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Did he? I mean, it wouldn't shock me, but I didn't know that about him. Maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention.

I remember almost catching my first foul ball sitting in the front row on the first base side looking down the third base line. I could have spit on the home plate umpire from there. RHB hit a beeline right to me. Just as I was about to get my hands on it, a buddy of mine, who I treated to the game with tickets I got from my dad's work, reached over and snagged the ball from in front of me, then had the gall to giggle and laugh and say look dude I caught a ball! I mean, technically, it was fair game, I guess. But we didn't hang out much after that.

I'm not saying this is what's happening here, and that numerous women coordinated on a strategy to get Trevor Bauer, or anything like that. But I can see how, in an repulsive and compromising sexual situation that involves a famous party, the other party could be tempted to blackmail the famous party with exposure of the behavior not because it's criminal per se, but because it is so repulsive that people paying only headline attention to it would assume criminality, and a lot of famous people not named Trevor Bauer would cave to it. Again, I am not saying five different women did coordinate on this particular instance. They almost certainly did not. But I could see how one of the five might decide to go for that.

Well, yeah, there's that ... 😏 But I meant more like, I believe they are of a kind: guys who don't really want to play, but would like to leave baseball with all the money in hand and just go live the rest of their lives.

Plus, the other top projections in that draft were pitchers Asa Lacy and Max Meyer, and hitters Austin Martin and Zac Veen—any of whom would 100% have been Avila’s alternative to Tork, and none of whom are lighting it up either in the bigs or the bushes. Meyer is off to a decent start this year but his FIP is way higher than his stats. But any of those four would also have almost certainly been ruined in our system, especially the hitters. So considering all that, we probably still ended up with the best of the bunch, at least as of today.

Naw, I think we’ll be over it by 2050, 2060 at the latest.

Wyatt Langford raked at every level of the minors, and he has plus defense besides (grades out at 50 for fielding and arm), so the Rangers may have merely concluded that there’s nothing more he can learn at Round Rock and he’ll just have to work it out in Arlington.

I think of Eduardo Rodriguez and Anthony Rendon as being peas in a pod.

I wonder what the US passenger train map looked like 100 years ago. Probably a lot closer to Europe today than the US today. There’s one big problem with taking passenger trains in the US. My wife and I decided to take the train from Chicago to LA, in a sleeper car. Supposed to take 44 hours. About halfway through, it’s 3am or so and all of a sudden the entire train is woken up. We have to get off the train and onto buses. We drive some six hours across the state of Kansas and end up in Dodge City, where we see another train and hundreds of people milling about. We who were on the buses all get on that train, and those people get on our buses. We soon learn that was the train going from LA to Chicago. Turns out there was a freight train derailment in the middle of Kansas and neither train could get through, so we had to swap trains via buses. We took their train back to LA to complete our trip, and they took our train back to Chicago to complete theirs. And that’s one reason we can’t have a robust passenger train system anymore: freight and passenger trains all share the same tracks. In Europe, they run on different tracks.

I think this might be parcel of the “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me” strategy. As far as they’re concerned, an impeachment inquiry into Mayorkas is basically the same as “Biden is a capital criminal.”

I wonder whether the Dems might be trying to help time things out so that the removal chaos happens closer to the election?

Remember when people on the old board were worried that Avila would go off book and pick yet another pitcher with his 1/1? Detmers and Crochet are looking pretty good, aren’t they? #SecondGuessingFTW

OK, now you’re just trying to lose.

So, heroes. OK.

Hopefully Yates is rattled after losing Canha after being up 0-2.

Maybe Tork is turning into a pumpkin with the glove, or maybe he’s just having a bad game. We’ll probably see in the next few weeks.

Wow that was a lucky break to get out of the inning. Could have been a disaster if it had gotten by Vierling.

Urshela just had an awful at bat, but then, we didn’t hire him for his hitting, anyway, did we?

If MLB had ABS, the inning would be over. Let’s make ‘em pay!

Javy ties the game on THE FIRST PITCH! A.J. And the batting coaches must mad! 😜

Exactly. I think a lot of fans, maybe not here but elsewhere, who believe that geeks just want to fill players’ heads with endless numbers, because they are myopic and they themselves never played the game so they don’t know any better, are hoping it truly is that way, so they can point to analytics and say, see? Told ya analytics is a failure. They think analytics is still a debatable proposition. It’s not. The war on analytics has been over for at least a decade, and analytics won.

This whole line of discussion took off from your mention of inability to deal with information, which is analytics. In any event, maybe not you, but a lot of people want to see Hinch flop and get fired and be replaced by a manager who doesn’t know from analytics, just like when we were kids. That’s never going to happen. We have analytics, we are going to use it, we will share guidance from it with hitters, and that’s that. I’ll also assume that Hinch is not so rock-headed that he will hold onto his one approach because he refuses to admit he’s wrong even when the hitting is failing and the team is losing, until he proves he is that guy after all. I will continue to hypothesize that we have not had hitting All Stars who are failing only because the coaching is failing them, and that instead we need different, better hitters on the team than many if not most of the guys we have now.

We have no insight into exactly what the coaches are telling or showing players, but I would really be surprised to learn that it involves computational math, and I don’t believe there’s anything we have seen to indicates that’s what’s happening, other than we are flailing at the plate.

If hitters don't have information about pitchers and pitches, then how would they have any idea of what to do at the plate?

I can promise you that any change Hinch makes will involve analytics, and that whoever is coaching the hitters, whether it's these guys or whether it's new guys, they will be sharing that information with hitters. The strategy of leaving hitters on their own to simply see ball hit ball is dead.