chasfh

Eastern time zone teams are generally harder sells for Japanese players for a lot of reasons: cultural differences are starker; traveling back home takes a lot longer; ET night games start at 8:00am vs pacific time teams' games starting at 1100am, which make them better for TV. I'm sure there are other reasons. Not saying Yamamoto could never ever sign with Detroit, but it is a lot longer shot.

The irony is that they don’t appear to care what The Man said if it doesn’t suit the purpose they already had in mind going in. The Bible is a big book and there’s a lot in it to ignore in the service of making a point.

It's hard for the US to be anything other than "Israel right or wrong", since the Jewish people as both individuals and as a political identity still occupy that moral high ground from ~75 years ago. That said, I've been gobsmacked how many (I had thought) reasonable people of the Hebraic persuasion think nothing of the idea of killing hundreds of thousands of Gaza civilians because, hey, they voted Hamas in back in 2004 or whatever it was, so it's their own damn fault what's happening to them. Of course, never mind that Hamas has blocked elections ever since then, and that half the people in Palestine are children and weren't even alive or old enough back then to vote. Justice is the demand, just like it was post 9/11. Exact same idea, it looks to me.

I think Utley making it would help Whitaker on a future committee ballot.

I think Trump himself is going to make a lot of that happen. Just like last time.

Well, Trump has already affirmatively stated what his plans are for when he returns to office, and it's going to be nothing but revenge and retribution for all his enemies, which is basically anyone with a different color hat. It's actually the only thing he's said that he is gonna do, as far as I can tell. Unless you're waiting for him to make the affirmative case to the American people about what he's going to do about the federal budget and tax negotiations and all that, in which case, lol. 😉

Told you it was fashionable. 😏

I've always thought of the whole born-again thing as being related to this. Their thing is, you can't earn your way into heaven—only by the blood of Jesus after you've accepted him as your Personal Lord and Savior™ can you ensure your spot in heaven. But the flip side of that is, and must be, that once you are saved, you can't earn your way out of heaven, either. That must mean by definition that a saved person can sin in the worst ways imaginable until the second they die, but as long as they've accepted Christ, they're perpetually golden. I guess that's why the concept that being a cruel MAGA is an unChristian way to behave bounces right off their deaf ears, because acting in we've come to believe as being "Christian" was never the point for them. Being a saved Christian is not an act, it's a condition, and if you can never lose it except by explicitly rejecting Christ, what's the incentive to act "Christian"?

I think Trump earned his second term loss. The only way I can see Trump winning is that reasonable people stay home and/or Republicans fix election results in swing states. I see no way a reasonable person abandons Biden for Trump, and despite all the fashionable dark-joke cynicism we see about the American people as a class, there are more reasonable people than irrational people. Remember, Trumpism has lost hm three straight election cycles, and he and that party are doubling down on the very thing that lost those elections for them.

The curse of a social system that neither teaches nor values critical thinking skills.

Far be it from me to say it serves him right.

Mauer won three batting titles and an MVP at catcher, which is a really big deal, and he had plus-plus sideburns that got him TV spots, so he fulfills the fame part. Fifty-five wins is enough when paired with that. Maybe this year, maybe not, but I think he gets in at some point. I think Sheffield has the career totals, what with 500 homers and all, but he was also a sort of generic nondescript slugger during Chicks Dig The Long Ball, so he gets a little lost in that shuffle. if he has his same numbers during the 60s and 70s, he sails in. Sheff did have a sudden vote surge on his ninth ballot, but he does have twenty points to make up as well, so I think he’s a long shot. Victor will always be in the Hall of Tiger Fan Hearts, but he and Torii don’t have a prayer for Cooperstown. Chase Utley should get in, since he has a ring and a little bit of fame through things like It’s Always Sunny, but the Utley Rule thing might cost him votes on the margin. Probably not this year, but maybe with five years he’ll be in. A-Rod should have been an inner-circle Hall of Famer on his first ballot, of course, but there are probably still enough moral scolds and douche scolds to keep him out for the next eight years. Beltre is the only lock this year.

I think he might have evolved into a Heyman-level hack.

Wasn’t Morosi also the guy who said the Tigers and Eduardo were negotiating after the season ended? He needs a win to get back on the horse.

