chasfh

Maybe Matt Gaetz for MTG. No, seriously. Power couple thing. Possibly some NRA lobbyist for Machine Gun Boebert.

The way I remember it, it wasn't whether Paredes could stick in the infield at all—it was whether he could make it as a middle infielder, which I don't think anyone outside the Avila brain trust thought was a real possibility. Everyone else thought Paredes was always going to be tracked into being a third baseman. As for where we are now, not sure what that means exactly since we are in a much better spot overall than last year, but that rarely turns on one player alone in any event. I think with 20/20 hindsight we can safely conclude we would be far better off today with Paredes at third than with parade of quad-A players there. On your other point—did Tampa know something about Meadows? I've wondered that as well. I haven't found anything prior to last year that reported that Meadows was dealing with mental health issues, but then, nobody in sports ever talked about that before literally last year, so that doesn't mean nothing was happening. And even though Avila was anything but the king of due diligence, I'm not sure how that could come up even for the most diligent trader. Unlike physical health, you can't see mental health. And Meadows did play most of 2019 and 2021 with decent production. So we can probably chalk this up to weird luck, although there may always be something in the back of my mind about that.

There’s no way to actually know, maybe unless you could somehow OOTP it out, but I feel that Paredes would have done better under Hinch/Harris than under Grifol/Avila. I didn’t love the trade at the time because I thought Paredes was better than Meadows straight up so it was a lot to give up, but I also thought it was defensible based on where we were and what we were trying to do coming into the 2022 season. We all thought we were on the brink of contending, and it seemed like we needed Meadows more in left than we needed Paredes at third. But now it’s been almost a year and a half and with Paredes getting comfortable and heating up for Tampa whereas Meadows may literally never play again, we are already losing the trade by a substantial margin, and I can’t envision any scenario in which that flips around and we end up winning or even tying it. I wonder if Tampa locks up Paredes for cheap at some point, like a 7/70 deal or something.

Anyone still glad we made the Paredes deal?

I remember listening to this game on the radio while we were on our way to my grandparents’, which must have been a Sunday. I was just getting into baseball, and I had zero idea that day just how unusual getting seven hits in a game was.

Solid, workman-like win tonight. This is how good teams routinely win games, and we are playing mostly bad teams into at least early June. The next few weeks has the potential to be a very fun stretch of baseball.

Get out of here with your stupid ****ing logic, you’re making our whine sour and ruining our pity party. 😁

The league can definitely sell this. Cha-ching.

San Antonio, comeback story. Good narrative for the league.

F#@K!

The music is so precious.

I’ll be happy with top three. I think Wemby goes to Portland or San Antonio. The league would like either one. Good narrative.

Sure, it's a grotesque version of a symbiotic relationship.

There's a bit of luck to his numbers out there. His LOB is high, his BABIP is low, his HR9 is one is the lowest on that team (which plays at 3,700'), and his walk rate is over double what it was in Toledo. As a result, is FIP is 3.64, whereas in Toledo it was 3.88, which is not all that different. However, his ELP xFIP is 4.46 whereas his TOL xFIP was 3.78, which is decidedly all that different. The one possible good thing for him is that he has been beating the ball into the gorund at a 50% clip, which, still, could be SSS theater. Bottom line, thought, the Padres are a bottom ten bullpen in many key metrics, so even Drew Carlton will get a fair hearing out there.

This sounds very much like the time a poster on the old board tried to invalidate my theory that private medical insurance is basically socialized medicine by trying to trap me on not knowing or being able to explain with a risk pool was, and that argument made no sense back then, either.

This may be the most logical, believable thing you have ever posted here.

I sometimes regard myself as far too cynical, and yet this never occurred to me even once, and it simultaneously shocks me and doesn't surprise me in the least.

Believing someone could be this sexually predatory is the easy part. Even people we all think of unconditionally as heroes can be like this, and many are. It's the submission by subordinates to the grossness that makes my brain explode.

For anyone even a little invested in this: bottom line is none of the five people I talked to across some 2-1/2 hours could help. They all introduced themselves as "senior advisors", yet they clearly do not all have similar levels of training or maybe even knowledge. A couple sounded like they could pass for senior; the other three definitely did not. Plus, they apparently don't read notes presumably taken by the prior advisor, so the later ones had me try all the same things the earlier ones did that failed, and one even said it was impossible to do screen-share on both my phone and my PC at the same time, when the second advisor did that exact thing. I finally just said "hey, listen, thanks for your time" and hung up on the last "senior advisor" because she had this kind of cavalier not-really-working-or-caring-much attitude during the call, talking at me like she might talk at her little brother, and when she said had to try all these things I told her had already failed on prior calls because she would be "docked points" if she didn't, that's when I knew it was over. I then went to the local Apple store, and the advisor there suggested that the recent update of my phone to iOS 16.4.1 (a) may have broken compatibility with iTunes 12.12.8.2, which none of the other advisors brought up even once. That actually makes some sense, so I am waiting for another iOS update, and if it still doesn't work, I'll go back to the Store and we'll see whether they can help. But right now, I can't sync any calendars to my phone, and I can't even sync my current phone calendar to the iCloud calendar. I'm thinking the phone, still less than two years old, might have ended up a lemon.

Well, if you were amused by that, you will go into hysterics over this: After being on the phone with Apple for well over an hour, after getting passed to three different people for whom I had to describe my problem from scratch all over again, after having gotten to a senior advisor who asked me to wait on hold while she was to check into something ... the call got cut off. Square one.

We are orange. I wonder whether we are ever even yellow.

I call Apple because I am having a syncing problem with my iPhone. While you wait, they give you choices of music to listen to: (1) modern pop music; (2) classical; (3) jazz; or (4) nothing. Definitely not modern pop music. And the jazz, which I like, I was afraid it would be some soft R&B or what they used to call "smooth jazz", Kenny G stuff. Not a fan of that either. So I selected classical, hoping I would got the kind of string quartet music you can push to the background while you do other things. Nope. Turns out what they call "classical" is John Williams-style movie music, with huge orchestras and endless flourishing crescendos, which I didn't even think was possible, since you typically need soft passages in music to set up the crescendos, and there were no soft passages. It got so bad I ended up hanging up and starting over, and choosing "nothing". So, the peeve, I guess, is organizations that have no idea what classical music actually sounds like.

Thank you, Donald Trump, for reinforcing our border with the military earlier this month after President Illegal Alien refused to.