gehringer_2

BP can be frustrating. The Tigers will go into the year with all kinds of guys that should be able to supplement the BP: Wentz, maybe Faedo, Roni Garcia, Olsen, Ty Maddon was supposed to be nearly ML ready. It's not like they lack for arms, and yet we've seen years before with this many guys in the pipeline and they all fail!

To be terrible this year and pick up the '22 version of Mobley for the front court sounds like a better scenario than the long nightmare of the Grant Hill years where Cade starts throwing down weekly triple doubles but the team is stuck in mediocrity.

Washtenaw county does publish vaxxed vs unvaxxed status on hospitalizations but not by type and it does not breakdown vaxxed/unvaxxed deaths. That said the % of vaxxed people among COVID admissions even prior to Omicron is alarming, reaching ~40% in Nov. Anecdotally I hear a lot of physicians saying that despite the hospitalizations, vaxxed patients are not dying but that certainly is not categorically true, so like you I'd like to see some real numbers.

I agree that folks have trouble believing this team's upside - but it will all depend on pitching health. If we lose two starters again in 22 like we did in 21 you can probably flush having a competitive team.

well, I hope Tyler is pleased with himself.

I still don't understand why you feel a guy like Walker is not honoring a contract here. He is not playing any more games for MSU, they are not paying for the rest of his education. He has surrendered the balance of his scholarship (he could have had a full year of eligibility left). You can certainly argue whether it would nice to have a different system, but when a guy leaves early, he's not cheating his University in any contractual sense.

I think this is key. In the current system the non playoff bowls are nothing more than big television advertising sign boards. The traditional conference rivalries are mostly gone, obviously the chance to win and end up at the top of the polls is gone. Few sell out and many are played in front of embarrassingly empty stands. It's true that all sport is entertainment, but part of the entertainment value is normally that something is at stake. With that aspect missing too many of the bowls are pointless.

weren't you talking about the disengaged type? They're not the AOC crowd railing that their Rome won't be built in a day. I'd put them in the "my vote doesn't matter because nothing ever changes" slot. Their error is that a lot of stuff does change, they just aren't really paying attention to a lot of the institutional decay that will be a lot harder to fix if we have to wait for them to start noticing.

probably true, but OTOH I don't think those are the folks sniping at Biden.

They could always the view that their civic lives were an investment in the future. There is a radical thought.

yeah - no matter much Cade raises his game, he doesn't seem to be raising anyone else's. Not hard to understand when it's a bunch of guys that can't shoot. So where does any more improvement come from? It should have been Bey and Hayes, but good luck with that.

whether they have their degrees is not the question, it's whether they are registered for winter term. If you don't register you are no longer a student. I would guess many of them that are going into the draft are not - they are going into workout regimes for the combine.

Not necessarily. Most bowl games are not played until the semester is over. Many of these players are parted from the their universities as of the end of fall term if they are not coming back for another season. Their scholarships are over.

No, it's just an economic calculation on risk/reward. As we professionalize college sports we need to expect players to make decisions based on their value to their professional careers. We are telling them that is what is important, why complain when they agree?

The GOP facsist wing plots for 60 years to get to where they are. Democratic progs are ready to go home in 11 mo? I guess the TV generation needs all stories wrapped up in 48 min.

this really isn't so much news as confirmation in the sense that everyone looking at the data for 1st vs 2nd shots could see that 2nd shots were either being missed or counted as more 1sts. How likely is it that 10% of the people who went to get their first shot in a place like Washtenaw county never went for their 2nd?

when you consider how many ways the data can be sliced and diced, the number of possible factors, I have some sympathy with the data collection not being what we might wish it were. But the bottom line remains that the US has 50 millions confirmed cases, so probably at least 80 million for real, and out of that 800K have succumbed, which is 1%. Consider mortalities figures weight at least 10/1 toward those over 65 and obese, and the healthy working age general public is still looking at roughly a 1 in a thousand chance of it killing them. That's sort of the worst region for risk evaluation. Too low to make it obvious 'everything possible' needs be done at all times, too high not be worried all the time. If you add vaccination that is another order of magnitude reduction, but the problem is that the average person has no way of knowing if they in the minority whose vaccination didn't 'take' until they get sick.

which is more secure, a Ukraine that looks like Finland or a Ukraine that looks like Dunbass writ large? The nationalist imperatives inside the Russian State will not allow it to see itself as being 'bullied' anymore than those inside the US ever would. Alliances in and of themselves do not prevent wars. Having Ukraine or Georgia in NATO would actually turn article 5 into a hollow promise because the American public would not support the US presence in a war for either. What matters is each side understanding clearly what the other will really do, not what may be on paper in Brussels.

when you are a sociopath, all the other 'anti-isms' are pretty much just subsets by definition.

what's better than millionaires vs billionaires in court? ( as long as it's not the baseball players and owners!)

agreed. The USSR fell, but being a 'bad winner' in the cold war won't get the West any better an outcome than it got the allies in Germany after WWI. "In your face" triumphalism may be fun when it's Larry Bird on a basketball court, but it's generally not helpful in international relations. The objective should be a path to calm Putin down and give him his domestic policy fig leafs (what he probably really wants) without abandoning self-determination for the people of Ukraine. NATO is an irrelevancy to those objectives. NATO is a means to an end, not an end itself. If it's actions generate conflict that is contradictory to its charter. Of course I would note from the article that it was that most triumphalist and lest deep thinking of president's, 'Dubya' who pushed hardest on NATO for the offer of membership to Ukraine in the first place.

The story on Jacob Barnes in the Freep was also intriguing. Another guy coming back from injuries - but he was apparently hitting 98. Interesting part was he liked the Tigers because he knew he had more changes to make and he felt the Tigers pitching analytics people knew what they were talking about.

this is from Dana Milbank in WaPo Merry Christmas

so the 6th circuit appeals court ruled in favor of the OSHA vaccine mandate, contradicting the 5th circuit and more or less forcing SCOTUS to take up the issue. However, I want to know how such morons get on the court as the Trump appointee (OK nevermind, just answered the question...) who dissented from the majority with the following logic: “The virus that causes COVID-19 is not, of course, uniquely a workplace condition. Its potency lies in the fact that it exists everywhere an infected person may be — home, school, or grocery store, to name a few,” wrote Larsen, a nominee of President Donald Trump. “So how can OSHA regulate an employee’s exposure to it?” OK - lets parse this out. Are ladders ubiquitous in peoples' non-workplace exposure to them? Power tools? Dust in the air? Electricity? Is there a single thing you can think of that OSHA regulates by virtue of workers only experiencing it in the workplace? His argument falls apart within 30 seconds of consideration of what OSHA actually does. OSHA's legal mandate is not to insure people's safety everywhere, it is to insure it in the workplace. It's one thing to argue disingenuously to reach a desired political end, but one could at least have the competence to do it with with some skill. It is both laughable and tragic that such a moron could achieve a seat on an appeals bench.

I think of it as a huge test that humanity, and especially the US, is failing - and miserably. I mean if you were 'Q' and you really wanted to put humanity on trial, who needs tachyons? Just a virus. A virus that could be defeated by concerted unify of purpose, a reasonable dose of altruism, a dedication to seeking and following the logic dictated by the facts as we have the capability to discover them, and a rejection of tribalism and superstition. Or another metaphor would be that all the cultural trees seeded by the Enlightenment that grew up to support western culture have reached senescence in the US, and instead of tending to their seedlings we are content just leaving them to be choked out by weeds.