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I would not extend him any time soon.

I could be talked into this. He just walked away from three years and almost 60 million, so anyone who seriously wants to sign him will need to pay way, way more than this. It will probably have to be higher than his 5/102 deal the Mets signed him to. What are the chances he will want to come to Detroit over the Dodgers or Mets or Yankees or Red Sox or Giants or Cubs?

It occurred to me maybe a year or so ago that as reprehensible as MTG and her views are, she is not the bridge troll that Lauren Boebert is. Of course, that's a super low bar.

Chicago has been run by Democrats since well before I arrived here in 1996, and it has improved immensely in the past 30 years, with crime in particular having gone down by over half, and it wasn't even bad here when I arrived. So, now I know by firsthand experience that you have no idea what you are posting from your bubble about.

I don't think I have ever asked you guys anything about this before. I have shares in a company that is connected to the administration and is considered very reprehensible. You can probably guess which one it is. (You can guess but I will not confirm either way.) When I bought the stock, I thought of them as a good AI play, nothing more. I had no ideas about who they are or what they might engage in. Now I do. My stake in the company has gone up by 14x (yes, that is fourteen x) in the two-plus years since I bought it and is poised to go up even more. Ethically, I would never buy the stock today, but I already have it in hand. The question is whether I should sell out of it immediately to cut all association with them. On the one hand, I shouldn't be supporting this company at all with my money. If my association with them entailed my giving them x amount of money every y number of time periods, then it would be an easy call: stop giving them my money. Done and done. On the other hand, they've already gotten all the money they were ever going to get out of me over two years ago. I have not put any more money into the company, and they are not getting another penny from me anytime in the future. They already have all they're gonna get, so whether I sell today or a year from today , it will still be the same amount of money they will have gotten from me either way. It's just that now the value of the stake I gave them my money for has exploded literally exponentially. So whether I were to sell the stock I own in them for $10,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000, that would not change the amount I put into the company. That part is fixed and done and over with. So, while I am loathe to claim any ownership stake in this company—such as that "ownership" is, anyway—I am leaning towards hanging onto the stock as long as it's going up so I can extract as much money out of them as I possibly can when I do sell, and I may then turn around and try to do something good with the original stake, something that's opposed to how they are helping the regime. I actually have implemented a series of trailing stop limit buys to sell it as the price drops through a series of trigger points. The price has not even threatened that first trigger, though, and the triggers keep rising with the stock price. If any of you were in this same position, how would you handle it?

Declined since when?

Fun fact: communism and democracy are not mutually exclusive ideologies.

I wonder whether, after the end of Game 6 when Barger seemed way too anxious to score like RIGHT NOW by getting too far off the bag on the short fly ball to Hernandez and then getting doubled off second to lose the game? I bet the Jays were taking way shorter leads because that loomed large in their minds and they were over-correcting.

I effed up this part and said the opposite of what I meant. What I meant to put into the bold part is this: The main reasons to slide are to avoid collisions, avoid tags, and keep from oversliding the bag so you don’t get tagged out afterwards.

Yeah, not sure. I poked around via PIM but I’m not sure anyone knows.

Which for Bobby Higginson is all the time. I have zero idea what the guy is even doing anymore. Is he still the limo king?

This is a really good point. Sliding slows a runner’s progress into the base. At second and third bases, the main reasons to avoid sliding are to avoid collisions, avoid tags, and keep from oversliding the bag so you don’t get tagged out afterwards. At home plate, oversliding is not a consideration. On the play Saturday night, IKF would not have collided with Smith, so, the only reason to slide would be to avoid Smith’s tag, and on a force play, tags on the base are very unlikely. So had IKF gone full speed running through the plate, would he have been safe instead of out after slowing down due to the slide?

Welcome back! Hope to see you in game threads next year.

You can still have all those things. Well, not the Tiger games and probably not the lawn mowing, but the rest of them, sure, why not. 😉

