiger players by WAR (BR) are all pitchers. The 10th was javy.

these guys' bats should sort themselves out for us. All we can hope is that they don't fall in love with guys for mysterious reasons who don't produce over the ones that do.

I have a suspicion that we are at the front end (well the young are already there) of a long transition where serious news junkies start relying more and more on expert/think tank etc podcasting for in depth information and broadcast/stream/live reporting strictly for breaking news. The podcast is the successor of the function that Newsweek/Time etc once provided in the past for serious issue background. Even today, the old folks aren't watching Fox because of its news value. Fox is a service designed to give them positive emotional feedback all day long while they park their retired butts in front of a Telly. It's just the AARP version of the Hallmark channel. It just happens to destroy our politics as collateral damage. (whereas all the Hallmark channel does is make wives more discontent over their insensitive male mates. )

the funny thing with inflation is that one of the ways it can be self-accelerating is that people want to buy more because they figure out that their money is devaluing faster than what they buy with it. So there is some kind of transition between the initial resistance to purchase because prices are high, to a reluctance to hold cash. The psychology depends on whether people expect the inflation to last or not, ie. whether they expect prices to fall again. My guess is that most people understand at some level that this inflation is a transient dislocation created by governments trying to respond to the pandemic and not the kind of structural money supply imbalance we had in the 70's. So to some degree, in the present case, if people expect this end, they won't spend, and it will end sooner. The one area which is pretty detached from reality now though is home prices. They are not being driven by supply issues in China - they are just crazy. People trying to get in before mortgage rates go up is part of it, but it's still nuts.

On level it seems odd, but the other hand, this is not a merger/buyout *negotiation*, Elon already signed the deal, so the alternative take would be; "you signed the deal, you had your chance to do due diligence before you signed. We don't owe you anything. Nothing you find out now matters unless you can prove fraud. Close the deal or pay the fee."

screw 'em. There should be no special security for anyone in gov. Let them live with exactly what the rest of us get.

one run against Keller is a pretty sorry performance, but good to see Meadows hit a couple. Get him and Tork hitting balls in the same inning we might have an offense.

too interesting

soto feels a need to make this interesting.

yeah - That's as good as Fulmer can pitch.

OTOH, Masahiro Tanaka is still pitching in Japan and as far as I know never did have his UCL replaced despite a TJ diagnosis.

the pandemic drove all the monetary policy manager's around the world to pretty much the same lock step conclusion - expansive money supply was needed to prevent the pandemic from also creating depression. They all looked at the same situation with the same kind of knowledge base and made the same decisions. They over shot, so sure you can fault them, but I'm not going to be super hard on them. They know how to put this Genie back in the bottle and the other scenario could have been a lot worse.

But baseball fans are into statistics, and the numbers say when a guy can't pitch because his elbow is barking the likelihood of surgery is quite high. You don't need to see the MRIs to know the odds!

well maybe. Baddoo put up a 750 OPS and his K rate stayed under 25% the last month of last season when everyone had scouting on him and he had played a longer season than the ever had before. I put a lot of stock in how rookies finish a season. A lot of guys that hit with a bang and run up big numbers early often tail badly, and even if they finish with decent stats for a season, have weak 2nd halves as they are eventually exposed by MLB pitching. But Akil held up pretty well. So despite his lack of a standard dose of minor league seasoning I won't be surprised if he hits his way back to the majors quickly. Granted it's been a bad start though!

Funny, watching the games i get the feeling that Willi is on an upward track, but the hard numbers say that his last 50 AB he OPS'd 599, which is actually a drop from his previous ~60 AB at ~680. So he's actually tailing off. I guess when no one is hitting anything looks like something.

As I think about it, if I had Elon's money to spend and bought CNN, I would try something more along the lines of topical shows. 1/2 hour on Europe, 1/2 hour on education, 1/2 on medicine/health, Asia, State gov developments, and then also fed gov, etc. But keep each show in it's own lane and develop good topical expertise in your staff. Do a 5 minute headline recap top and bottom of the hour. Have a live news room that can pre-empt and take over if something big breaks. Again the problem is that might be an absolute feast for a news junkie, but it would be phenomenally expensive to produce those shows at a high quality level and would almost certainly fail economically. Still I'd love to see someone try it.

