gehringer_2

That there about 500 things in Leviticus you can be put to death for - put fire in a censor in the wrong place? Yahweh's gonna roast you. If you want to strap your wagon that OT God that commanded his people to massacre civilians without mercy and dash the head of enemy infants on rocks, that personally sent an angel of death to destroy the lives of thousands of innocent Egyptian children, that prescribes casting lots to decide what is truth (Umin and Thummin anyone?), that wiped out a man's family for a boast to the Devil, you go for it. But don't tell me it has anything to do with Jesus. The OT is not anyone's inspired anything. It's a long historical pastiche and re-edited chronicle of one ancient people's understanding of themselves and their own history and who they thought God was. That's a lot, but it's nothing more that that. In the same way that the best an ancient vagabond population could understand a universe of quantum physics and general relativity was a creation story like Genesis, the best they could reflect of their moral world was the OT. It was a low bar.

I'm not worried about Greene's ground balls, everyone rolls over on ground balls. It's why no-one hits 500. The only thing I've ever worried about with Greene are the K's.

LOL - yes! I had a Forth interpreter on my PC years ago. The connection for me was that I had H-P programmable calculators and programming those was structurally just like FORTH, all stack operations. So I played with FORTH a bit. Never did any serious work with it though. I read somewhere that early Space Shuttle computers used FORTH because it was so compact, but I've also seen that contradicted.

Yup - pitchers use that fact that most hitters hate to take a called K more than a swing and miss and use that against them. But it's not just jest. If a hitter is too unwilling to take a called 3rd he will never be as good as he could be. It's a chance you have to take at least once in a while to keep pitchers honest.

hitting is weird. I know with Javy he looks so terrible when he lunges at that outside slider you think there is no hope for him, but watch Schoop next time he starts to slump. He'll looks every bit as hopeless. He wasn't getting anywhere near pitches in April and to have watched him you'd think the guy couldn't have ever hit successfully in the majors. But something clicks and a guy starts to zero in on good pitches. Schoop went from a <400 OPS in April to ~700 in May. He's still not at 100% but at least he looks like he knows what he is doing again as a hitter. The same will probably happen with Javy. One of the things that aggregate counting stats don't tell you about a guy is whether he is a Tortoise or a Hare. There are guys whose monthly OPS splits hardly vary and there are guys who run hot and cold 50 -100 AB at a time and you don't know it to look at the back of their baseball cards. Javy and Schoop are both streak hitters. As a GM you do probably want to limit your exposure that kind of guy though or you can end up with your whole team in a funk at one time - and we have.

We did FORTRAN because it was 'engineering.' COBOL was for the busAd students who couldn't have gotten in the Engin school..... To me the funny story in engineering programming education was that after K&R released 'C' it gained wide adoption pretty quickly because it was so fast and powerful, but CS Academics hated it because it was unreadable, undisciplined and 'dangerous' (all of which are true) so Pascal became the language of choice at many University CS departments because it was more 'sound' from a purist's standpoint. But of course no-one in industry cared a whit about Pascal or ever used it for anything, so eventually university CS depts were pulled kicking and screaming by industry back to 'C'. So now we have 'C++' which combines of worst of all the worlds it tries to encompass. But anyone who wants to get anything done quickly just jumps ship to Python. 👍

GOTO with you and your FORTRAN!

There is a tragic amount of truth in this. I probably couldn't count the number to times I've drawn the parallel between the basic worldview of American Christian 'fundamentalists' and Radical Islam. Motivationally, emotionally, intellectually they are cut from exactly the same whole cloth. One basic big key being, (and just like in Jesus' day) a structure around a pharisaic class that takes the right of interpretation of divine mandate unto itself, which leverages that class into social and political power, and in the US case especially, an economic payday.

If you start quoting Leviticus you have already lost any argument. Read the whole thing and check back. 🤣

probably a mistake to challenge one of these nuts to find something in the bible, because they will. Like all complex literature, the Bible can reflect back to you anything you want to bring to it if you are so disposed. To me, and YMMV for anyone else, the key point to try to force is that religious people have no a priori right to impose what they believe on others on *that* basis. You may believe murder is wrong because God forbids it, but when you bring the desire to ban murder to the secular society you have to find secular grounds to do it. And that is easy so we do don't argue that much about legislating about murder. If you think things are wrong (or right) for religious reasons that the larger society has no reason to agree with you about, then you must be prepared to live your life the way you want and leave others alone to do the same, because in the end that is the only approach that guarantees *yours* or anyone's religious freedom in the first place.

Reyes is close to the ideal 4th OF. He can play all three positions and not be a liability, will give you a 700+ OPS (maybe a little more if does hit a few more long balls as he reaches peak strength years), runs the bases well (assuming the quad thing doesn't become some kind of chronic) and is a switch hitter, albeit one with a poor platoon split as a LHB. It's hard to argue with that profile on the bench. Anyone better is probably a starter.

yeah, I know Helm was too old be part of the rebuild here, but it was fun but sad watching his play against Edmonton while knowing how much the Wings were missing his skillset this season.

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.