gehringer_2

its the ultimate irony. For millennia we used things like gold that were hard to get and yet quite easy to keep (very physically stable and reworkable) to stand for the value of other stuff we wanted to trade so we didn't have to carry bushels of wheat around. But it never worked all that well because the price of the gold or silver or whatever, kept changing its intrinsic value (e.g. every time a gold find flooded the market with cheaper gold) and when that happened it screwed up everybody's economy. And there was no way for money supply growth to match economic growth so growth was often inhibited. But that's the way it stayed, right up until the 20th century. Then finally some clever people figured out that you can just print dollars, and as long as you control the supply, it's value won't bounce around everyplace. The economy saw that it was good, and that was the creation of 'fiat' money. Now, sometimes the people trying to control the supply didn't do the best job and the economy ping ponged from inflation to recession, but decade by decade they tried to learn to get better. How much better is an open question but the point being there is group of people out there trying to keep the dollar as stable as they know how. (and getting a lot of flak for being too slow to have caught the current inflation before it got off the ground.) But all was not joyous in paradise. Some people thought that the government was controlling the value of money to evil purposes and pined to go back to some material standard like gold, despite all the problems inherent in that. And some people just couldn't accept the idea of money with no backing. But they never got much traction. Then came 2009 and the crash. And a bunch of programmers decided that the crash was caused by the fact that the banks 'controlled money.' Now this was a misdiagnosis because the problem in the crash was not instability in the value or origin of money, but in its use (reckless credit and derivativization) but be that as it may they decided that what the world needed was money created by computers under some kind computational distributed model were no-one had control. They would free 'fiat' currency from it's oppression by government and bankers and somehow market magic would take care of everything. But it turns out that fiat currency only works exactly when there is someone, like the Federal Reserve or Euro Bank, actively trying to manage the value of a currency. In it's absence it's value becomes a pure speculation and just goes anywhere, and that is what crypto now is. On top of that, the programmers' dreams of block chain tech have also crashed because the 'ledger' (the bitcoin or other cypto database) quickly became too big for transactions to be executed at reasonable cost (which has to be damn near zero in the everyday economy). The cost to clear a single bitcoin transaction today is in the 10s to 100s of dollars depending on too many variables for anyone to contemplate when they are in the line at Krogers. So it has failed both functionally as a medium of exchange and theoretically as a stable store of value. And Bitcoin even fails as an environmental scourge because mining bitcoin is pointlessly generating untold tons of CO2 the world doesn't need as computers churn recalculating the encryption of the ledger. However, the market loves a good speculation - especially with a high tech gloss and a story so complicated it can keep people confused and worried about FOLO, so onward it goes. And Etherium thinks it can transition to a new gig by adding NFTs to its blockchain to keep it going for them. All the while the power to control these 'currencies' is concentrated into smaller and smaller circles as the cost and resource requirements of mining goes up, failing even their initial theology of a system too distributed to be manipulated. The system insures each crypto quickly and effectively generates its own oligarchy. Moral of the story, the nerds are no better at saving the world than anyone else, but clever people can always find another way to get rich.

true enough, but when it come to the anti-abortion forces it's a crusade to them, so I'm not sure a more level headed analytical view is the one that would necessarily hold.

right, but that why some guys are going to get lucky and be thought of as great strategists and some will suffer bad luck and be dinged unfairly for it! >how many wins is that going to amount to in a season? And that is one of the properties of baseball - 5 wins is a lot in the standings even after 162 games because so many teams cluster so near 500. I've posted before that I believe it's the high level of randomizing inputs that keep baseball that way and I do think it's possible that in the general drive toward never letting 'mistakes' happen, whether calls in the field or ball and strikes, we might end up losing enough the that property to change things in a direction I don't know if will I like in the end.' Hopefully the basic nature of the bat, the ball and the weather is enough, though we are losing the last one some as well.

right - he'd almost certainly be worse.

it more than more a matter of detailed, it's a matter of unavailable. I guess I am more over sensitized to this issue, but I spent most of my career in a particular engineering field that is full of 'one-offs' being grilled by management types that had been through 6-sigma classes taught by mass production manufacturing engineers bitching at us about why we couldn't give then certainty about what was going to happen in their particular process that didn't even exist anywhere else in the world or had never been in the particular state it was in. You can't do that kind of analysis when the data don't exist and in baseball there are enough situations that don't happen often enough to gather reliable statistics, and that is always going to be the case.

you don't think Mitch would wave the filibuster for abortion? He'd do it in a New York minute. You are really in a different world on the GOP.

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Will Yzerman's call be the first?

What's fun is that a manager has to consider not only stats, but game theory and risk analysis as well. (of course none of them do that explicitly, that's the part they are talking about when they say they 'had a feeling'). You don't get to repeat a game 10,000 times in a monte carlo simulation where eventually the average outcome converges to mean statistics. The game is played once and whatever happens is what happens - outliers and all. So you are actually faced with not only what might happen on average, but how much risk you want to take that a lower probability result that has a higher severity rears its head like a badly played OF ball that leads to multiple bases and an extended inning for a rookie pitcher who may already be at the edge of his mental endurance. That kind of complexity is one of many reasons why I don't think we will ever reduce managing a baseball game to just reading the analytics.

