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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.

Point taken on Pena, but I think the rest stands. It could be said that Mize and Manning and TORK! and Riley are gifts to Harris, but I don't think it necessarily follows that, if any or all of them inevitably become All-Stars, It's because Avila chose them to come to the Tigers. All four of them were the players anyone else would have picked in those circumstances, and it took the organization tanking for years for us to get them in the first place. Plus, the high draft picks and international signings that flopped under the prior regime was legion, and it's not inappropriate to posit that were Avila still here, any or all of these guys might well have flopped in his system, too. And of course, Al Avila also made some of the worst trades in recent history, liquidating All-Stars and future Hall of Famers for almost nothing but damaged goods in return. Although who knows, maybe that will be proven wrong by Jake Rogers and ... who else? So I'm still not convinced that Randy Smith was much worse than Avila was, but if anyone else insists that's the case, I'll agree to disagree on it.

I don’t see how Avila left this franchise in substantially better shape after he was ****canned than Randy Smith did. At best, it was the same, as far as I can tell. Even those vaunted slam-dunk everyone-else-woulda-taken-them-too draft picks Avila selected, like Mize and Manning, aren’t guaranteed at this point to be any better than Jeff Weaver and Kenny Baugh were thought in 2002 to become. Riley (#4 prospect in Baseball America in 2022) and TORK! (#5 BA 2022) might end up being better sticks than Carlos Peña (#5 BA 2002) whom Randy Smith left us—might be—but again, no guarantee. Even if they are, otherwise, the system Avila left behind is, at best, no less a shambles than the system Randy Smith left. I think in practical terms, the comparison between the two is a push.

Not only that, both Francisco Cordero and Frank Catalanotto had good years that could have helped us in 2006.

Sounds good, although that might make it hard to tell ours from the A’s or Nationals.

Again, totally normal public company behavior. I’d like to order 100 shares, please.

So Tusk is essentially admitting out loud that he is using the checkmark system to reward people he likes (like Lebron) and punish those he doesn’t (like NYT and NPR). Yup, totally normal public company business practice. Where do I go to buy stock in that?

Didn't know where else to put this, but ... uhhhhh ... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/?location=alert

More than a few retail workers I would see every week with beautiful eyes, very captivating, then when they could take off the mask it was like, oh wow, that regresses the face to the mean a bit.

I don't remember that the accepted wisdom in 2003 was that the Tigers were trying to lose, like the 2023 A's seem to be, but it was 20 years ago and I may have forgotten, so I'm open to the evidence if you have it.

I don't think so. WAR already takes into account that most runs will either be in excess of what's needed to win this game today, or else will be wasted because his team already loses this game today without or without him. That's partly why the rule of thumb evolved into, for every ten runs a player plays above replacement, that translates to one win generated for the team all by himself.

Really the only person who knows whether this is true or not is Scott Harris. 😉😅

This is true of literally everything Scott Harris does. We still enjoy the speculating.

Lol The best part: the guy who proved Lindell wrong was a Trump voter in 2020.

Streaky or not, it still all adds up to a solid 109 OPS+.

I think it's that too, and they're both related.

I think a big part of this is that there’s no longer a cohort of people alive that has the 1919 Black Sox scandal as part of their living memory.

That’s a .333/.333/1.333 slash line. I’ll take that from the kid all year. 😉

The difference is that A’s management has basically run that team into the ground for business purposes. The front office that put together the 2003 Tigers were actually trying to win.