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Don’t look now, but “McStinky” is now a 1.2 WAR player for the year, which is his best season. He has been impossibly hot lately: .373/.431/.525 in the last 30 days, .462/.500/.654 in the last two weeks.

I don’t listen to MLB audio for radio broadcasts anymore because the same Chicago-based radio spots are played for me no matter where in the country I am. MLB on Sirius is better in that regard.

Skubal with the lead now.

Super weird play. Meadows might have been able to get that, although that probably was a 5-star play. And then the monumental ****up by the A’s to actually make an out and score none instead of scoring two. Wow. Baseball, man.

**** Cheney spent his entire vice presidency building alliances to maintain the international order with America in the lead, and he is not in the mood to let Donald Trump **** that the **** up, so god damn right he’s voting for Kamala, a proven World Order proponent.

We’re talking 1/1s, not down the draft picks. Nobody else would have passed on Casey Mize, and nobody else would have passed on Spencer Torkelson, and it doesn’t make the Tigers dullards or luddites because they didn’t go against that universal grain, regardless of how Brady Singer does after the fact.

I agree that “you’re welcome” feels stiff, and I usually end up saying “of course” or “sure thing” or “sure”. I would never say “no problem” because when I myself hear it, it frequently feels freighted with underlying feelings that are unspoken, and I don’t think I have it fully figured out. Maybe it’s because it implies that it would normally be considered a problem. In any event it usually makes me feel a little uneasy. I would bet that most of the time people don’t mean anything by it, and that they’re just delivering it by rote, which would mean they’re not engaging.

The plan is working according to plan …

I’m sorry, I don’t see the relevance as it relates to the Mize pick. Tork was a consensus 1/1 as well.

Mize was the consensus 1/1 on all fronts, so ruing that we could or should have picked anyone else is basically being Captain Hindsight.

See, that’s another change in the past few generations: the expectation of saying “thank you” has completely shifted from the service clerk to the customer. In maybe 80% of cases it goes like this: transaction completed, clerk hands customer the receipt, clerk says “have a good one”, customer says “thank you.” Occasionally the phrases will be flipped: transaction completed, clerk hands customer the receipt, customer says “thank you,” clerk replies, “have a good one”, or nothing at all. To me, the ideal transaction would be, clerk hands me receipt or change, says “thank you”, and I say “thank you”, with the attendant farewells. But I don’t get to expect that. I don’t know whether retail chains train their clerks in customer interaction, but if they do at all, it definitely does include “say thank you after the transaction”, because hardly anyone does that. I’m of the impression that clerks, especially those who identify as black, feel uncomfortable saying “thank you” because to them it implies a form of servility, and that’s a particular sore point with them, and you can see why. I remember this topic coming up on the old board maybe 10 or so years ago. I had mentioned in that pet peeve thread how I missed when clerks would say “thank you” after a transaction, and some posters there absolutely hammered me for that, basically saying how dare I expect clerks to kiss my ass, or something to that effect. Their response seemed a little overboard to me. There was also a sidebar about name tags, and a couple posters who wore name tags for their job insisted it was not at all intended for customers to refer to them by name while they’re on the job, which they regarded as a kind of violation of their personal dignity, a sort of keep-my-name-out-of-your-filthy-mouth thing. I can’t remember the reason they said the name tag was for, but I do remember thinking that it didn’t pass the smell test for me.

It is definitely a different era for retail or restaurant or service worker protocols when it comes to etiquette. When I was growing up, when you made a retail transaction, the clerk would invariably close the transaction with "thank you". They said this to me even when I was a early teenager, and that was during an era of maximized suspicion and loathing of long-haired teenagers. Nowadays, I would say that fewer than 10% of retail clerks end the transaction with "thank you", and maybe 75% of them end with this exact phrase: "Have a good one". I don't know how that phrase achieved such universality, but it has. The rest of the clerks maintain silence. I think this might be because many of the retail clerks of my youth grew up during the Depressions and war, during which there was still a culture that expected and accepted a form of cordial servility by service workers—perhaps related to the historical first class/second class divide I mentioned. That doesn't exist on just about any level these days, at least among service clerks born in first world countries. Nowadays clerks tend to think of customers as peers, which implies the negotiation of give and take, and not as patrons, which implies the imperative of service.

I don't think "Boss" is quite the same as "Bro" or "Buddy" or "Pal". At least those last three are somewhat peer-level greetings, even when they're delivered with barely concealed hostility, which they frequently are. "Boss" is a hierarchical greeting that's historically freighted because it has at least some connection to slavery and Jim Crow. The people who were expected to refer to someone else as "boss" didn't do so because they loved their boss, or because they thought of him as a benevolent benefactor. It was a way to establish a clear divide between first-class and second-class people, which is why second-class people were once routinely referred to as "boy", "girl", "auntie", or "uncle". How names and honorifics usually convey a great deal of meaning. We're not supposed to have a second class of people these days, and those who would have fallen into that category generations ago are acutely aware of that, so resurrecting the appellation "boss" is at least borderline provocative and sneaky hostile, I think in most cases, actually. After all, historically first-class people such as white collar people, especially women, don't address their bosses as "boss", unless the boss likes it or requests it, which to me actually constitutes a red flag about the boss. There's only one acceptable situation in which I don't mind when some random dude calls me "boss", and that's if he honestly mistakes me for Bruce Springsteen. Otherwise, stow it, chief.

At least someone in the vicinity got it right.

I feel really good about the turnout for Kamala and against Trump. That’s going to be at least close to a record. The two wild cards are how enthusiastic will be the turnout for Trump, and how effective the Kamala vote can be suppressed in places like Georgia and Florida. I don’t worry about that as much in Pennsylvania or the other battleground states.

I was just going to come in this morning and rhetorically ask, “So who wants to give Avila credit for this renaissance?”, but I guess I don’t have to do that after all. 💀

And Parker catches the final out. How poetic. This might be a key defining moment in the transformation of this franchise.

OH MY GOD! PARKER ****ING MEADOWS!

The lefthanded hitters are having some really impressive at bats against Suarez.

At least he had the decency to take the popup hard.

This should be Tork’s moment, a guy with his pedigree.

The really aggravating thing is that none of this is going to peel off red hats in any real numbers, because they have already been per-conditioned to regard any reporting on Trump as being part of a coordinated attack by a liberal media in the bag for Democrats. It really was a genius strategy on Trump part, and I'm pretty sure he didn't come up with it on his own.