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I mean, I can see you're typing the words, but vast majority of the evidence I've seen from you is anecdotes from X, many of which are sketchy accounts; and the citations I've seen you you offer from MSM are pretty tame. I mean, really, a story about six elderly protesters outside a Jewish comedian's comedy show at a theater in Albuquerque? Come on.

Like. Also, that people will try better to have an opinion about Hamas rather than spread hate about Palestinians and pro-Palestinian protesters, who look like they're starting to make gains with the American public. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx

I don't think that's necessarily true of Ohtani. Not everybody gets into gambling to make life-changing money. Some do it for small stakes, relative to them, anyway. Maybe that's Ohtani. Or maybe he doesn't gamble at all. We have no way of knowing even given his denials and MLB's wishful thinking. We have to wait for the Feds to dive into it, and hope that they are not being influenced by Baseball during the investigation. As for he or any other player risking his careers on gambling: I'm not sure players think about it that way anymore, despite the posting of Rule 21(d) in clubhouses, which by now has to look like just so much wallpaper to players. Baseball, like any other authoritarian force like employers or pastors or parents, like to tell us "Do as I say, not as I do". (That was practically my mother's catchphrase.) But players aren't blind: they see Baseball, and other sports, raking in billions from gambling, so if daddy acts like gambling is OK, how are the kids gonna be expected to avoid it? Remember when baseball suspended Mickey and Willie for a year just for being casino greeters in Atlantic City? Baseball had no tolerance for gambling of any kind anywhere near their sport as long as the Black Sox scandal was still in living memory. But no one is alive to remember it firsthand any longer, and it seems so much like ancient history these days. So now, with no one left to tell the story any longer, Baseball is trying to thread the needle in a very fine way: it's OK if you players gamble on this, but not that; and it's OK if you gamble there, but not here; and you can't gamble during this timeframe, but you can gamble any other time all you want. How can we expect thousands of players up and down their system to keep all that straight and toe that line exactly? And how are you going to keep gambling proxies from consorting with ballplayers? Baseball, like every other megabusiness, is trying to reap all the good while brooming all the bad out of sight under the rug. They might get away with it for a while, maybe even this time, if they can successfully convince the world that it was merely one bad apple who doesn't even play the game, for cry eye. But the day of reckoning is guaranteed to come, it will be ugly, and there will be drama and changes. Maybe not this month, or this year, or even a few years, but eventually, and inevitably.

Right, Manfred couldn't just wave a magic wand and make blackouts go away, even if that's what he wanted to do.

Yeah, Newsweek is not much better. On the others, you continually conflate pro-Palestinian protests in the western world with Hamas terrorism in Israel. To Rob's point, there can be peaceful pro-Palestinian protests, which as far as I can tell from my reading is the vast majority; there can be violent pro-Palestinian protests, which I have seen only claims on X and Reddit for; and there can be Hamas terrorism, which does not qualify as protest at all. Those strike me as all being distinct separate deals. Based on your voluminous posts here, it seems all the same to you.

God bless Jerry Seinfeld, how brave he was to decide to still perform his show even with six menacing protesters in front of the theater.

lol Visegrad 24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visegrád_24#Misinformation

Has anyone ever actually made 100 million dollars on gambling? Seems like anyone at that level of action is going to figure out how to make it less of a gamble and more of a sure thing. In any event, I don't think the issue is how much money Shohei might have made on gambling, as much as he might be involved in gambling himself. After all, Pete Rose also denied it over and over until investigators saw how Red his hands were. (See what I did there?) I'm not saying I believe Ohtani is a degenerate gambler like Pete Rose. But I also don't believe he simply because he read a prepared statement averring he never gambles, or because an entire media apparatus dedicated to promoting Ohtani as the future of the game insists that he has never gambled. I do know this, based on reporting to date: Ippei, an $85,000/year working stiff to whom an illegal bookmaker saw fit to extend $4.5 million in credit, felt very comfortable telling ESPN that his good friend Shohei helped him out of a jam by arranging nine wire transfers of $500,000 a pop from his account to the same bookmaker in 2022 and 2023, and an Ohtani spokesman felt very comfortable in confirming right afterwards that yes, that's exactly what happened. Then, 12 hours later, the Ohtani camp ran a truck back and forth over the remains of Ippei's career by claiming he had perpetrated a massive theft that nobody, including the accountants or his agent, who were employed by Shohei Ohtani Inc. ever noticed even once over the course of more than a year. That's why I'm waiting for federal investigators to dig into and report on it. Until then, I will gleefully engage in speculation based on reporting to date.

