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Riley was the draft pick everyone else would have taken at the time. He developed into his one 5-win season under Harris in 2024 before taking a step back this year. This upcoming season is a key one for his career.

Malloy and Sweeney were never top 100 prospects. Sweeney topped out at 22 for the Dodgers system, Malloy at #7 in the Tigers system. Jung topped out at #60 MLB which is (checks math) not in the top 10.

Colt Keith is not done quite yet. He may not even be at his optimal self yet. He's just finished his age 23 season.

I'm scheduled to go to the USA vs Mexico game in Houston on March 10. Fingers crossed it's a Skubal or Skenes game ...

Yes, I love pulling things out of datasets in the way you imply. It's like solving a puzzle. Huge endorphin rush. I went ahead and subtracted the 34 minutes as you suggested ad there was some minor movement in the table, I didn't bother dicking around with brooming the field or seventh inning stretches or foul territory sizes: Team Pit/Min NYY 2.19 NYM 2.23 TOR 2.24 SDP 2.25 TEX 2.26 HOU 2.26 MIA 2.27 BAL 2.27 ARI 2.28 SEA 2.28 BOS 2.29 LAA 2.29 LAD 2.30 TBR 2.30 PHI 2.30 CHC 2.31 STL 2.32 CHW 2.33 MIN 2.33 WSN 2.34 MIL 2.35 ATH 2.35 PIT 2.35 COL 2.35 KCR 2.36 DET 2.36 CIN 2.36 CLE 2.37 ATL 2.38 SFG 2.38 MLB 2.31 In short, the Dodgers moved up the slowness table by four places, along with the Brewers. Tampa and KC both dropped four places. The Tigers were flat at 26th slowest (i.e., fifth fastest). Something I just now noticed: eight of the slowest 15 teams are NL or AL East teams, meaning only two of the fastest 15 teams are from the East divisions. I wonder whether there is something to that?

Not only that, but because of the extensive revenue share among the teams from streams like merchandise and media, practically any NFL team has an equal shot at signing any top free agent, personal geographic preferences being flattened.

As much a joke as anybody else's.

That amount would be one, and it wasn't even this past year. Obviously, Harris's terrible deadline moves lost Riley three wins versus 2024. That cost us winning the division!

Yes, why couldn't Harris have replicated the brilliant trade deadline moves that won us the division in 2024?

I agree the movement takes a big hit when he goes, but I also believe the MAGA elite have a plan in place to address that, part of which would entail the martyring of Trump upon his death (odds of blaming Democrats for his "murder" = 100% ± 0), and passing the baton to the successor they think can most successfully carry on in his name. Believe it or not, I think Don Jr might be the guy, and it might actually work, at least among the most ardent trumpaholics, especially those in the white supremacist activist wing of the movement.

This is not so much stupid as it is ingeniously purposeful, because it's working as intended. Just ask our resident imbibers of trumpahol. The whole idea is to make us focus on and argue about the fake math on top and look past the bad policies underneath. Klassic Kremlin.

Thirty-three percent of the people would pay to sell out this country and its constitutional principles on behalf of Cult 45.

No. The bad grammar helps highlight the inherent illegitimacy of the entire thing.

I agree. I was thinking more globally about the entire MAGA thing, not just the mouthpiece.

Quiet part out loud.

That can happen on a permanent basis only once the fever has broken, and I fear something more dramatic will be needed to do so than just voting it away.

Maybe the term LLAMA can be Xeroxed or Kleenexed or Cellophaned.

Yeah, maybe that's all it is. I can see it. As with everything else controversial or divisive in this country, hatred of socialism has racist roots. The Origins of the Socialist Slur - The Atlantic The accusation of “socialism” had sharp teeth in the 1950s, as Americans recoiled from the growing influence of the Soviet Union and the rise of Communist China. But Republicans’ use of the word typically had little to do with actual, Bolshevik-style socialism. The theory that the people would rise up and take control of the means of production has never been popular in the United States. The best a Socialist Party candidate has ever done in an American presidential election was when Eugene V. Debs won about 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912. Rather, in the United States, the political charge of socialism tended to carry a peculiar meaning, one forged in the white-supremacist backlash to Black civil rights in the 1870s. During the Civil War, the Republicans in charge of the government both created national taxation and abolished legal slavery (except as punishment for crime). For the first time in U.S. history, voting in federal elections had a direct impact on people’s pocketbooks. Then, in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, extending the vote to Black men in the South. White southerners who hated the idea of Black people using the vote to protect themselves started to terrorize their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls. But in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to protect the right of Black men to vote. Attorney General Amos Akerman oversaw the prosecution of more than 3,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, winning more than 1,000 convictions. Meanwhile, Congress passed laws to protect Black voting. Suddenly, it was harder for white southerners to object to Black rights on racial grounds. So they turned to a new argument, one based in economics. They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor, and they would vote for leaders who promised to build things such as roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and most of the people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, although the infrastructure in which the southern legislatures were investing would help everyone, reactionaries claimed that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing.

I don't know how much I buy this as being accurate, but I gotta laugh at Michigan's.

I want to know how they are selling it on the RWM to rank and file red hats. There’s got to be something they’re saying to them that they think is a benefit, doesn’t there? Such as, every subsidy is going only to illegals, or welfare queens, or something like that to make them hate the idea. That’s what I’m trying to get at. I can’t locate anything along those lines.

Stay classy.

Can anyone tell me what the intellectual argument against healthcare subsidies is? Why is it a bad thing? Serious question.

Random thought that popped into my head: I don't know whether I should be a little surprised or not at all surprised that apps like ChatGPT, Anthropic, Gemini, et al. have never been referred to as LLAMAs, which strikes me as a reasonable acronym for Large LAnguage Model Agents. I mean, come on, it's sitting right there in plain sight ...

You could also say that if it weren't for the ten-year struggle Poland went through, it would have taken Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia a lot longer than ten months, ten weeks, or ten days.

Because I disliked driving on the wrong side of the car so much in England, I opted out of driving in ANZAC when I was there.