gehringer_2

but there would have to be a direct $ link between people placing bets in real time and income to the team (not just to the sports book) before the team cares about it. At least until the teams start running their own books. Right now there is a sponsorship/advertising link, but if those are fixed dollar amounts, they won't drive teams' in-game motivations. Just because someone may make more money on a longer game under some circumstances doesn't mean the team does - yet.

The world has passed George by and he doesn't like it, but his baseball fandom is real enough.

Moskva apparently has two sister ships. A Russian attempt to take another warship into the Black Sea after a Turkish refusal of passage seems like a situation that could end up pulling NATO in the conflict.

you sell more beer in a 2:16 game if 30% more are watching than in the 2:40 game. Plus the marginal value of the Call Sam ad placed at 2:40, which is about the 10th time the same ad has played to the same eyeballs, has to be close to zero.

correct. He is dangerous because he doesn't care about institutions or their defense and is perfectly happy when any of them are compromised if it benefits him personally. He has zero real sense of his own impact beyond that he wants to be famous and a star in his own universe. And that profile attracts others who do have more malevolent agendas into his orbit who know that with Trump they can often get what they want by simply flattering him into supporting their ideas.

If it were just Trump it would be one thing - but Lindsay Graham, Cruz, Boebert, Cawthorn, Jordan, etc., and Mephistopheles himself from Ky are a cast of characters all beyond the pale of anything that should have ever come close to being elected to govern a pig farm let alone the US gov.

story in the DNews said Manning wasn't concerned - he didn't tell them anything was wrong - they pulled him because they didn't like what they were seeing in his motion and he then admitted he was a little sore but he would have pitched through it if they had let him.

Definitely true. Just thinking about how far the GOP has gone; it's not just from hard care right to batshit crazy - the total transformation far beyond just that : I remember Sen (R) Bob Griffrin used to come to UM football games and campaign to *students* as they walked to the north entrance of the stadium. Can you even imagine a GOP pol believing they had a potential constituency with UM students today?

For sure - if Manning and Mize both go down it's going to be a long season.

I agree - I think we will see more teams try things like split start systems. Maybe they will have to change the way the wins and losses are scored to reduce possible push back from the players.

And the thing is, teams have tried to condition guys into being able to pitch deeper. Nolan Ryan made a big push when he was running the Rangers, other teams have tried more long toss, more of this/that. I don't think it's for lack of teams trying. Nothing seems to work. I'm as frustrated as anyone - be nice if someone would figure it out!

Influence follows money. How much money is gambling putting into the game compared to TV? I would think a bigger audience generates more $ from media and even adds more potential gamblers to the pool than a longer games adds in bets by individual gamblers already watching.

All injuries are not similar. Fatigue effect is direct on muscle injuries, but fatigue effects skeletal issues indirectly. If muscles lose tone, it put joints like knees at risk for hyper-extension for instance, but it's still hard to see how that effects the most common form of UCL injury, which is fraying from xs wear.

The other thing that we have to be careful about also is not putting too rose colored a set of glasses on history. A LOT of pitchers did get hurt back in the day, but you only had half as many pros that had to have lucky genes and survive to keep the majors full when there were only 14 teams! And since pitchers did throw a lot more, including in the minors, maybe most of those guys got hurt and washed out long before they got to the majors (because there was no TJ in those days) and MLB fans never heard much about them.

I think working your endurance up from relief to starting is a different issue than wearing out your UCL. Plus UCL, while it is the injury that causes the most lost time, is not the only thing you have to protect a pitcher from hurting that mandate some processes.

but I don't believe these are fatigue mediated injuries. More inflammation/irritation type. You can't condition your way to a more wear resistant UCL. You have to stop doing what is causing it to fray or stay on a cycle that allows more effective healing. The truth is working shorter doesn't even help - if it did relievers wouldn't be going down just as commonly as starters. If you try to look back at why things are so different from the past, the one argument is that pitchers have to work closer to max effort a higher percentage of the time, and I'm certainly not here to dispute that, but I also wonder how much damage is being done to arms because few guys ever take the 4-5 solid months off without throwing that used to be the case. Joint tissues grow/heal slowly. That's just one thought, but for whatever reasons the situation is not getting any better.

I find it hard to believe that with all the medical technology being aimed at pitchers it is making virtually no difference in the injury rate. That argues to me that they already know the answer but it is just too devastating to the current state of the game to admit it out loud - it has to be something along the lines of "there is no safe breaking ball" or "pitch over 95", etc.

144,000 winning lottery tickets. Tough luck for the rest.

who's pitching?

Belief in democracy is the first casualty when your belief in your cause reaches religiosity. There is a kind of ideological convergence that takes place with all movements that decide their issue too important to just work and teach and advocate until the people are with them.

so it sounds like they don't really know anything about Mize yet - when they put him on the DL it was on the basis of him missing a start and not because they had any medical diagnostics yet beyond - "the kid says his elbow hurts." So we wait for the imaging.

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correct. Though I'm not sure even the "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" paradigm captures the full fatalism of Calvinism, which is along the lines that you are just destined to be what you are. The children of Ham are cursed, etc. Parenthetically - In defense of Calvin, from what I've read, he wouldn't necessarily recognize "his" theology in where his followers/interpreters took his movement.

well, to call 'agricultural' the cause is a bit of euphemism. MN, IA, WI, OH all have deep agricultural history. The difference was agriculture based on slavery and the ensuing decades of denial of economic opportunity or wealth accumulation to a big segment of the population that happened to be the descendents of those slaves.

It seems we know the real alternatives, regardless of whether we are willing to admit the political reality they imply to ourselves or not: Either improve living conditions and income for the US poor, or keep putting a lot of them in jail. I think America's real political/moral problem is that a majority of the public is perfectly happy with the latter instead of the former as long as it's cheaper for them. And of course even the savings is only short term, net national wealth would go up if the poor became more economically productive.