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Fun fact: Five of the top six guys in the batting order today have an OPS higher than league average of .708, one other is kind of close (Canha at .701), and Riley is sitting out.

I had hypothesized something along these lines might happen.

I agree votes are valuable in the aggregate, but my individual vote is practically worthless, because the Democrat is guaranteed to win by a mile. Not true in Michigan, which is why your vote is extremely valuable while it still hasn't been thrown out. I will proactively reject any counterargument that starts out with "what if everyone saw it the way you do and decided not to vote", because they don't see it that way, and they won't not vote for that reason. There is exactly zero zeitgeist going in that direction.

"Kamala the Killer"?

I didn't say your vote is entirely unimportant. As far as it goes to help select the 100% of electors in your particular state who will cast the vote for your candidate, it is very important. But once that slate is chosen, your individual vote does get thrown out and no longer counts in the choosing of the president. And if your candidate happens to lose your state, then your vote is completely wasted because it won't matter for your candidate in any way. In my case, my vote is virtually wasted, because in this political era, the Democrats have Illinois completely sewn up. If Illinois were to get to the point where my vote might be as important for choosing our slate of electors as your vote in Michigan is, then it will be practically wasted anyway, because that would mean the Republican is swamping the Democrat nationwide. So please, go vote, and good luck.

I'm listening to the worst goddamn earworm I can imagine at the moment: "Sweet Sally", Ted Nugent, off Cat Scratch Fever. ARRRGH! God, please, either kill me or make it stop!

As far as I care, yes. They're free to lip off all they want. I'm free not to care about it if I want.

Electoral votes are the only votes that count when it comes to deciding the president. Individual votes do not count. If they did, Hillary would have won in 2000, because she got more individual votes than Trump. You and I are not voting for president. We are voting for a candidate's slate of electors from our state. If the Republican wins, their slate of electors will cast the actual vote for president. If the Democrat wins, then their slate of electors will cast that vote. Either way, in the end, our individual votes get thrown out and do not count toward the actual electing of the president, and only the slate of electors' votes will count, and 100% of all of a state's electoral votes will go to either one candidate or the other.

Did anyone claim that vaccines have absolutely zero side effects? I mean claims by people in the NIH promotion the vaccine, not claims said to be made by caricatures made up by the RWM. Either way, a vaccine can both tend to generate side effects in a tiny portion of people and still be safe for the general population to use.

As far it goes to help choose which candidate will get 100% of the Michigan votes that matter, sure.

Well, technically, the entire Electoral College system throws out our votes in the end, but I take your point.

By the way, I looked at Fry's Reference card and here is what is list as his position: D2H73/59 The slash is a 10-game cutoff, meaning, he played ten or more games at the positions left of the slash, and fewer than ten games at the positions right of the slash. ("H" is pinch-hitter.) Take a deeper dive and this is how those positions break outs: So what the hell is wrong with Mike Chernoff and Stephen Vogt? Why do they have to play Fry all over the field? Why can't they stick a guy at a position and keep him there like teams did when I was eleven?

The cutoff I used was qualified hitter, meaning, 3.2 plate appearance times the number of team games. So, 3.2 * 99 = 317 plate appearances. David Fry has 259 plate appearances, which is why he didn't qualify. Also, I used .800 as the cutoff because that, not .790 (or, more exactly, .792) was the cutoff you established. To your point, thought, David Fry is a regular—an American league All-Star, in fact—and .792 is close enough for rock and roll. But now you understand why they did not show up in the list.

A lot of people are migrants and can’t get work. A lot of others are mentally ill and can’t get or keep a job, but there are no institutions who will help them (a core legacy of Ronald Reagan), so they have nothing else they can do. I would think very few who could get a job and could keep a home would choose joblessness and homelessness instead.

That’s OK, all kinds of people vote for Trump for one narrow reason. Lots of people will vote for him just because of the price of gas.

Good eye. Probably since they realized exotic names scare old people in small towns.

Only three teams have even three qualified hitters over .800 this year. .800 OPS doesn’t mean the same thing from year to year, anyway. This year, an .800 OPS translates to about a 130 OPS+. In 2000, it was closer to 105 or 110.

Things are looking so up with our last two drafts. I feel like all I have to do is live to see them. I really want to see Bryce Rainer.

As they have been all month? Baseball is so weird and upside down now—how about the A’s above us? And the Braves near the bottom? There is one team at the bottom we can’t see, though. Some things just don’t change. 😁

That’s a bad influence.

Who are the nuts you're referring to?

Without relitigating everything that was wrong with Avila, it wasn't an issue of his not pushing us into a full rebuild—after all, we lost 98, then 98, then 114 games in consecutive years on this watch—it's that he didn't know what the hell to do once we got there. Putting a loser on the field is the easiest thing to do in big league baseball, and Avila was among the best at that. But yes, we are now in the post-Avila rebuild, but I promise you we're going to get out of this one a lot a lot faster (although TBF, any amount of time is faster than never). Harris is rebuilding correctly right now, and we were so deep in the **** that it was never not going to take time. All you have to do is live through it.

In time, my friend. In time.