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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.

So, this is interesting: take a look at his Savant this year versus last year. He's basically Bizarro TORK! so far.

So I'm reading this thread and I'm seeing a fear that TORK! might end up being like Rob Deer: super low batting average, quite a few homers, a ****-ton of strikeouts, along with a hope that he won't be so bad and he'll end up like guys who had similar profiles but still decent careers. So I look up his numbers and I see eight strikeouts in 49 trips, and I'm thinking, huh. That doesn't seem so high. I look at his SO% and BB% specifically, and they are coming in at 16.3% and 6.1%, respectively. Those are both lower than MLB overall, but also lower than his last season's numbers. And I'm like, huh. So I go to his Savant card, and I see that he is swinging less on first pitch but swinging more overall; making more contact in the zone but less outside it; his overall chase rate is up, but he's letting more middle-middle pitches go by him unswung at. But most concerning, I think, is that both his exit velo and max velo are way down; his hard hit rate is also way down after being among the best in baseball last year; he has zero barrels in his first 49 plate appearances (he should have four or so instead); and his XSLG, based on quality of contact, is half what it was last year and is among the lowest in baseball overall. Add that all up, and it looks to me as though there's an attempt to remake his overall plate approach to be more selective and to concentrate on putting his bat on the ball when he does swing, versus letting 'er rip. That might not be the worst thing for him, specifically, since he probably has the kind of power where he can jack a ton of bombs without putting everything he has into his swing. If he eases up and concentrates on meeting the ball better, he can cut his Ks down and raise his batting average while hitting just as many homers off the increased number of balls he puts into play. That may be the hope, anyway. But so far, the results are less than whelming. Granted, this is a small sample size and he could have gotten these same results in less than 50 plate trips without trying to change a thing. But given all the differences in these various metrics and how they relate to one another, it looks to me as though there's a conscious effort to re-do his approach, and these are the results so far. I don't know what this means for his future, but I think this is worth keeping an eye on to see whether he continues along this path, which I would assume given it's so early in the season, and whether/when they abandon it and let him go back to what brung him to the Show in the first place.

I would think that along with the improved defense we got at the other positions, it would raise the team's defense overall.

I think we all knew the outfield defense was gonna go get it, but I think we all expected Keith to be meh at 2B. Honestly, if he can end the year with at least 0 DRS and 0 OAA—that is, not negative—with 100+ wRC+, he’s gonna get votes, and I’ll be thrilled.

I don’t see any way in which pitchers en masse, outside of maybe an handful of exceptions, lay down their arms and lay up on pitches and allow batters to put balls in play on purpose. I believe they would basically regard it as career suicide to do so, and I think in most cases they would be right. It’s the game that’s creating the incentive to throw max/max on literally every pitch, because getting a chance at a career in the big leagues is based on outstanding performance, meaning, standing out from the crowd. I see no way a pitcher coming up through college or the minors is going to decide to ease up on his pitching to preserve his arm for the sake of his long-term career when he doesn’t even have his career in the first place. If it comes down to laying up to worse results and not making the majors to reduce the possibility of arm injury, versus going max balls out to better results and having a chance to make the show in the first place, I think they’re gonna choose the latter, if not exactly 10 times out of 10, then probably 99 times out of 100. To paraphrase a now-famous saying, don’t blame the player, blame the game. Therefore, change the game. Just my 2¢, OMMV.

Of course, and it's a big "if", which I implied in the parts you excised. Single-digit percent, if at all. But speaking only theoretically, I think it could work for Trump if he could ever pull it off, and that's a scary thought, because you know on November 6, once he's president-elect, all the moderate talk goes right out of the window and Buyer's Remorse sets in immediately for 70% of the country.

This. It will take a generation of players to adjust to any dramatic change, whatever they land on, if they land on anything. Always remember, too, the financial incentive Baseball has to maintain Next Man Up.

That is the other thing he said that will create a problem even if they do deaden the ball in the majors: kids, meaning travel ball all the way up to college, are incentivized to maximize strikeouts in order to get noticed and drafted, or recruited. So unless use of a deadened ball could be forced on various levels all the way down the line, immediately and without exception—which I don't see as being a practical, workable solution in the short term—young pitchers are always going to throw max/max in order to improve their chances to make life-changing money very young. This is a quandary that extends far beyond the major leagues itself.