I’m not sure abut how the backup program copies. It looks like by file to me on the interface but I don’t know what it is under the hood. The program app is called Fileback, and I’ve been using the same copy of it since the 2000s. It hasn’t even been updated since 2009 and the guy who created it might even be dead. But I know it like the back of my hand, it’s awesome, and I’m gonna use it til I die. Anyhoo: The sector sizes are different. I am moving the files from a disk that’s NTFS 4096 to one that’s ex-FAT 1024. Is that the difference right there? Should I reformat the SSD to sx-FAT 4096 to match? I probably should keep it ex-FAT because it’s an external SSD, right? Or should I change it to NTFS? Or: is there any way for me to change it without formatting so that current files are there under ex-FAT 1024 and all new files after that come in under ex-FAT 4096?

I like Maeda as a target. He's old, but he still has good strikeout and walk rates, gets a lot of swing and miss especially outside the zone, and he has a lot of playoff experience he can share with the staff. I would approve of a serious offer.

What's his public minimum demand? 😁

Cue Trump posting on his Social Truthiness thingy congratulating North Korea and calling Kim Jong-Un smart, successful, and handsome. https://x.com/abplive/status/1727016671528059082?s=20https://x.com/abplive/status/1727016671528059082?s=20

Thank goodness for that. Willie Horton was (and still is) my favorite Tiger from the very beginning in 1968. He was also my first coach on my Tigers fantasy camp team in 2007, and I would—I will—be shattered should he die. He's one of the last remaining strong links to my childhood. I hope he outlives me.

Who knows things about external disk drives? I have a couple older backup drives that are 1TB HDD and I got a new, bigger drive that's 2TB SSD. I used a backup utility to copy the contents of both HDDs to the SSD. Since the SSD is equal to the total size of both HDDs, all the contents on both should fit. Got all of one HDD onto the new one, but shortly into the second HDD, a notice came up that the SDD was full. What? How could that happen? There's about 800 GB on one HDD and 750 GB on the other, that's less than 1.6 TB, which should fit easily onto a 2TB drive. I did a properties check on some of the folders and I was gobsmacked: It was showing a way, way higher number of "Size on disk" versus just "Size". Example: one folder showed 550MB in Size, but 1.15 GB on Size on disk" That's more than twice higher. None of the other HDDs I have reflect any practical difference between the two numbers, and even the SSD hard drive on my laptop is showing the same number for Size and Size on disk. Only on this new SSD external drive do I have this problem. Does anyone recognize this and know what I can do to fix it?

See, now, that's the problem! Nobody wants to work anymore! Thanks, Biden!!

Giants offered $350 mill, and got him for that number, until the deal fell apart for non-number reasons.

What was Nola's minimum demand?

Not true. In a high-profile business where everybody can see exactly what you're doing in full view, appearances not only do not mean nothing, they account for a lot. Demanding $330 and then accepting the first offer at $275 would have resulted in a serious loss of face among his peers in the business, who have an indirect stake in Correa successfully negotiating his best contract. It would also have an effect on the way his next contract negotiations go. Maybe hard to understand but true.

It's true, which I can attest to from professional experience. The difference here is that one side had established, in public, a minimum amount he would sign for, $330 million, and the other side made the first offer of any team, an offer that was $55 million short of the public minimum demand. The only reasonable response from the one side to the other side would have been, you need to bring it up to $330 million, because other teams were going to make an offer that hadn't yet, so why would the one side accept the lowball out of the gate? If that Tigers would have responded by raising it up to $330MM, that would have been serious. But even had they raised it to $329MM before another team made an offer, Correa still could not have accepted it until getting other offers. So, if anything, $275MM might have been a bet that Correa had no market beyond that, and I don't recall anyone believing that at the time—although, if we recall, there was no "at the time" at all. As it was, we didn't even hear about the offer until after Javier Baez was already safely signed and in-house, so in the end, the Tigers never had to put their 10/275 money where our mouth was. The only way $275 million would have ended up being serious is if no other team matched that with their offer, or even made an offer. That's basically what happened with Pudge back in 2003-04: he'd made a public demand of $40 million at minimum, and the Tigers were the only team to offer that much, so Pudge had to take the deal. He almost certainly didn't want to have to sign with a 119-loss team, but he was on record and the Tigers matched it, so he was duty-bound to take the offer. Turned out OK, after all.