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C-SPAN's Washington Journal is a halfway-decent barometer of what's sticking with the average voter (I say "halfway decent" because I do think at least a few callers every day are planted by organizations with agendas). The only three things those people on the Republicans line have to talk about these days is (1) the price of gas; (2) the price of groceries; and (3) how free money, healthcare, and housing the Biden administration is giving to illegals is driving up the first two. And by the way, inflation is up over more than 20%, according to them, which is right when you add all four of his years together, which they do, because it hammers the Democrats harder to do it that way.

Right. Median. I wrote "average" because the prior poster used "average". I didn't want to come off as Captain Actually. 😁 The unspoken idea was that there's probably a 50% chance Kamala’s less genuine than your average median politician

Cops already feel free to tell you what you can and can not do. I was asked for my ID when in public places with cops a few times when I was younger, like in my late teens and twenties, places like on the street outside of bars in college towns and stuff, for no other reason than we were there, and civilians either don't feel confident enough or comfortable enough or even free to say no. I know I didn't. That right there is quasi-police state, isn't it? And that's not necessarily new or even unusual. Hell, the entire Jim Crow south was a fascist one-party police state. So the acceptance and even embracing of the idea of cops (and certain self-appointed civilian deputies) policing public spaces runs deep throughout the history of this country.

Yes, and also, if you have a super low ERA+ (i.e., super high ERA), chances are you're not getting 150 innings in a season.

Nate had the 11th lowest K/9 rate for any pitchers with 150 or more innings in a season not just during the 21st Century, not just during the wild card era, not just during the divisional or expansion eras, but during the integration era. He is surrounded on this list by pitchers from the 1940s and 50s

Yeah, it can be tricky for a lot of people to figure out what posts should go where. I expected to see a lot of that when I started this thread. Nothing can be really done about it, it’s just part of the forum landscape.

I think that until we move in the fencing in left field, we are always going to have trouble bringing in RHH slugging talent.

I don’t like the idea of SROs, which are invariably either uniformed police or uniformed like police, being mandated in all schools because in certain cases it feeds into what is called the school-to-prison pipeline, getting students used to a surveillance officer who is suspicious of or even hostile to them and contributing to a mindset of what they deserve and should expect in life. I understand that the majority of adults, including parents, want SROs in place for when a school shooter shows up. I would counter with two things: (1) school shootings are a one-in-tens-of-thousands event that will never be experienced by 99+% of the kids in SRO-schools anyway; and (2) fat lot of good SROs did at Parkland and Uvalde, among others I’m sure. I think getting kids used to living in a police state under which they are constantly surveilled is a gateway drug to getting them to accept a fascist state as the normal state of affairs.

I think there’s probably a 50% chance Kamala’s more genuine than your average politician.

Are you voting third party or staying home?

You’re voting for Trump, aren’t you?

I think that might be Trump's bid by going on every Russian-funded bro'ed-up podcast his Kremlin campaign plants can identify that will buy a second microphone he can use when he stops by. They believe using Trump in this way can persuade an army of incels to get off the ketamine long enough to march to the polls on Election Day to vote for him in numbers. If I'm the Harris campaign, I might consider using the fact that he is showing up for these podcasts in the first place as a data point to scare the vote out of everyone else.

I don't so much expect him to be a top five as much as hope as he can be a top five, because for all the flashes skill he has shown during those times he has stayed healthy, staying healthy is itself a skill he hasn't proven to have just yet.

At a certain point, though, Harris is going to have to decide whether keep Tork because Harris thinks he can be at least an All-Star-adjacent contributor, or Harris going to have to fluff Tork up as much as possible to sell him for as high as he can get, and then make that deal, whether it's this winter, next spring, next season, or next winter. I think I'd be surprised to learn that the former is the case. I have been coming around to the idea that what we're seeing here is simply a mismatch between system and talent, and I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that Tork can ever be converted, because I'm almost certain he's a guy who just wants to stay raw and let it rip, not go to school working on the same things over and over again every god damn day like it's Groundhog Day or something. The one thing I think we would hate to see happen is to have Tork stuck in replacement-level purgatory for the rest of his tenure here, we simply end up DFAing him sometime during the 2026 season, he latches on with someone else, and he finally gets the career we dreamed for him in a system that works for him, probably an analytics-agnostic system like the Angels or Rockies or Nationals.

Well, you and I both know that's not going to happen, and while I agree with you on the principle, if not on all the specific details, of Cheney's and that entire administration's war-criming, the 100% certainty that she would never do that is not going to factor into whether I root for her to win the election even a little bit. In fact, ironically, I would think that if any of this year's candidates would offer up Bush and Cheney to the Hague, it would be Trump, not because he is horrified by their actions in the White House—since it's a safe bet that in reality he actually admires those actions—but only because he hates their ****ing guts to the core and would do just about anything to shove it straight up their asses sideways.

I predicted super high turnout for 2020 on the old board, and I nor anyone else didn't have to be Nostra****ingdamus to get that one right. So I'm gonna go ahead and predict that this is going to be the greatest turnout for an election in American history, at least in numbers, if not in in percent of electorate, certainly higher than 2020.

To this point, I agree that the vast majority of eligible voters are simply not paying any attention to any of this as they pursue only those things that impact their own lives today, and I continue to be hopeful that as the election draws near, like in October, these people will starting to pay attention, look into the things we've been taking in every day for their first time, be horrified by what they didn't know before but now see, and will sprint to the polls at two in the morning on Election Day to make sure they secure their place in line for their opportunity to vote against that guy.

OK, so, what's the action item here?

Did you know that the Detroit Tigers almost moved to Pittsburg spelled without an H, Pennsylvania in time for the 1903 season? They had the plan and they thought they had the money fronted for it and everything, until the money part fell apart at the last minute. Why on earth would the Tigers have left Detroit to become a possible second-banana team in Pittsburg? It was because Ban Johnson's idea was to directly challenge the National League in as many cities as possible. That's why the Milwaukee franchise moved to St. Louis for the 1902 season; and also why when the Baltimore franchise shut its doors after the 1902 campiagn, it was reconstituted as the New York Highlanders for 1903 instead of restarting as another iteration of the Orioles. Plus, at the time, Pittsburg, including the city of Allegheny which they annexed in 1907, was a bustling steel and iron metropolis of almost half a million people, whereas Detroit was basically a horse-and-buggy manufacturing town of less than 300,000, and since horse-and-buggies were going the way of the horse-and-buggy, why keep a major league team in such a minor league horse town? Why, that would be asinine—might as well put teams back in Troy and Altoona while you’re at it, amirite? So, Detroit came thisclose from becoming a minor league city with an American Association or International League team for who knows how long?

We have the money and we have the lawyers. All that’s missing at the moment are the guns.

I guess this is a southern culture thing, but I will never understand how a 14-year-old, whose brain is not wired for adulthood even halfway, can be tried as an adult. That seems to me more like it’s meant to satisfy a kind of fascist bloodlust to maximally punish everyone all the time on behalf of the mob than it is a matter of public safety. The kid should be in the system for a long long time, perhaps for the rest of his life. But throwing him into a supermax prison among the worst, most psychotic adults in the world, hoping and praying he gets torn to shreds, doesn’t sound very Christian to me. Or maybe it does, I don’t know.

The “old” guys have been carrying the offense last couple of weeks. Also, Dillon Dingler is really overmatched.

I wonder how conflicted McCosky feels after that Daz Cameron single?

THAT was a Tyler Nevin strikeout.

Man, that was a sweet recovery by Carpenter to get the force at second on an tough outfield popup.