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I wonder what percentage of pitcher contracts are successfully insured? How common was the Strasburg contract situation? That would give us an idea of how far things would have to go to wake up the owners. Maybe that’s one reason hardly anybody was getting super long deals this winter—teams couldn’t get reasonably-priced insurance, so enough of them said no to drive down the market on pitchers and other players with injury history. Not the Dodgers, of course, because they have funny money. And Nola and Hader have both been horses so it was probably easy to insure them.

If you’re going to eventually spend it anyway, why not just spend the money now wherever they accept Apple Cash? Then if it turns out it is someone you know after all, you can dig into your bank account to make them whole.

I’m afraid I have no advice about budget software, but I can totally co-sign onto this sentiment. I had spent the first half-century of my life buying the cheapest option possible (or, just as commonly, the second-cheapest option because of a presumed quality boost over the cheapest) just to save money. Once I turned fifty and started realizing I was going to have to start keeping things literally for the rest of my life, I started buying the highest quality stuff almost regardless of price, and I have never regretted that. It took another ten years to get my wife on board with that, and I’ve got her almost all the way there.

Mr and Mrs Smith, anybody? If you like “Atlanta”, you’ll like this, since many of the same people work on both, and they both have the same feel and approach to photography and dialogue.

Even worse, Ttump appears to be running our foreign policy.

What’s in it for Fox News to allow this woman to lay a big stinking turd on Judge Jeanine’s set?

Are these direct contributions only, or does this include dark super PAC money?

I’ll be impressed when the responsibility extends to the white principal, too.

That might help on the one count, although I’m not sure it would help keep balls from flying out of the park, so pitchers would still need max/max effort on every pitch to avoid that outcome.

Which leads to the $64 question, how does the game get restructured to lead to this? And bonus question, when needs to happen for Baseball to care enough to address it?

It doesn’t much look like they’re gonna get tonight’s game in, and they don’t have a workable common off day until September 23 (unless Thursday after All-Star Game is on the table), so they may have to play a doubleheader. That would make seven games against our key division rival in the next ten days. This might set the tone for the whole season, right here.

I've been giving this a good deal of thought, and I realize that it's possible that the pitching coaching is just far ahead of the hitting coaching. But from a smell-test standpoint, I find that less likely than another hypothesis I've been gravitating toward: as a group, our hitting prospects are simply not as good from a big-league standpoint as our pitching prospects. It's not as though all players are tabula rasas that can all be molded into Hall of Famers under the right circumstances and coaching. Different players have different ceilings. Some will indeed top out at the Hall of Fame level; others top out at the minor league level. When it comes to groups of people, that's just the way things are. My hypothesis is that when it came to player acquisition through the draft, international, minor-league free agents, trades, whatever, the Avila regime may simply have had a better idea of how to acquire pitching talent than hitting talent. I think it might have had something to do with the types of pitchers and hitting they preferred. Avila was known to draft pitchers for speed and spin toward the end, perhaps resulting from the data analysis Jay Sartori put together. But when it came to hitters, Avila always did like scrappy guys who were more run manufacturers than he did on-base guys or big boppers. That's why our system was lousy with that kind of hitter, at least until last year and this. So maybe it's not that the Hinch coaching team is incompetent when it comes to working with hitters. Maybe it's that they simply had less to work with when it came to the hitters they inherited than they had with the pitchers. Here's some more sample size fun for you: this, from FanGraphs, shows all Tigers hitters with at least 20 plate trips, ranked by wOBA: There are twelve such hitters on the Tigers. Five of the top seven are Harris acquisitions. Of the two that aren't, Carpenter was a 19th-round pick so I wouldn't consider it an Avila coup; and the other is Riley Greene, a slam-dunk 1/5 pick. All five at the bottom are Avila pickups. They have all working under the same hitting coach team who all report to A.J. Hinch since February. Again, sample size, so maybe this means nothing and will be completely disproved within the next few weeks. And TBF, this is a blunt table that doesn't take into account the commitment Harris has made to bottom-fiver Colt Keith. But I think this is at least worth watching over the next year or two.

OK, hope so either way, because the alternative.

Jerry Seinfeld hosted something in 1990 called Spy Magazine’s How to be Famous, which is a hilarious but at least semi-serious examination of how people become famous and maintain their fame. Rule #1 was “Have talent”, which he demonstrates doesn’t always work by showing a concert violinist plying her trade on a subway platform.

Oh good lord, now what?!

They’ll get the waiver. The system is designed to help Trump and people like Trump.

States’ rights is practically the textbook definition of fascism, which elevates the rights of the state above the rights of the people.

The idea that an athlete would expend just enough energy needed to win the game sounds reasonable on paper. But considering that most professional ballplayers are actively striving to either make the majors, or to keep from getting sent down to the minors, every single pitch adds to a body of work against which he will be judged worthy or unworthy. I don’t see where a Mud Hen pitcher lays up just enough to still be able to win a minor league game, when doing so affects the record he and his career prospects will be judged on. In the end, he is judged on his personal pitching record, not his team’s win-loss record.

Related to our topic:

OK, sorry, I misunderstood. I thought when your put "threaded" in quotes you were referring to my post, since I also used the phrase "threading the needle" in exactly the same way as being a potential wild card for Trump's messaging.

Replying since this is a direct reference to my post. This is not my word, or my implication, at all. Not even close.

The extreme on the right are Trump's base, and they make up at least a quarter and maybe a third of his party. The extreme on the left are definitely not Biden's base, and they make up probably single-digit percent of the Democratic Party. Biden's true base is the establishment middle of the party, and they make up the substantial majority. The job is to get them to come out. Hanging the election on whether the extreme left votes for Biden is like hanging the election on whether the extreme right can be moved off Trump. Neither is going to happen, anyway, so the Democratic Party should go after what can be got, not after what can't.

This should provide comfort.

I'm not sure I have ever heard these six words strung together in this exact order before. 😉

I agree that most sea changes in the game are generational. After all, when they made the ball live in 1920, only Babe Ruth was taking advantage of it while the rest of the players kept batting like it was still a dead ball. It took a decade or so before more players starting figuring out how they could get 30+ bombs, too. (Answer: swing from your heels and accept the strikeouts.) What I'm not sure of is whether Baseball and Players will just accept that the game has changed and that pitchers will shred their arms as a matter of course because that's just how it goes now. At least Players won't accept that; Baseball would be just fine with it. But ultimately, I do think Baseball will make, or attempt to make, some adjustment to address it and reduce elbow/shoulder injuries. I also think that, as with the years they spent tinkering around the edges trying to shorten games, they will fail several times until they hit upon the one major change, whatever it might be, that will fix it.