sure - the problem is that this approach is nearly impossible to fill 14 hrs of programming with. There is a reason that back in the day the networks did the news in 30 min. If all you are doing is straight reporting, that's about all there usually is that anyone is interested in. The alternative is go NPR or BBC and have people reporting on Botswanan high school curriculum reforms. That barely works on the radio, how may eyeballs would it capture!? 🙄 The cable/streaming broadcast environment creates an insatiable content vacuum to be filled. You only have two choices as a news org, spend a gazillion dollars actually sending top journalists with great reporting skills all around the world all day long finding hard to find interesting things to report, or paying a lot less money to people to talk about the same stuff a hundred times and the only way that works is if you keep raising the emotional level on each version you repeat. Which is going to happen in a country where all that matters is quarterly corporate results? There is a reason the industry is where it is. It's the organization and content structure that makes money. I really do wish CNN luck. I doubt they can succeed.

Good stuff. Though TBF, not many states were holding presidential primaries in '52 (If I count right on Wikipedia it was only 13). So getting the most primary votes in '52 might not have meant what it would mean today.

HaHa. Ingraham is so deep in to white aryan xenophobia/master race thinking that she's way beyond what the average person would even define as simple racial bigotry. The inside of her head would probably make a nazi eugenicist blush.

I agree with a lot of this, esp from the stand point that if it's that hard to get an error, if you are only going to count one type of error (off the glove) out of the whole universe of actual fielding mistakes, then you might as well quit because what is the point? I believe the only original value of scoring was that there was some belief at one time that earned vs unearned runs was important to understand. If the error standard being used doesn't serve that purpose, and I don't believe scoring today does, why still do it indeed? Today we look at pitchers peripherals/barrel/exit velo to get a much better picture of whether a pitcher is getting hit around than earned vs unearned runs. You raise another interesting point around BaBIP and 'if the batter puts the ball in play.' Again that may be a shift both in the way the game is perceived as well as how it is actually played. Today we tend to see BaBIP more as outcome of general exit velo and FB/LD/GB ratios instead of any per at bat intentionality on the part of the batter to "hit it where they ain't" so why deny a batter a hit on a hard hit ball because it found a fielder who hacked it rather than the spot between the fielders? There was time in the game when there were large numbers of slap hitters who did place the ball around the field, and even a very few more recently - Gywnn, Ichero maybe the last of the breed but it certainly has largely disappeared compared to 50 or 100 yrs ago. So that's another evolution in the game and that also shifts perceptions. I think the reduction in the numbers of errors charged speaks for itself. It is the scoring. At least for the last 60 yrs the ball and gloves have not changed significantly - (if anything the bigger OF gloves worn further down the fingers should be leading to more clankers - not less) and the quality of MLB field has been very good for a long time - though they do rake the dirt more often in a game than they used to. But OTOH there are fewer artificial fields that played even more true than there were 30 yrs ago. If anything you can argue that in our youth they didn't give enough credit for how hard a ball was hit on the IF when giving errors. I actually have less argument with the giving more hits on IF smashes than the state of OF scoring which is what I think has really become pointless.

I also have to think Hill and Cameron are likely to end up back in Toledo in favor of Baddoo and Greene. Or one will stay in Det if Baddoo doesn't come around. Two weeks ago I would have said W. Castro would be sent back down also, but to my admitted surprise is he is beginning to hit a little left handed and that might be enough for them to keep both he and Harold and send down a relief pitcher. Reyes may end up odd man out - or he and Willi a toss up for the last SH option.

this bit was interesting from Henning's article. This is Henning quoting Ryan Garko,

HaHa - maybe we have mutual friends. I'm not a big Taibbi follower by my impression is also that he has shifted to more radical positions, though not necessarily MAGA radical. To me just more a guy getting older trimming his sails less so we see more of what he probably thought all along that we might not actually have agreed with before if we had seen where he was coming from.

Could be, but on the other hand, I'm not sure what the value of the *number* of accounts is in any case. The fake/bot accounts can generate traffic far out of proportion to their account population, especially if we assume (with justification) that many of these accounts are operating as paid policy agents of foreign governments (or corps FTM) with the resources to keep them running full tilt. So whether it's 1% or 5% doesn't really tell you much does it? You need posting or RT ratios -or some kind of actual traffic data, and I haven't heard them talking about that - so to me an argument about a number whose relevance may be questionable in the first place is what smacks of a shadow play. But it's not my field of expertise at all - that's just my impression.