Like in the 1960s? Pass.

It's a good interview and it touches on all the points we've been discussing the last couple of pages. One thing I do part company with JV on is the idea of merely incentivizing starting pitchers to go deep into games, which is obviously an issue he is close to. Things like tying them to a DH, or shortening bullpens to force managers to keep starters in games longer, which are ideas we have seen discussed by Baseball before, do nothing to alleviate the need for pitchers to throw with max velocity and max spin on every single pitch to avoid contact by hitters. The only possible type of solution I can imagine is one that mitigates the damage hitters can do on when they put the ball in play, one that reduces the possibility of home runs and allows pitcher to lay up on most hitters and let them put the ball in play without giving up homers left and right. I'll bet you, though, that moving fences back, or pushing plates toward the back wall, will come up as serious options before they ever consider changing the ball.

It's been a Tale of Two Small Sample Sizes. Five-and-oh, then 1-4. Pretty much how .500 teams play.

Yes, this could happen. It did happen, actually. I believe it was 2016.

I'm sort of a wait-and-see on this one, seeing as how collective amnesia has been shown to be somewhat of a factor among broad swaths of the electorate in the past. I do believe that if Trump put on a good enough show of seeming like he's reoriented to something closer to normal—not a good show, necessarily, but good enough—the moderate Republicans would flock to vote for him, because they desperately want someone anyone seemingly normal that's not a Democrat for vote for. The wild card on that is whether he could keep the hardcore MAGAs after such a reorientation. Seems like a bind to me for him. But it is one potential way for him to win, as unlikely as it seems.

The fact that they're even dragging their feet on something that should be so clear and obvious, in an apparent bid to aid a fascist-in-all-but-name, is diseased enough.

You are born again hard, romad1.

It is a clear bid to moderates, especially those in swing districts who are thrilled to have him back the Party off strict abortion bans. Trump is also doing so far enough ahead of the election that it may give them enough time to successfully implement the Oceania strategy, i.e., Trump is against a national abortion ban, Trump has always been against a national abortion ban. It's up to Biden to keep pressure on the issue by continually reminding voters of what Trump did, versus what he says, which is always changing. The wild card is whether Trump threaded the needle well enough in his statements so that Republican moderates and independents can parse the difference between "Trump got Roe overturned to send it back to the states so they can make their individual choices based on local standards", which sounds reasonable on the surface; versus "Trump overturned Roe in advance of banning abortion on a nationwide basis", which makes him look way out of touch with how the majority of people feel about choice.

I also don't think he will be able to successfully violently overthrow the US electoral system, but I can't think of anyone else who could come closer to doing so.

Idle speculation: TORK! spent at least a year being regarded as the Next Big Thing and that can really go to some people's head. I do kind of wonder whether he is the kind of guy who is so full of himself and such a believer in his press clippings from college that he feels he doesn't need to take any serious direction on his hitting. After all, it did get him eight million bucks before he ever put on a professional uniform. Maybe he thinks he can become the best hitter in the game by doubling down on what brung him to the draft in the first place: swinging out of his shoes and hitting homers. I'm sure it'll all just click one day, right? Hope I'm wrong about that, but we're going on, what, four seasons by now? And he did miss an entire season due to the pandemic. More snake bites.

You make some good points, and we are talking about a Fisher team, so they might have already blown their chance. An expansion team there probably stands a better chance of carving out a national fan profile. I feel as though the baseball team may have more opportunity to pick up people as fans who are Vegas-crazy and don't care much about baseball in their hearts. People who don't really care about baseball tend to be Yankee fans when they do well; a Vegas team could fill that niche somewhat. I think one difference might be that most everyone has an NFL team they follow more than a baseball team, since NFL football is so much more popular than any level of baseball. And hardly anyone in America cares about hockey, so who cares about any team. I have no evidence for any of this beyond my general feel based on my living in America as a sports fan for a long time.

It's only going to get more like that as we get closer to November. The main thing we have to hope for is that the Trump party doesn't find religion and put on sheep's clothes so they can look like a normal political party until November 6. And, also, that they don't violently overthrow the election system altogether and take power by force.