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The most correct answer so far. There was talk that Buddy’s was going to break into the Chicago market with a location in Schaumburg (!), which i would have totally traveled out to to get a Buddy’s ready-to-eat pizza. (I can only get half-bakeds in Kalamazoo while driving home and they never come out the same). But then COVID, I guess, killed that idea dead. I can’t even find the news story about it from about four years ago.

It’s not at all true that teams don’t care about ad dollars and ad eyeballs that RSNs get for their games. It is true they don’t make any immediate additional revenue if the RSN overachieves on ratings estimates and can start charging higher rates for sponsorships and spots—that benefit all accrues to the RSN. But overachieving on ratings estimates, getting more eyeballs than anticipated, does serve to help the team negotiate a sweeter rights deal when it’s time for renewal. More eyeballs also means more interest for the team, which they benefit from in terms of a boost in attendance, more concessions sold, more merchandising sold, etc., which gooses non-broadcast revenue and could provide additional funds for better players, coaching, infrastructure, et al, as well as the halo effect it provides to the owner’s other business interests as the proprietor of a popular, high-profile major sports franchise. High fan interest driven through high broadcast ratings has a strong effect on all of this. Teams definitely root for high ratings for their broadcasts on RSNs.

lol But hey—I’m totally ready!

I maintain three Twitter accounts: one for SABR baseball stuff, one to follow news, and one to follow entertainment and media and pop culture stuff. I like to keep the three silos of information separated and distinct. All three of them had Musk’s tweet about people believing the press in the For You. I had never interacted with him, his tweets, or anyone who ever retweeted him, not even once, not even the news account. Yet the tweet just showed up. That’s a little bit of a problem, I think.

Remember the phrase "too cheap to meter"? As in, "[commodity_inserted_here] will be so plentiful it'll be too cheap to meter"? I'm pretty sure they used that phrase about Internet service way back when. lol

I have DirecTV and they just raised my regional sports fee, for the two channels here (Marquee, NBC Sports Chicago), to $14.99 a month (!), and I almost never watch either of them. But we keep the service because (a) I negotiate deep discounts every year, and (b) it's just so darn convenient to use.

Another thing about Harris and what he did this offseason is that he his talent acquisition options were severely limited by the mess he inherited. Any free agent who had options was never going to choose to come here this winter, and Harris had very little in terms of talent to deal from on the trade front. So really, his main two acquisition options at this moment are waiver churn and minor league free agent deals, and given that it’s hard to put together a shiny offseason that you can show off. But we’re in the baby steps stage, so patience.

Cubs have had quite a good offseason. I know the projections continue to be down on them, just as they are on the Tigers, but if they stay healthy and things break the right way, Cubs could take that division.

I see, OK. Miggy did have a smaller role at the end of last year, and based on the conversation in the article it sounds as though he, if not exactly comfortable with it, is at least coming to terms with the idea. So I think it’ll be all right.

Based on the what's said in the article, your post reads more, to me anyway, like you're concerned about AJ being pressured into playing Miggy too much. I don't think we'll have to worry about that.

I think AJ is going to be the least of our worries going into the season.

Yeah, I got out some years ago because I came to hate my profession, or more exactly, how it got tracked at the end there. Maybe if I were working a fun data-driven job like yours, I'd still be working!

This does not sound like a compliment! 😉😅 But hey, look, this is not my idea or opinion, so please don't be unhappy with me about it. I wouldn't care if they did 16-team tables like the UK Premier League. I know you wouldn't, either. I'm just sharing what I understand about why Baseball will probably never go to anything like an eight-team division. In any event, I'm also retired, so marketing affinity is a very tiny speck in my rear-view mirror.

There is a psychological difference between being a 95-loss team in third place versus a 95-loss team in seventh place. Owners don't want to try selling the latter. It doesn't matter if it's not logical. It's still an actual thing. It's a key reason why they went to divisions in the first place in 1969. The other thing is that more divisions of fewer teams mean more races for first place, more engaged fan bases, presumably more interest, more tickets sold, higher ratings, more revenues.

It’s the ultimate nostalgia.

I certainly wouldn’t mind this, but no team owner is going to want to have to try to sell a seventh-, eighth-, or even sixth-place team late in the season, so this is a non-starter.

Even as a percent of users who do use the platform for news or news headlines, Facebook is the equivalent (52/71 = 74%) of Twitter (16/23 = 73%), plus FB has the raw numbers. Of course, we can also debate just how much content of each platform actually constitutes “news” …

True as this may be in the abstract, the government’s responsibility to prevent people shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is the only foot in the door politicians need to expand the scope of oversight as far as they can get away with. At that point it’s up to the people to monitor the government by getting sick of their shenanigans and replacing them some fine November day.

It’s didn’t hurt either that Catherine O’Hara was a stone looker.

Bothsidesism.

So all the President of the United States of America has to do to get a pass for his behavior is be childish and petulant on a regular basis, but the Speaker of the House has a bad moment and she gets good and raked for that? How convenient for the man. I know you're not saying Trump should be excused for his childish behavior, but my point is that he does get regularly excused for his childish behavior. I agree Pelosi should take criticism for the tearing up of the speech, but the criticism for that single incident is also generally out of proportion versus that of Trump's pathological behavior. I think it's the fire hose effect: because Trump displays a fire hose of childish behavior, it's hard to pick out just one outrageous incident as an example, whereas Nancy does something once, and everybody remembers and crushes her for that. So I think if someone going to post that criticism of Nancy, regardless of how justified it is, it's fair to reply with an incident of Trump's, one directly related to hers.

Just about any other country losing their young men in great gobs in a folly like this would turn tail and sue for peace, but not a country that wears its WWII losses like a badge of honor. They’ve got a long, long way to go yet.

So was Trump embarrassing Pelosi publicly by failing to shake her outstretched hand when he handed her the speech before the address.

The anger works for them because their base is always angry. Angry people don’t like it when other people are upbeat and happy. That only makes angry people angrier, and leads them to want to shut those upbeat and happy people the hell up. Cohen is right about preaching to the converted, because the basic rhetoric has maxed out the number of people who will respond and subscribe to it. Nationally, that number is a substantial minority at best which, in an electoral system, is a losing number. So the time has come to start convincing the base to take up arms against the tyrannical majority—because an armed minority can subjuagate an unarmed majority, at least for a time—which is what the violent rhetoric is all about. And really, isn’t that already happening?