The only way teams like the Tigers, or the PIrates or Royals or Rockies for that matter, could effectively compete on an ongoing basis is if MLB were to substantially delocalize baseball as both a fan pursuit and an industry. This is something the NFL and NBA have done very effectively. The NFL did it through pooling television and licensing revenues among the teams, and even though all teams keep their local money, because practically all 32 teams sell out every week, the local money is pretty close to the same for everybody. This is in large part how the NFL can have the teams in Green Bay (#68 ranked DMA in the country) and Kansas City (#32) be considered among the elites in their sport, while franchises can survive and even thrive in small markets such as Buffalo (#54) and New Orleans (#50) The NBA has effectively delocalized their sport via the strategy of marketing players over teams, a tactic that by nature has generational appeal (i.e., young fans are more attuned to players as personalities than older fans are). That’s how Oklahoma City (#48) can come to be considered THE elite NBA team for decently long periods of time, as well as the league being able to support franchises in Memphis (#51) and, again, New Orleans (again, #50). Of course, there are also key structural differences when it comes to baseball versus football and basketball. Football is a sport dominated by a quarterback personality who controls the ball for roughly half the entire game; plus, as a once-a-week event, every NFL game is considered a spectacle worthy of national or super-regional broadcast practically regardless of which teams are playing. Basketball is a sport where one guy out of five can take over and control an entire game or stretch of games or even a whole season, touching the ball and making magic happen practically anytime he wants; plus, the games are also somewhat locally event-like in that there are only one or two games in town in any given week, and since the arenas are relatively small and similarly-sized, there cannot be vast attendance differences among the teams. Baseball is practically the opposite of all of these things. In terms of players, even a superstar comes to bat only four or maybe five times in a game, and he hardly ever touches the ball on defense (not that you would want many of them to do, anyway). As for pitchers, superstar starters pitch only once every five or more days; and superstar relievers, who already have short shelf lives career-wise, are in the game for only one inning at a time, if they come into the game at all. Plus, while the stadiums are humongous all around the league, the attendance differences are vast between team groups such as the Yankees/Dodgers/Cubs versus the White Sox/Marlins/Rockies. (Baseball even has two teams playing in literal minor league stadiums right now!) Low attendance versus stadium capacity occurs in part because a team will play at home every day for a week and a half several times a year, almost eliminating the possibility that games could be considered must-see events. No amount of marketing can change the effects on the business of any of that. MLB could go a long way toward fixing this inequity among franchises by, again, delocalizing the money part of the sport by pooling all revenues—national broadcast and maybe even local broadcast, licensing, digital media, perhaps even ticket sales and other gameday sales—into one pool and dividing it evenly among the 30 teams, with perhaps some minor concessions to local cost of living differences (e.g., a touch more to New York teams, a touch less to St. Louis). They could also implement and enforce a narrow band of payroll, marketing, and perhaps even infrastructure spending, requiring a low ceiling and high floor of spending to ensure that none of the 30 teams have a substantial spending advantage over any of the others when it comes to attracting and keeping top players—something the NBA does right now, and very successfully. That would go a long way towards equalizing opportunities to compete among the 30 MLB franchises. The dirty little secret, of course, is that there is exactly zero appetite for any of this at either the team level or the league level. The league makes much, much, much more money overall when the Big Six teams (Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants) are successful on the field versus when they are floundering; and too many small franchises are only too happy to spend next to nothing on players, fielding 90-plus-loss teams year after year, and pocketing the money from whatever revenue they do get, while franchise valuation continues to skyrocket and gives them attractive parachute options when it’s time to cash in on that. So, really, the only way fans of franchises outside the Big Six could enjoy seeing their teams rise to the level of contender for multiple seasons at a time is to go through natural cycles where they compete for a few years and then have to reload for a few more years, because they simply can’t generate the revenues needed to compete for decades on end like the Dodgers and Yankees do; or like the Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, or Giants all could if they were simply smarter organizations when it came to the actual on-the-field baseball stuff.

I think the team we see next March 25 will be substantially different than the team we saw this past September 25.

It looks like I’m not going to be able to post here anymore, at least for a while. Apparently I have hit some sort of cap on uploaded assets, and now I can’t attach anything that’s bigger than 2.76 kB, which is barely more than a screenshot of a sentence in a Word doc. Hopefully the cap resets after the end of a rolling day period or something, but if not—if it’s a permanent assets upload cap of some sort—then that’s the end for me.

That’s OK, as long as the Tigers didn’t win the pennant or a ring, it doesn’t really matter to me who else won this one.

15th and 12th for you, 18th and 15th for me

Man Guerrero can put a huge exclamation point on his postseason right now

Oh f*** is this gonna go 18 innings now?

Talk about poetic justice!! Wroblewski clocked by a comebacker!

I don’t think Wroblewski was trying to hit the number nine hitter, but it does show that he’s nearly out of gas. This is probably a break for him so he can catch his breath, but he might be all wound up, too. If I’m Roberts, I’m getting him out of there soon as I can.