chasfh

And they start tuning in for real in October and make their decision then. But they are watching TikTok now, and what they see on TikTok in June and July will factor into their decision in October

Yes, anyone would have taken Tork 1-1, and Avila is anyone, and so is everyone else. But while Tork has been doing terrible this season, is now the time to telegraph to him and everyone else that his days are numbered here? The timing is my question.

Your smartest guy in the room got ****canned in August of 2022.

I don’t know about that as an absolute. Valuation is relative, but if my system is lousy with first basemen and way short on shortstops, I might take a SS I rate at 92 over a 1B I might rate at 95.

I think there are more people legitimately undecided than we imagine. A lot of it has to do with Biden’s age. Tonight ain’t helping.

I’m old enough to remember when George Lombard Sr was a can’t-miss prospect. 👴

God damn it, Pitchbot is right!

I’m not sure whether Biden getting better is going to do him any good, anyway. Elections are won on the margin, and a big part of that margin are TikTok users, and they have all the TikTokable moments they need in the first ten minutes.

Thank you, United States Constitution. It can’t be any other way.

Joe Biden has about 40 minutes to figure out how to keep the entire planet from bailing on him.

He was a win-positive player in 2022 and could have served as a multi-positional depth piece. He was even average in outfield defense, not below average, by multiple measures, despite the moaning and groaning we did about him early that year. And he was defense-positive at 2B. We could use something like that now.

TBF, just about everyone here was screaming for Willi's head his entire last year here, same as Jeimer's head, so ...

Wrong thread! 😉😂

Please tell me you're not invoking Keider Montero as the future of our rotation in the same breath as Jackson Jobe.

All good points, although but I'm focusing on what happened, not what might have happened if. Just because Gore might have gutted out and won a challenge, but didn't, does not mitigate the abject awfulness of the Supreme Court of the last 25 years. Bush v Gore was the catalyst to make it all happen.

No contender is going to trade a core part of their lineup even fir a Cy Young contender. It would have to be someone close to major league ready who is blocked.

Gleyber Torres or bust!

I’ve been thinking a bit about the Supreme Court of late, and it occurs to me that the Court has done more in the last 25 years to make life for the average person far worse on an everyday basis than any other institution in America, bar none, and it’s not particularly close. Worse than the executive branch, worse than Congress, worse than government bureaucracy, worse than the media, arguably worse than the mammoth corporate class, even worse than religion. The Court is the undisputed champ of the last quarter century of making Americans’ lives miserable, and it’s been their worst quarter century ever, and that’s saying a lot, because they’ve had some doozies in their time like Dred Scott and Plessy and Korematsu and, of course, Marbury. I have five examples to back this up, in reverse chronological order: Dobbs. This was the decision that ended federal protection for choice and sent it back unprotected to the states to do what they wanted with it. They took this right away from individuals and they gave it to the state. They subsumed already-existing individual rights to state power. If that’s not fascism, nothing is. Murphy. A lot of people don’t know this one by name, but this was the ruling that overturned the federal ban on gambling, and opened up a freewheeling gambling mega-industry in which casinos and sportsbooks and online companies spends billions of dollars chasing people around trying to get them to bet bet bet bet. Here’s fifty free dollars for your first bet, guaranteed winner, do it right on your phone 24/7/365, and so on and so on. This ruling is certain to lead to one of the worst health crises in the history of the United States within the next ten years. Citizens United: now corporations and insanely wealthy individuals can give all the money they want to politicians, and can do it in all kinds of clandestine and even anonymous ways where we the people don’t know who they are. But the politicians know, and the politicians end up beholden to those who give them all the money, instead of working on behalf of us the people, and we end up abandoned especially when we need protections from the abuses of the very people who give them the money. Heller. This is the one that removed the well-regulated militia requirement from owning firearms. You don’t have to belong to a militia of any kind anymore, never mind a well-regulated one. Now anyone can be a lone wolf militia of one if they want, and in fact, we have seen a rise in exactly that kind of activity ever since the ruling. And the granddaddy of them all: Bush v Gore, the one without which none of the other four would even exist, because that guy ended up putting John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the court, which led to a hard right turn that ended up screwing Obama out of his rightful pick and giving Trump the opportunity to put three more hard right-wingers. Without Bush V Gore, we almost certainly don’t get Heller, Citizens United, Murphy, or Dobbs. And now they are angling for a sixth ruling to add to that list at whatever point they can figure out a way to give Trump unlimited immunity as president while not giving anywhere close to the same immunity to anyone else. And this doesn't even contemplate the dozens of smaller rulings, like those that came down today listed on this very page, that erode out country slowly but surely, like a frog slowly boiling in a pot of water. The Supreme Court is the most powerful, least accountable, most corrupt institution in this country, and the problem is, I have no idea how they could be stopped, short of impeachment and removal, which, according to Dershowitz, even if successfully voted upon, could probably be overturned by that very same court! tl;dr: The Supreme Court is now a monster. Full stop.

Cannon’s just doing what she was hired to do.

I don’t know about that—I think there are people who would sit out on voting for Trump but would come out to vote for Vance, assuming the exact same positions, because of the way Trump acts out and makes the whole party look like a clown show. I’m talking about people who want their fascism wrapped up in a nicely presentable package. Vance can do that.

Going nutjob is Trump playing to his base. But if it's his odious policies you're talking about—militarizing the border, abortion restrictions, trading taxes for tariffs, all that—that's not just for red hats. The center-right might hate it when Trump opens his mouth, but they definitely like what he wants to do on policy. I'm thinking double-digit percent of voters would vote for Trump's policies in more of a J.D. Vance package. As a man who has a base of celebrity and who can breathe fire when it's convenient, Vance is actually the guy I worry about most post-Trump.

If she don't hawk tuah, don't wanna talk tuhuh

Kids: stay in school.

I had thought Trump would find a way to pull out, but now that it appears the debate is going to happen after all, the thing I’m most concerned about is that Trump comes off looking reasonable and Biden’s game plan is all about Trump being a madman. People in the middle want desperately to vote for a reasonable Republican, so if Trump has a quiet debate with little or no acting out, he might make serious in-roads into the middle without losing a single red hat. Of course, then he has four-plus month to maintain that veneer of reasonableness with the middle, so …