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I have sort of the same problem in that one of my next-door neighbors has a humongous tree that must be over 100 years old. Some years ago I turned my postage stamp-sized front lawn into a garden with a tree that’s rather large itself, so even if I took that down, there would still be a ton of leafage courtesy of my neighbor’s tree in my front yard. If you know how tightly built together houses are in this city, you know why it’s bit of a problem.

I watched the first episode of Death by Lightning on Netflix last night, and it is off to a legitimately great start. I can hardly wait to watch episode two today.

I agree, I don’t really want to contemplate that either, but it is a strong consideration to plan for. A number of one-year contracts might be beneficial to a team that is loaded at certain positions in their system, such as we are at dirt positions.

Hypothetical question: who would benefit more from a conditional long-term deal that voids if there is a work stoppage? Suppose a team signs Bichette to, let’s say, 5/150. Could there/would there be any condition within which stipulates that in the event of a stoppage, the deal is void? I could see either side benefitting from that depending on what first year comp would be. If it’s front-loaded in Year One, that benefits Bichette by giving him more money and setting a higher market for him next time; if it’s flat or back-loaded, that helps the team more by preserving assets for a long “winter”. Flip side, if Bichette were to agree to a front-loaded contract—say, 40/30/30/25/25—that would peg his final market at age 34 to the lower number than to the average or higher number. Would the parties agree to a one-time payout if there is a work stoppage? Say, if the team insists on a flat 30 every year, would Bichette demand, say, a $5 or $10 million payout if there’s a stoppage to satisfy his desire for a higher value in year one in case of stoppage and sweeten the pot at the end to sign? Would a team agree to that? Would it even be legal to arrange for such a payout during a work stoppage? Of course, if there is no work stoppage at all, none of this would matter, but I think everyone in the business is planning for the stoppage. This idea has just flown into my head so I haven’t been baking it for long, and I’m just throwing it out there if anyone’s interested in picking up this ball. You might not even agree with any of my assumptions.

It might be something Bichette and other long term candidates worry about. They might not want to hamstring their future earnings with a pre-stoppage deal if the resulting deal substantially favors Players. Might we see a lot of high-dollar one-year contracts this winter for guys who would normally get a bunch of years? Something like that would open up the market to a lot more teams, particularly us.

Another reason not to lock up Torres to years is all the potential second basemen we expect to come up in the next couple years.

Perhaps another thing that will diminish everyone’s free agency is the impending lockout. Will teams commit money and future years to players when they don’t know what the landscape is going to look like?

He would definitely go. They might not make the offer to him.

And just in time for Thanksgiving. Tell you what: this sure didn't happen under Biden.

Including Trump, right? Because I posted that $3 billion heist post right before ⬆️ post

I don't know if it's Dodgers, necessarily. They have a lot of Cy Young-level pitchers there right now. But I bet it would be a team that was ready to contend for a ring before he gets there.

Peanuts.

That's going to be a tricky balance for her. Unless she successfully completes a transformative makeover in the next year, she's never going to get the center to center-right in a 2028 election, and the red hats will dismiss her as a RINO.

How about, "the cheese fell off his cracker a long time ago"?

True: the Jim Crow-era Democratic Party had both the effete eastern liberal camp and the murdering southern fascism camp. Big tents are big.

I don't know what the offer would have to be to pry Skubal away from the Tigers this winter, or who would make such an offer, but if that offer does not make us better in 2026—if it were to force us to take a step back from contending—then it's just not going to happen. Simple as that. Because if Harris purposely takes us off the contender track for the promise of making us better than we are now starting in 2028 or 2029, the fans would go ape****, the players would go ape****, the free agents would avoid us for the rest of his tenure here, and he'd be basically a marked man in this industry. The only PBO job he could get after a debacle like that would be along the lines of Pirates, White Sox, Rockies, et al. The only way he wouldn't be a marked man is if it's widely known the Baby Doc forced him to sell off Skubal which, after the millions poured into the infrastructure of the team to make us a perennial contender, simply doesn't pass the smell test.

I’m out of reactions, but Like.

There’s a good reason those closeted gay Republicans appear so publicly anti-gay. It’s related to the reason closeted people who are ashamed for being gay gravitate toward organizations that are the most vocally anti-gay, and the more shame they feel for being gay, the more violently they act out publicly, and the more crazy they behave privately when they go on a gay bender.

It’s taking a long time for them to get to the voter fraud part. It’s been, what, a whole day already?

OK, so, first this part … "If we see someone leaking, you’re fired," Eric Korsvall, the organization’s chief operating officer, said during the question and answer portion of the meeting. While Roberts stated unequivocally in his original video that the Heritage Foundation would never cancel "our friends," he said Wednesday he should have made clear there was a "limiting principle.” "You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows, and I should’ve made that clear." So the attendees are warned to not leak the meeting under threat of termination, and then Roberts pussyfoots around the apology clutching his pearls saying he would never cancel anyone. I don’t understand the point of apologizing internally while allowing the impression externally that Roberts is 100% behind Carlson and, by extension Fuentes. Separately, I found this interesting, from the end of the article: Roberts took questions from the audience, including from Robert Rector, a welfare scholar, who described himself as a 47-year veteran of the Heritage Foundation—"longer than most of you have been alive," he said. He harkened back to William F. Buckley Jr., the National Review founder. "I hope you know who he is," Rector said. "The boundaries that he set forth, William Buckley, in the early 1960s, were twofold. You have to expunge all anti-Semitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it … the other is you have to expel the lunatics. Ok? The lunatics who think that Eisenhower is a communist. And we have them back now. Ok? They are both here, back, just the way they were in 1959. And we have to go back and set the general parameters. You say, ‘Oh, we don’t cancel.’ We do cancel. Did we cancel David Duke? Yes. Did we cancel the John Birch Society? Yes, ok. Because they were harmful. Because if they’re in your movement you look like clowns. The issue here is Tucker Carlson … Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum." It took a guy with half a century in the organization to remind everyone of how the Foundation finally ended up canceling the crazies after all, in a way they refuse to today. He remembers. This is in part why fascism is making such a strong comeback in America today: te fascist world we fought to destroy in no longer in living memory. It’s just a tall tale to people today.

Which means, of course, that no other organization is likely to empty the top of the farm system for one year of Skubal.

To the degree it exists in other sports, that's probably because their players' unions had to approve it. I don't see the MLBPA agreeing to it, and since Baseball is a federally-protected monopoly and the other sports businesses are not, I would guess they would try to unilaterally impose that on Players who would have to get the issue adjudicated in a court of law.

I hope he saved his money and invested wisely. He's gonna need it.

Well, it's definitely not going to be the first thing they do.