gehringer_2

just to do some spitballing here....(feel free to offer other estimates....) there is some nationalization of TV money now ($60million) - as per the article below. Supposedly no team has less than a $40M local deal so each team is now guaranteed a floor revenue of $100 million from TV sources alone going forward. In addition total revenue sharing is given at $110 million - assuming not more than 10 teams share in this that would be another $10million, so the very 'poorest' teams should be looking at $110 million *before* ticket sales. If you draw a millions fans (and none of the 6 teams that didn't should exist where they are!) that's probably at least another $60million. Throw in $20M for radio, merchandise, parking and you have $190M on the revenue side for the *poorest* teams. Now, take a SWAG that non-MLB salary expenses for a team might be something like 100 employees at $100K, ($10M), Exec salaries including manager $20M, Stadium maint 5%/yr of a $500million struture = $25M, and say $20M in prospect salaries. That's $85M, so if we assume most owners don't really care how much they take out of their team, the poorest teams would have something like $105M for MLB salaries. Even if this is all off by 100% to the low side, you are still just barely approaching the luxury tax number. https://dodgerblue.com/mlb-teams-receive-at-least-100-million-annually-from-tv-rights-contracts/2022/02/12/

and the truth is they probably don't even have to deaden the ball very much specification wise, just tighten the distribution to remove those most above the current average COR. Of you could just take all the balls and fire them at a wall from an air cannon a dozen times to soften them up a bit before packing them.

what kind of fool american would be in Russia right now? Did her team put her there? Sounds like daylight madness to me..... ....plays for a Russian team...../..sigh../

right, but on the other hand I don't want judges to distort other rules of procedure in back door efforts to get death penalty reprieves because that reverberates through the whole trial system as well. I would guess that the admission of the kind of evidence that the defense wanted in this case would end up leading to more (possibly wrongful) convictions in other cases.

Yup. The PP kill sure suffers when the first unit has to rotate off. This one was frustrating because they played well enough from about the 30 minute mark to have at least picked up one point. The other thing on my wish list would be to make the goalie crease about 4 feet bigger and then cut down the size of the goalie equipment. I don't really much care for the number of goals scored by screening the goalie, but you would have to give the shooters some advantage back if you force the screeners away. In that regard I actually think the curved crease is worse than the old rectangular one because it's the corners where I would like to see the goalie have more unobstructed space back.

Plus it was superfluous, the proposal is DOA with the players anyway. There is no deal there with or without those four owners. Their action hasn’t kept a single game from being played.

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.