gehringer_2

I'd be(will be) happy to see the death penalty go away, but I don't have an argument with the Tsaraev ruling, basically because I don't much like the base concept behind 'Svengali' defenses so I'm not troubled at the exclusion that was the basis of the appeal. Haven't read about the other one....yet.

I've been trying to guess how much better they will be with Berggren, Vrana and Edvinsson, and wondering how Yzerman is going to come up the rest of the offense they would still need, or if '22-'23 will be another tread water year.

Wings get a decent chance for Betuzzi at 6 on 5 but take a penalty with 50 seconds left.

the most dominant Wing player without a doubt. He's passed both Larkin and Bertuzzi

wings fight off 110 seconds of a Tampa PP, then lose a defensive zone face off and give up the goal. Looked like Oesterle could have made the shot deflection and didn't.

2nd PP looked much better. Didn't get the puck on the net much but held the play in and pressured well.

Wings pick it up in the 2nd half of the 2nd period, carried the play well other than one bad sequence with about a minute left. What do they have left for the 3rd?

Bertuzzi with the stick, Seider makes the play, Fabbri gets the goal. Wings being outshot more than 2:1 tie the game.

OTOH, to play Devil's advocate to myself, I just heard Fareed Zarkaria on Ezra Klein's podcast argue persuasively that since low oil prices hurt Putin as much as any sanction, we need to make a choice about which is more important in the short term, the ecology or the world political order. It's a fair point as long as there is some commitment to let the price back up when the immediate threat has passed.

I like all of this. But c'mon, rationality? Long-term planning? Who are we kidding? We are talking about the Gang that Couldn't shoot straight on one side and the Dead End Kids on the other.

so this is one of the things I can't figure: A young J Verlander would start games and not throw a breaking ball at all for 3 innings. That's one of the reasons he could actually finish a game now and then early in his career; he didn't have to show everything he had the 1st time through. And my recollection at least is that 15-20 yrs ago that approach was not uncommon. Maybe not as extreme as JV, but pitchers holding the arsenal in reserve much more than today. The big push now you hear from every young pitcher is "I want to use all my pitches" meaning throw everything right from get go. That's great, but then what do you have left they haven't seen the third time through? So it's not like guys don't throw the FB as hard as ever, so what is it? Are the hitters that much better against FBs that no-one even gets through the order once without going 50% off speed, or in all the excitement about slider spin rates and sinkers are they forgetting the value of throwing a really good live 4 seam fastball? Or is it that the high fly balls you give up on the 4 seamer just go out of the ballpark too often now? ...maybe answered my own question....._

TO me, the big unknown is still Russian morale. We are hearing bit and pieces, but an army that doesn't want to fight, won't, it's that simple. You can only do so much with air and artillery from a distance. You can break a lot of stuff and hurt a lot of people but you won't defeat a dispersed enemy with it.

Logistics: NYT

From WaPo There is some debate on the overall merits of this, but OTOH, slow or no I-net is one bald faced fact Putin's propaganda will not be able to negate.

i think there is something to the idea that hitters at not able to see pitchers enough. I noted somewhere a few days ago that in the pre-expansion era you saw each other team 22 times! With the good starters going every 4th day that means you saw each hard to hit starter for 20 AB every year. That's a huge advantage for hitters in terms of being able to stay in an AB and put a ball in play. So moving to a scheme were no batter sees a pitcher more than twice in a game would be the conscious extension of the effect that has happened over the years incidentally. But I don't see any easy in-game rules that would work, you basically would have to limit pitcher numbers on the roster. So you do that in conjunction with the deader ball? You might have to limit transfers back and forth from the minors in some additional way to prevent skirting the purpose of the rule. I don't like that either but I'd accept it before banning the shift. And of course the possible unintended consequence is your burn out more pitchers.

LOL!

I hate the idea - the standard positions evolved as the best way to make outs against hitters at the time. If the hitters change their approach, the fielders should have the same right. Besides, giving pull hitters more advantage is not going to create as much interesting baseball on the bases as getting RID of some of the pull hitters would.

one interesting point made here is that Putin has to take some care not to commit so much of the Russian army to Ukraine that he leaves an opening for unrest in other far flung areas and the Rodina without resources to put it down.

meh - the trade off is that high gas prices are good for the planet.

I absolutely do not believe that data. It doesn't line up with my own observations with a DVR at all. And the fact is that it defies logic. The games are more than an hour longer than they used to be, so where it the hour? A big part is more total pitches thrown, then add 5 pitching changes a game and that is maybe 30 min tops. Then I would argue from my own DVR experience timing it that the real time between pitches is closer to 25 sec. If you actually got that to 15 then you have 10 sec times 240 pitches which is your other 40 min.

the media deals is where you would have to start. Something like a 50% league tax on teams' TV/Radio income, which would then be shared back to all the teams equally. At 50/50 every team will still be motivated to grow its own market and worry about the health of the league. That would also give you an objective verifiable number to start with for a team salary floor. Will never happen of course....

right, they are in a death spiral together because the owners are too greedy to share and the players are too dumb to realize *that* is the single biggest issue they should be pushing.

exactly - but players are in a fantasy world if they think that will happen. It's been decades and it hasn't yet, and the team payroll disparity only gets bigger. The mid/samll market teams are not going to lose money to compete, they will find a way to keep expenses low enough so that the fan base that accepts them as they are can keep them alive. That is what has been happening, and what will continue to happen, unless and until the team disparity on the *REVENUE* side is addressed. The players appear to operating under the oldest canard about pro sports, which is that just because a small market team is owned by someone whose net worth is equal that of a large market team, that owner is going to be willing to spend out his non-team revenue to compete. These guys didn't get to be billionaires by being financially stupid. They do not and will not ever subsidize their teams with their other income. Mike Ilitch may have been the closest case ever and even there it lasted less than maybe 7 years out of 100+ of the team's history.

right. Inning breaks are now actually way shorter than the timeouts in any other sport. They take 5+ minute commercial breaks at football games. I DVR'd a lot of Tiger games last season, and I have a 15sec advance button. If I hit that as the call goes up on the previous pitch, I NEVER, miss the next pitch - I don't even miss the wind-up for it. And the pitch clock is supposed to be 15 sec. So the base condition is bad enough, but then you have relievers who absolutely come to a standstill with men on base. I understand you would have to waive the 15 sec rule with men on base because of holding the runner, etc, but you have relievers out there now who are waiting for longer grass to grow for a ground ball between pitches, so there needs to be some kind of secondary timer even with guys on base.

I would call BS on this one. The frackers were moving plenty of product under the old rules when prices were high enough, and prices are high enough again now.