IDK, I was really surprised to see either Castro even on the roster this season. I figured with Reyes, Cameron and Hill available as reserve OFs and Clemen, Short, Krieidler available they would have cut bait on both of them. You can put me down as unhappy with whichever half the Avila/Hinch brain trust is responsible for those choices. Willi is a disaster waiting to happen every time he steps on the field. To me Harold is the classic fool's gold ballplayer. The BA sucks you in but everything else about his game ends up hurting you. They keep hunting for the reincarnation of Donny Kelly, but there can be only one!

Price of computer video cards has fallen about 30% in three months. Some supply chain kinks are resolving, though Chinese lock downs remain a problem.

and Rod didn't appear to work very hard - did very little research beyond his infamous strolls past the batting cage and so had precious little interesting to add. I'm sure that is what wore on Mario after a while.

A Marcos appears set to regain the presidency in the Philippines. “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"!

Dr. Fauci speaking at the UM commencement: Fight "the normalization of untruths" Good advice but not exactly prime bumper sticker material. 🙄

he's made gambles that came up losers. Managers are going to that, it's their job, but when too many bets come up losers, you're going to get heat because they're paying you to have it come out the other way. My guess it that to some degree Hinch felt pressure to get the team to play better than they were, and the injuries just made it worse, so he forced things a little, hoping to escape with nothing bad happening. But when he put Willi out there the ball found him and playing Harold a lot at SS instead of bringing up Short resulting in a lot of balls he couldn't handle finding Harold as well. Maybe the odds were that didn't have to happen, but it did. Statistics make predictions but the future decides itself. For better or worse, sports is an outcomes based business.

I think you are confusing me with someone else, I don't think I've ever made any particular deal about Hinch's troubles in Houston. Beside, as per my last post, I'm speaking purely hypothetically, I don't don't actually think anyone is going anywhere. But *IF* I'm an owner whose trigger finger is getting itchy and a bunch of veteran guys are playing below their capabilities I don't see any connection to the GM that managed to bring them together, I would ( if I were going to) have to go after the management on the field. >and you think they're slumping because of something the manager did? Did the Red Wings start playing badly because of something Blashill suddenly changed in what he was doing? Field managers/coaches take the fall for players who don't play as well as they are expected to. That just is the way it is. But again, I don't expect anyone is taking a fall in the Tiger FO in any immediate future.

I don't think anyone is going anywhere anytime soon. They have no choice but to ride it out. I think the only question left is if they really get themselves in a hole (well, they already have) do you sort of pull the plug on any dream of competing and start looking at Clemens and Dingler and Wentz and Cameron (again!) and decide you are going to move veteran pitching depth (Pineda, ERod) or even one of the younger pitchers to restock the position cupboard for next year. All I know is that I've come to appreciate the game day animation. It's a lot less frustrating keeping tabs on team playing horrible baseball that way than having to actually watch......🤮

Fantastic! Always room for another pitcher on the roster to take losses in Quality Starts!

because the computer says LEFT!/RIGHT!. I'm as big as anyone on the importance of handedness in baseball. To this day I will never understand why DD didn't seem to care about it at all. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. One of the problems in working in complex systems is that you can easily start making mistakes based on measurement bias. We can measure platoon splits very accurately, Rdrs is kinda shaky, especially in less than a couple of seasons. So the temptation is strong to pay a lot of attention to what you measured and give shorter shrift to what you can't, even if on some level you realize it may be more important that you are giving it credit for. But you can answer your critiques by pointing at the numbers you have much easier than arguing your vague notions about the importance of what you have softer data about.

I'm fine with ranked choice in primaries, but what I'd like even better is to require run-offs in generals if no-one gets >50%. Especially in Presidentials. Too many guys get to the WhiteHouse on minority pluralities thanks to 3rd party mischief.

you still may not like the development system but Schoop, Baez, Meadows, Haase, Candelario aren't slumping because of it.

Willi hasn't played enough for his fielding stats to mean much, but has clearly and grossly misjudged two balls out of a small number of chances. I not sure I want to wait until the stats prove out what we can see already - He's not good at judging fly balls.

I guess I'm glad I just got back. If we have 5 starting pitchers (Rodriguez, Pineda, Faedo, Skubal, Brieske=5?) and the DH isn't until Tuesday why are we doing a BP day today?

Easily. All this is needed is for Biden to get sick and have to resign, Harris taking over - as incumbent being too difficult to defeat in the primaries, and then getting plastered in 2024 by another Trumper.

TBF, from personal experience they can be bad enough that you'd have hard time playing without taking something and once you did you might have a really hard time catching up to a 95mph fastball. For me even today with the newer options there is only one antihistamine which is strong enough to suppress my symptoms without making me at least a little drowsy. If Austin doesn't have anything that works that well for him I could understand it might be an issue. If they're hiding something I'm not sure what the point would be, just IL him - you don't have to say why.