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O'Lantern was pitching in the Aussie league at age 16 with guys on average ten years older. This could be interesting.

Well, he is 29 and so has no future to offset his lack of present.

This is not a bad idea, if the goal is to protect the pitcher's historical advantage over the hitter to some degree. Absent that, one way for a pitcher to get through a situation like this is to simply not put everything he has into his 13th, 14th, etc., pitch to try to induce swing and miss—in other words, give in to the situation and ease up to reduce stress on his arm. Maybe that's not fair—or maybe it is, who knows?—but in this new world of ours, them's the breaks.

"YOU GET A JOB! AND YOU GET A JOB! AND YOU GET A JOB!"

I think the idea that MTG would be a power beard for a closeted right-wing thought leader is one of the less surprising things I could learn about her.

The thing I worried most about the pitch timer was that teams would find a way to undermine it to make games go longer, and umpires would start peeling off from enforcing violations, and that games would start creeping back up toward three hours-plus by now. But two months in, it looks like pitchers are still rushing, and umpires are still vigilant. Pitchers could still figure out how to effectively max out their times in between pitches, which would not only give them a bit more rest between pitches but would also make the games close to three hours on average, but I haven’t seen where they’ve started doing that yet. There are differences between teams in time of game, ranging from 2:34 for the Guards up to 2:46 for the Orioles. I wonder how much of that is related to taking more time in between pitches, batters, innings, etc., versus non-time-oriented game play. You can tease that info out of downloaded Statcast data. Maybe I’ll get around to that at some point.

I do like that ATT provides uploads to go as fast as downloads.

We don't know what was in the guy's head, but there is also a certain kind of person who gets a thrill out of getting rough and hurting or humiliating people.

Produce the receipts.

Lived experience.

Churches already pay no taxes. Now we're giving them taxpayer-funded subsides? ****ing A, I gotta start my own church and get in on the grift.

You know why. 😏

My wife and I are going to Curacao in January and expect the experience to be similar to yours.

SNO has been doing that for years. Don't Bally and the Tigers do that now? I could swear I've seen ten-second spots for one of the casinos in between pitches.

Sociopathy is pretty much indicative of just about anybody who rises to the tippy-top, isn't it? I can hardly imagine a circumstance in which someone rises to the top tier of a major function—government, business, whatever—without breaking laws, flouting ethics, disregarding integrity, and/or callously ruining some people's lives along the way.

Between this and the report that he may have over-exercised his way to the injury, this strikes me as a possible bad sign. He may be too eager to push it too early, either because he thinks he feels good or else he wants to test out how he's doing, which would risk re-aggravating it or otherwise lengthening his recovery time. He might be too antsy to just keep off his feet and just rest to start with. (I can relate.) If he's truly like that, I hope he can overcome his instincts and take it as easy as the staff tells him to in order to minimize time off.

Fascinating Fresh Air episode from the other day talking to the guy who make the new Frontline doc about Clarence Thomas. He spent a lot of time talking about Thomas's upbringing. It was fascinating. Clarence Thomas was born in Pinpoint, GA (seriously!) in the Jim Crow south as a coastal geechee, born Catholic, abandoned by his father, rejected by his grandfather, cast off to live alone and make his own way before he was an adult, went to seminary for high school and then Holy Cross on a scholarship, was never accepted by the overwhelmingly white student body at either, the latter because he was part of the first black class borne of affirmative action. While he was at Holy Cross he joined the Black Panthers, grew out his hair, went to protests and whatnot. One day he had some sort of epiphany: why am I doing this? I might get arrested! So he quit that. After getting his JD from Yale he did not get offers of high-paying law firm gigs so he decided to try to get into government, and he chose to work for Republicans because "the line was shorter" for black people to rise up in those ranks. He knew nothing of conservative ideology so he contacted John Bolton, who had been a classmate of his, and asked him to recommend books he should read on conservative topics. By the time he joined the Reagan administration, the Republicans were only too happy to hire any black person who would be willing to step out in front of the media and defend their racialized policies, and Thomas was only too glad to do so. He eventually became chairman of the EEOC (with Anita Hill on his staff) and stayed there until nominated to the Circuit Court of Appeals by Bush Sr and, eventually, became the affirmative action appointee to the Supreme Court, of which he has always resented the implication, which might explain why he is so anti-affirmative action. So now that I've capsulized his story, I want to share the big insight I got from listening to this program: Clarence Thomas had no ideology growing up into adulthood. He was neither liberal nor conservative. He joined an extreme black organization because he felt he had to; he then went to work for extreme right wingers because it was a good career move. He had no problem going from extreme left to extreme right. The only thing they had in common is that they were extreme, kind of like the Bernie Bros from 2016 who turned around and voted for Trump in 2020. Some people just want to do things to the extreme because it makes them feel alive. I think that's Clarence Thomas. He had a ****ty childhood that made him feel dead inside. Once he got agency he busted out and chose extreme paths in all directions. Didn't matter what side of the spectrum the extremeness was. Just that it was extreme. I've learned a lot about Clarence Thomas just from this Fresh Air. I might watch the Frontline on it, too.

Which i have done for four straight years now.

It’s hubris, nothing more. Once you reach a certain level you completely lose your olfactory senses and can no longer pass the smell test. He literally has no idea anymore, if he ever did, just how unpopular cutting Medicare and Social Security is, mainly because he doesn’t travel in circles of people who need it.

Maybe McCarthy was told he was going to be on Fox Business.

My only broken bone was my left tibia. I was fifteen and on a skateboard being pulled along by a bike with butterfly handlebars and a banana seat through a grade school parking lot. I’d had almost no experience on a skateboard, and it showed when it jerked up from under me and I landed ankle bone first on the asphalt. They put me in a cast on my brother’s birthday. After a week on crutches they put me in a walking cast. I was walking normally on it within three weeks. I even hit a softball home run with someone running for me in ninth grade gym class. The cast came off on my birthday. That was almost exactly eight weeks. Good as new. Never a problem since. I am not a major league athlete.

He is completely off my radar. I will be honestly surprised if he comes back to baseball and produces positive results for the Tigers.

Jake Marisnick is the third of the four “think” players named in this post as being the level of player we can pick up and try that we have actually picked up and tried. Keep your eyes peeled for Johan Camargo.

Are you really criticizing voters for not turning out in the past midterms in the same numbers that they did in the biggest-turnout election in sixty years? Come on.

Counterpoint: surprising Democratic turnout in 2022, an off-election year. I’ll say one thing for MAGA: they can sure turn out the other side.