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I have a 40-ounce Stanley Cup! I like it better than the hockey version! 🦆🦆🦆

This reads to me as though clock management was at least some of it.

Maybe if they were red instead … 😉

Hell yeah that’s progress!

I know someone who’s available. 😁

Sharp observation.

Nice start for SGL. Looking at his minors numbers this year, he had elevated FIPs, including 5-plus in Toledo, mainly because he gave up great gobs of bombs. As a result, his xFIP, which is FIP adjusted back to league-average home run rate, is sub-4. I don’t know if that explains his dominating his first two starts. But it is a data point.

Manning has shown flashes of Skubality, he just hasn’t been able to string together a bunch of them in a row. He’d been better of late, but it’s still fair to say that you never know which guy you’re gonna get when he starts. I’m mildly surprised to be reminded that Mize started 30 games and tossed 150 innings last year, because I think of him as being a healthcare disaster. I think his impending return will be one of the top stories going into 2024.

I don’t think anyone has argued that Avila could never ever make a good pick. After all, his background is scout. The problem is he couldn’t lead the development of them, because that’s not what scouts do.

Yeah, his upside here is Kevin Federline.

I can understand why this confuses you. You see, there was an effort last year by Missouri lawmakers to allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident have an abortion — from the out-of-state physician who performs the procedure to whoever helps transport a person across state lines to a clinic. It was a pretty well-reported effort and there were a lot of posts about it here on MTF at the time. So the post that confuses you was a comical riff on that. Hope that clears it up for you.

Remember that one NL game, I forget exactly which one—I think the Diamondbacks may have been involved?—where I think it was no score really late in the game, and some hitter broke up a perfect game with a bunt, and the entire baseball world went ape****? I’m fuzzy now on the details, but I wasn’t fuzzy then about my opinion that it was the right thing to do because a run would have won the game, so why wouldn’t somewhere try a bunt hit to get the lead run or winning run on base? That’s just good baseball. Now, if it’s a blowout late in the game, like 8-0 in the ninth, and a guy bunts just to throw a monkey wrench in a no-hit bid, then yeah, I totally agree that’s a chicken**** move. FWIW, I also don’t think I can say someone has a no-hitter going if it’s only the fourth inning. I think it’s gotta go at least six before I take it seriously. YMMV.

You can thank for new pitch timer for that, which is also being enforced between innings whereas it hadn’t been before.

The best part about his groping her breasts is that she guided his hand there with her own hand.

I agree with this in general, and as for the idea that Nixon would have been considered too globalist because of his foreign policy actions: I have no idea either way, but I’m wondering whether the so-called globalism on his part was the result of his own convictions, or whether he felt pressured by outside forces such as the overwhelmingly Democratic congresses he had to work with. I also wonder that about his creation of the EPA, which he gets almost total credit for, and which consolidated the disparate parts of enforcement of the new NEPA law that had been strewn across several existing departments into its own department. Was he streamlining it to make it a more effective organization, or was he actually consolidating it to make it easier to control the slow-rolling of its implementations?

Good one!

Better watch what you do and say in your car ... Here's my favorite part: A surprising number (56%) also say they can share your information with the government or law enforcement in response to a “request.” Not a high bar court order, but something as easy as an “informal request.” Yikes -- that’s a very low bar! A 2023 rewrite of Thelma & Louise would have the ladies in custody before you’ve had a chance to make a dent in your popcorn. But seriously, car companies' willingness to share your data is beyond creepy. It has the potential to cause real harm and inspired our worst cars-and-privacy nightmares. Really? Car companies reserve the right to turn over your data to law enforcement even for an informal request? Yikes! What would that even look like? (brrrring!) Car Company: Hello? Law Enforcement Agency: Hello, Car Company, this is your local, state and/or federal Law Enforcement Agency. Car Company: Oh, hello! Would you like to obtain all the data on everything our customers and their passengers ever said or done while in our cars which they paid us money for the privilege of driving but we still think of as ours anyway? Law Enforcement Agency: Oh! Well, we were really just calling to see whether you wanted to get a bite for lunch, but as long as you're of ... Car Company: Sent! Law Enforcement Agency: ... fering ... Car Company: Check your FTP client, should already be there! Law Enforcement Agency: Oh! And there it is! Hey, thanks a bunch! We'll let you know whether we need you to testify in any trials. Car Company: Looking forward to it! Just let us know!

Didn't they pass a law against you going out of state to do that and are offering anonymous informants $50,000 to rat on you and anyone helping you?