Thank you, you saved me the effort of asking for evidence of what he's talking about. Are there actual news items reporting any of this? And is this all happening in scale, continuous and everywhere? Or is the evidence being offered basically uncorroborated one-off posts on X? I don't know either way, that's why I'm asking.

Of course it's true that people of all stripes can be antisemitic, and that goes double if someone like Robert Kennedy Jr. is assigned to the left, something a lot of people do. (I myself wouldn't.) What I don't co-sign onto is the idea that anyone who raises any objection to the brutality of Israel's apparently indiscriminate destruction of Gaza is de facto engaging in antisemitism. I understand I'm inviting the obvious whatabout, but even granting that, Israel is bigger than Hamas, so more is expected of them in terms of proportional response. It's one of the reasons why Netanyahu's political fortunes are quickly waning in Israel: he is the author of the indiscriminate nature of the destruction, and the people who live in Israel, including many if not most Jews, expect better of their leaders. And that's also true of Jewish activists here in the United States: they expect better of Israel, their traditional homeland. "Not in our name" didn't start with histrionic college freshmen at Ivy League schools, after all. I am also surprised at how little room has developed for nuance on the discussion of this topic. This may be the most black-and-white issue I've ever seen on this board, meaning in terms of positions taken (rather than right-and-wrong).

At my stage of life, every day is Friday. 😁

Before or after his gambl ... er, gaming los ... err, downward adjustments?

I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference between who among the nationals have been paying attention to what the Tigers have been doing (Gammons, Joel Sherman), and who have not (Jim Bowden, MLB Network chuckleheads).

Since they built the new outdoor concourse ringing the outside of the ballpark here, and my seats are literally last row right in front of the walkway to it, it's super easy to run to the bathroom, or run to get a beer, and get back before first pitch of the next half-inning. It's one of the few really good things the Cubs have done for that ballpark.

That was an issue for years at Wrigley, and then when they updated the speaker system (which they ballyhooed all that winter), it was hardly any improvement at all. We're guessing that the natural acoustics attendant to the configuration of the second deck, with its posts and a roof with a mish-mash of exposed girders underneath, defeats any attempts to improve aural intelligibility.

Funny you say because my wife and I were talking to a woman at a game last season who said she hated the new pitch timer specially because it did not give her enough time to go get a beer in between innings.

Hey, maybe that's why there are no games starting before 3pm local in any market. EDIT: D'oh! Tomorrow is Good Friday, not today!

You mean November! Come on, man, aim high! 😃

Javy has gone 4-for-4 exactly three times in his 1,142-game career. I don't know what the expected number of 4-for-4s would be by a guy who's played that many games, but at first blush, it seems low.

Read the thread.

I do find it interesting how the basic Constitutional right to free speech gets questioned by people when the slight inconvenience of the free speech being actually exercised forces them to have to find a somewhat less-direct alternate route to Walmart.

You also truncated the post to in an attempt to change the point from being mine to being yours, although, honestly, I'm not sure you even followed up on your own point here.

Not even close to what I was talking about.

So many meh series would be so much better as a really good feature-length film.

It’s borderline offensive to conflate a woman exercising her Constitution right to protest while having a baby in a jumper on her back as being a human shield, with the idea of terrorists actually using babies as actual shields and putting them in a position to be killed in order to protect themselves. Believe it or not, they are not even close to being the same.