chasfh

America the Beautiful.

The rot runs way, way deep. Gonna take a lot a lot of work to clean it up.

I just have to shake my head and chuckle at all the organizational concerns about third base and our lack of clarity about it, when for a few years there seemingly everybody Avila drafted or traded for was supposed to play third base.

It’s still April. A.J.’s got plenty of time to mix and match and see who can do what when where how. No need to land on a permanent lineup yet.

This is what I always hoped I would see when I was stumping all last year for Lange to be closer.

I like seeing my right fielder make a good play after communicating with the center fielder, and then seeing them share a laugh and a glove bump after.

Glad Baddoo got the walk, but that can’t remain his top offensive weapon and keep his job.

A.J. gonna figure out who can do what!

Robot umpires now.

Pinch runner, please.

Apparently not all of Schoop’s good defense was because of the shift. That was a hell of a play he made.

Totally agreed. My comment was about the hypocrisy and/or naivete of the tweet, that Murdoch acted out of concern that *ucker promoted the insurrection—something he had been doing for 27 months straight, along with numerous other air heads who have done the same and are still employed there at this very minute—as though he did/they are doing so against Murdoch's will. That is an asinine idea on its face, and this kind of coy, even cute mealy-mouthing in the face of such blatant obviousness is a big pet peeve of mine. If there is anything Murdoch is concerned about here, it is not about the coverage itself, which by allowing it to go on for over two years he's demonstrated he clearly had no problem with. It's only the blowback he cares about. LA Times should be better than that.

I was just coming in to post this very thing, minus the waiting a week part. *ucker would be an incredible get for them because he is already an established star there, and Murdoch would **** an entire brick because a third of Fox's audience would go to RT with *ucker. The only thing I can imagine that might prevent it is that it would shine a huge light on Russia's control ... or influence, if you prefer ... of America's right wing media in a manner way too obvious even for them.

That's a slow-boiling concern if it took more than 27 months for Murdoch to act on it.

Easy—just make Missouri an open-brandish state. Problem solved.

The speculation around MTG or Kari Lake or Kristi Noem, I don’t see how Trump chooses any of them because they all have their own heat, and that attracts heat away from Trump, and no way Trump allows that to happen. He might fantasize about them as VPILFs, but that’s probably as far as that will go. I think it’s going to be Nikki Haley. She’s fully on board with the MAGA fascism, but she’s also relatively quiet and demure, even attractish in a somewhat exotic way, yet still very accessible to unworldly MAGA voters, and of course she ticks the woman and minority boxes. The only minus on her card is that she’s a known flip-flopper, which could endanger her MAGA credentials, but there is no perfect good-looking woman VP candidate, at least at this point anyway. So unless someone new comes onto the national scene, which could certainly happen in the next year-plus, I think it’s gonna be her.

Are these Nielsen average minutes, or weekly or book cumes? Or maybe live-plus-sevens? That would help explain way Sunday Morning is so high.

Sad way to lose, on a suboptimal throw to the plate.

Las Vegas immediately becomes the smallest market in the majors and, to your point, a tough sell to tourists coming in to gamble. Unless they create a gambling paradise on-site where people who go there can leave the area of play to go gamble in air-conditioned comfort elsewhere on the grounds. I could see them doing deals with local casinos offering baseball/gambling package trips, where the tickets are folded into the package cost and not line-itemed out in the total cost.

Nm

I'm the only one here today arguing that Al Avila was very similar to Randy Smith instead of being way, way better than Smith, and you made that comment right on my heels, so that's why I thought that was a direct shot today. That notwithstanding, I don't know that I have seen the evidence that Smith is way way worse than Avila, other than people repeatedly saying that they think so. They both had terrible drafts, they both had terrible FA signings, they both made terrible trades, and neither could develop a decent cold let alone a winning baseball franchise. The main difference I see between the two is that the report card on Randy Smith has been completed, and Avila's has not. So at most, the comparison is incomplete, rather than settled fact. I'm open to being persuaded, though, so if anyone can cite real evidence of what Avila did that was way, way better than Smith, I'd like to know. For the record, I don't think citing Mize, Manning et al., will be enough, because even though they have given us little to nothing so far, it's still incomplete.

Exactly how am I whitewashing Randy Smith? I have already called him one of the worst GM in baseball history!

I mea culpaed that an hour ago.

Right, this is a terrible legacy for Randy Smith. He was a terrible GM, one of the worst in baseball history. Remember, though, how everyone was so excited for a lot of the guys Randy Smith drafted. Baseball America, the widely acknowledged experts on prospects even then, had Gresinger and Anderson in their top 50 rankings, as well as Mike Drumright, Juan Encarnacion, Gabe Kapler, and even Eric Freaking Munson, for cry eye. All of them, top 50 prospects in all of baseball, according to BA. So while it's easy to completely dismiss (and diss) Randy Smith's talent acquisition record with 20-20 hindsight, at that time, all of us, and Baseball America, were quite high on them. And they probably were good, talented baseball players who might have had very good careers, all of them. It's just that something broke along the way—same as it did so frequently with Avila. So again, they look pretty similar to me, the main difference being that we know for a fact all of Randy Smith's top prospects busted under Dombrowski/Avila, versus we don't know yet how Avila's remaining top prospects will fare under Harris.