chasfh

Fifty-five minutes left. I want my shiny new toys!

Absolutely, and Facebook, Imstagram, YouTube, all of it. It will be especially delicious when it comes to Twitter.

Again, someone should start a random baseball thread for random baseball stuff—anyway, pulling together something for a deck I'm doing and ran across this interesting tidbit from 1901, just as the American league was becoming a major league.

Fire Harris!

Montalvo is the get. #27 Pipeline midseason, #19 Fangraphs as of July 12. FG: 19. Joseph Montalvo, SP Drafted: 20th Round, 2021 from Central Pointe Christian (FL) (TEX) Age 22.2 Height 6′ 2″ Weight 185 Bat / Thr S / R FV 40 Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Slider Changeup Command Sits/Tops 40/50 50/60 40/55 35/60 91-94 / 97 Montalvo has a very athletic drop-and-drive delivery with big hip/shoulder separation that may portend more velocity even though he’s a smaller-framed guy. He’s run a sub-3.00 ERA at every minor league level, including at High-A this year, because Montalvo’s command weaponizes below-average stuff that might keep improving. His fastball already punches above its weight because of its uphill angle, and Montalvo has feel for a long-bending low-80s slider that flashes plus length and will likely play plus at maturity because of his command. He also has a mid-80s changeup that flashes bat-missing tail, but it tends to have early action that puts hitters off the scent, and Montalvo uses it sparingly. Montalvo’s capacity for movement and lower body athleticism is exciting and makes me want to project on his stuff quality into his mid-20s. He’s thrown a ton of strikes in the low minors and stands a good shot to be a no. 4/5 starter down the line. He’s Rule 5 eligible this offseason and might be kept at High-A all year in effort to keep him off the Rule 5 radar. He’s more likely to be rostered after next season and debut in 2026, probably as a spot starter. Seems like a good get for a middle reliever.

But at least Flaherty will not have blocked a trade at the last second! 😁

They allow toilet paper in the visitor's clubhouse? Talk about mollycoddling. Why, back in my day, if an opponent tried to wipe his ass with toilet paper we'd beat him unconscious to a bloody pulp and then let the red ants do the rest. The nerve ...

Ha ha ha, yeah, I'm actually being serious here.

Or ... and hear me out, here ... or he's going to explain why he did not or could not trade Flaherty.

How soon before the RWM start hammering Twitter for its liberal bias for allowing pro-Kamala/anti-Trump tweets on its platform?

Jonathan Swan got it all wrong in his tweet. The correct way to say it is, "Trump doesn't yet have a functioning transition team but will likely never need its resources anyway."

Shhh, don't give the mopes ideas! 😝

Homophobic queer-shaming is a bad look in 2024.

They can call it Project 2025 or the Fascism Program or the Permanent Government Shutdown Proposal or Betty Jane Bluebells if they want. It doesn’t matter what they call it because they’re still going to do it. All of it. Kamala cannot let anyone forget that.

Trump can’t get his arms around a rabbit? What is he in this meme, two-foot-three?

Non-player character? National Physique Committee? Northland Pioneer College? National Panhellenic Conference? National Plasterers Council? National Pharmaceutical Council? Navy Personnel Command? National Park College? Am I getting any closer? https://www.google.com/search?q=NPC&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1-m

Talk about the gift that keeps on giving … One of the things I was really worried about after the debate was that Trump was taking some sort of high road by not piling on Biden and instead letting Biden implode on his own, and that would bring reasonable swing voters and fence-sitters into the fold. But now with Kamala on board, it’s been just a complete 180. Trump is not only back to his unhinged self, but now he’s really going off the deep end, not bothering to keep his anti-anyone-not-WASPy-man-ism in check at all anymore. The worse he thinks it’s going for him, the worse a candidate he gets. If he keeps going on the trajectory he’s now on, not only will he lose his election , but the Democrats will mop the floor with the Republicans in the House, and D might end up keeping the Senate as well despite an historically unfavorable election map. It’s freaking amazing in the best possible way. What I’m tying myself into knots over is trying to figure out just how the Supreme Court is going to step in and hand him the presidency. It might be as simple as they rule on an arcane election fraud issue in his favor—someone here once said the justices care too much about their legacy to do anything so crass, but at least five of them owe their careers to Trump and/or don’t give a shït about what liberals think their legacy should be—or it might be in some way no one can even imagine today. Either way, if we think SCOTUS is just going to sit on their hands and allow democracy to simply happen in this election, then I believe they don’t understand this particular Court.

Not doing the players any favors, either. I’m maybe 80% certain that the Tigers have more home day games than any other team.

"owwwns, owwwns ..."

Never say "ever", but yeah, I agree that it'll be a while.

Do you really hate to thread police? Because you just got at least six likes for this post, so I would think you love to thread police! 😉🤣 Look, I won't speak for sports_freak, but if you care about being fair about it, I wasn't the one who brought up "Erod". RedRamage did, and tiger337, casimir, shinzaki, and longgone all weighed in on it before I posted my first words about it, and gehringer_2, kdog kept it going, too. So as long as you're name-checking perpetrators whenever you do thread police, make sure you're getting everyone who got the fire going and kept it going, not just the people you think have the most obnoxious takes on it. Love ya, buddy! 😘

And that's why I don't blame Harris for this, in that it's not his fault, even though he has to take responsibility for it, in that he has to manage the organization based on the result. He can't account for his player and the agent just being lying liars who are misleading him on their intentions.

And if the Dodgers are the only team making at least a halfway decent offer, then what was Harris to do? Cancel the deal on the last day even though the player kept saying yes to it, on the off chance he might block the trade because it's one of his ten teams? Would that have made Harris a hero here then? I don't think so. Or maybe Harris should not have taken any calls from any of the ten teams on the list, on the off chance Eduardo would nod yes the entire time until the last second when might block the trade, and then get nothing for him as he ended up doing anyway? Would everyone here believe Harris did the right thing then? I don't believe this, either. Should Harris have put a second team on the line as a fallback, even if they offer way under market value for Eduardo, on the off chance that Eduardo would nod yes to the deal the entire time and then block it at the last second, because getting something anything for him, even a Verlander-level return, would have been better than nothing? Does Harris win with the posters here for that? Highly doubtful. Really, I don't see any reasonable scenario where Harris should have had to anticipate every single contingency, the basis of which would be to completely mistrust everything the player and his agent say along the way, and come out a winner in this board's eyes. It just doesn't pass any smell test.

All reporting available to us reported that they were in the loop with each other the whole time, that Eduardo nodded yes to the deal the entire time, and the last minute demand was a surprise neither the Tigers nor Dodgers could have reasonably expected based on how things were going.