gehringer_2

So what do we suppose was with Garica? Ripped a nail? Dislocated a finger?

Yeah - It's gonna irritate me when they change the rules to protect guys that only want to hit that way.

Did we know a lifetime 247 hitter would be black hole? That was the 11th best catcher BA (350PA) in the majors last year. I wasn't expecting much from a D first catcher, but I didn't expect a start like this!

you'd be a fool to bet that Garneau was going to have a better season than Barnhart, if you hadn't been watching Tucker play so far that is. 🙄

Thinking back on the play in the 1st. I don't blame Tyler, he's a pitcher - he was waiting for someone to take it. The problem was Barnhart couldn't find it and Torkelson didn't get there to take over. Granted he might have ended up in the way if someone else had gotten there, but he might have moved if someone had come at him. And the tigers fail to turn another poorly struck ball into an out.... And Barnhart bounces the throw to 2nd. This team is not playing like a team that's going to win anything.

sure - esp in the cold. Feel bad for Alexander. He only gave up one ball that was hit and the umpire screwed him into a couple of the walks.

Schoop, Barnhart, Candy are just black holes right now. You'll never score enough runs with only 6 hitters.

LOL - TBH, I have seen 'safety' regulations that actually are counter-productive, but that's a different discussion.

Sample size will remain a problem though, the number of plays at degrees of difficulty that allow for useful rankings can be pretty rare. No matter how good your measurement tools you have to have measurements to take!

We have some flights later this summer. Hopefully we aren't in the middle of surge #5.

give him time.

right - but Willis? I'd be too old school to pick Willis. A 6'0 running qb from a school that lost 5 games in schedule were they didn't play anyone. He may turn out to be the biggest thing since sliced bread but the thinness of the resume against the kind of players he will see in NFL Ds and the emphasis on his running make him too big a downside risk for my taste. In the NFL, 'dual-threat' just translates to 'soon to be injured'

To a certain degree that 'stretching out'/condition process is all about getting just enough controlled stress to get the strengthening response without crossing over into an inflammation injury situation that ends up taking you backward. Manning missed the goldilocks point I guess. That risk is always bad enough for young guys who haven't been through it as many times - then no doubt doubled by the short ST.

I feel for the poor public health epidemiologists who are going to spend the next few years trying to tease useful data out of the total randomness of American behavioral response to COVID.

People- mostly in the far east, were wearing masks in crowded public places during flu season long before Covid but that never became a thing in the US - but you never know. Of course most places in the US don't have nearly the kind of population density of a Singapore or Tokyo.

True - Once he went to 1B, his ISO wasn't what you might hope for there, though he did keep his OPS+ above 120 until his last two seasons - he never lost his ability to work a walk.

exactly - the air traveling experience if full of unknown variables in term of architecture, crowding etc. Hard to say any rule holds well across the board. I was on a flight early in covid when they could not get the jetway aligned on landing. We sat in dead air for 20 min. Luckily at that time the flights weren't very crowded. But the highly vaunted in aircraft filtration system had shut down with the engines/APU. They did finally get a ground unit AC hooked up, but I found that fairly nerve wracking at the time.

Of course there is also a counter arg that BA-2 is SO contagious masking is of less value anyway. We certainly are seeing a mini-surge in student cases despite the retention of the mask mandate in classroom, but even that is hard to tease out because mask mandates have been dropped on the rest of campus. And the population will scatter after this week so any more potential to study the population will go with it.

COVID tracing in the US has been bad joke since early in the pandemic. Everyone was pretty much forced to give up because tracking capabilities were overwhelmed when once it really took off. The silliest thing in the airplane is that you take it off when they feed you and eating/drinking is probably the worst spread vector so it's a good thing the air on the planes does change out fast. To your more general question, nothing about the way air-travel is managed is rational, so that's about the last place I'd expect to see reason anyway.

you do get credit for effort. On a related note, I have noticed that the boomers seem to have finally decided it's time give up their Harleys. Seeing much smaller numbers out and about anymore.

that you know of.....LOL. It is probably true that the lines in the airport are worse than the plane - at least when it's flying. On the ground on each end the ventilation on the plane, which is good, may or may be on until the cabin doors are closed. If you have a gate or loading delay, you may find yourself in a tin can with dead air

except that unhelmeted rider lying with a broken head on the pavement (and his dependents) would scream bloody murder if we told him as a society we were just going to let him lie there and bleed out in his 'choices' instead of paying to fix and rehab him. Like Mr. Donne done said - 'No man is an island'

Yup. Tell me who's mind this thought hasn't crossed.

Yeah, I'm not sure I buy the argument that things are so different that the army that couldn't fight in the North suddenly becomes Caesar's legions in the East. But if the dire talk pushes against any tendency to Western complacency, that's fine. However, be that as it may, it would be nice if the West would move/move faster on getting some effective missile defense help in theater.

I think we have reached the point where it becomes context dependent. In my county the Vax rate is 87% and there have not been any fatalities in anyone too young to be vaccinated so I'm not bothered walking around in an unmasked general public any more. In an airplane where I am trapped in space with a person of unknown history, not so much. At the U, where a 5 day quarantine still creates a major hardship for students, we still mask in the classroom because it helps keep as many in class as possible. One of the problems in America is that we act like we are stupid (well, because we are), and have to have simple stupid one size fits all rules. Being asked to apply a little intelligent judgment has become too much for American society. (And of course the flip side is we are too belligerent to take other people's good advice.)