How about a little Alarmist Non-sense to take into the weekend? https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/09/mitt-romney-retirement-senate-constitution/675327/ My colleague McKay Coppins has spent two years talking with Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, former Massachusetts governor, and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. An excerpt from McKay’s forthcoming book confirmed the news that Romney has had enough of the hypocrisy and weakness of the Republican Party and will be leaving the Senate when his term expires; other stunning moments from their conversations include multiple profiles in pusillanimity among Romney’s fellow Republicans. (I am pleased to know that Senator Romney holds as low an opinion of J. D. Vance as I do; “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more,” he told McKay.) But I want to move away from the discussion about Romney himself and focus on something he said that too many people have overlooked. “Some nights he vented,” Coppins wrote of their conversations; “other nights he dished.” And then came a quiet acknowledgement that should still be shocking, even after seven years of unhinged right-wing American populism: “A very large portion of my party,” [Romney] told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester? I think every decent Republican has wondered the same thing. (The indecent ones have also wondered about it, but as Romney now accepts, people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have figured out that playing to the rot in the GOP base is a core skill set that helps them stay in Washington and far away from their constituents back home.) But enough about the hollow men of the GOP. Think about what Romney is saying: Millions of American citizens no longer believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. This is not some pedestrian political observation, some throwaway line about partisan division. Leave aside for the moment that Romney is talking about Republicans and the hangers-on in the Trump movement; they are also your fellow Americans, citizens of a nation that was, until recently, one of the most durable democracies on Earth. And they no longer care about the fundamental document that governs our lives as Americans. If Republicans no longer care about the Constitution, then they no longer care about the rule of law, secular tolerance, fair elections, or the protection of basic human rights. They have no interest in the stewardship of American democracy, nor will they preserve our constitutional legacy for their children. Instead, they seek to commandeer the ship of state, pillage the hold, and then crash us all onto the rocks. It would be a relief to find out that some of this is about policy, but for many of the enemies of the Constitution among the new right, policy is irrelevant. (One exception, I suspect, might be the people who, if faced with a choice between a total ban on abortion and the survival of the Constitution, would choose theocracy over democracy; we’d all be better off if they would just admit it.) The people Romney is worried about are not policy wonks. They’re opportunists, rage-junkies, and nihilists who couldn’t care less about policy. (Romney describes one woman in Utah bellowing at him, red-faced and lost in a mist of fury while her child stood nearby, to the point where he asked her, “Aren’t you embarrassed?” She was not.) What they want is to win, to enjoy the spoils and trappings of power, and to anger and punish people they hate. There is no way to contend, in a rational or civic way, with this combination of white-hot resentment and ice-cold cynicism. Romney describes multiple incidents in which his colleagues came to him and said, You’re right, Mitt. I wish I could say what you say. I wish we could stop this nightmare. And then all of them belly right back up to the table in the Senate Dining Room and go on pandering to people who—it bears repeating—no longer care about the Constitution. This is the seedbed of authoritarianism, and it is already full of fresh green shoots. And yes, at some point, if someone is clever enough to forge a strong and organized party out of this disjointed movement, it can become a new fascism. So far, we should be grateful that Donald Trump and those who surround him have all been too selfish and too incompetent to turn their avarice into a coherent mass movement. If you’ve ever served in the military or as a civilian in the U.S. government, you’ve taken the oath that requires you, above all—so help you God—to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Romney is warning us that many of his Republican colleagues and much of their base will do no such thing. They would rather turn their personal misery and resentment into mindless political destruction—even to the point of shredding one of humanity’s greatest political documents. I have written before that we can no longer indulge Republicans and their various media enablers in the fantasies that Trump is a normal candidate, that we are heading into a normal election, that the Republican Party is a normal party (or, indeed, a political party at all). How we each defend the Constitution is an individual choice, but let us at least have no pretenses, even in our daily discussions, that we live in normal times and that 2024 is just another political horse race. Everything we believe in as Americans is at stake now, and no matter what anyone thinks of Mitt Romney, we owe him a debt for saying out loud what so many Republican “leaders” fear even to whisper.

Hope you're right!

Wait a minute here: if they are concerned about Florida residents being used as "guinea pigs" for the mRNA COVID booster because they think the vaccine is dangerous—because why else would they be concerned about that—then why are they not advising people over the age of 65 to avoid the shot as well? Does Ron DeSantis want to kill off Florida's senior citizens, or something?

I said at the beginning of the year we'd be north of 75 wins, so I'm rooting for that. I also think there might be a psychological thing related to losing 90 versus losing 80-something that might give us some marginal edge in the offseason free agent market.

He can trust her because irrespective of her competence, she's loyal. At least for now.

Reminds me of this one famous website I worked for, run by a European billionaire, and we would have a once-a-year sexual harassment seminar run by his handpicked moderator. The woman he picked was … ummm … striking. So much so, I wondered whether he was trolling us. He also ended up leaving his wife for his personal assistant. But hey, that was almost 20 years ago, what did we know in 2004?