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Here's a back road you can enjoy: the Blue Ridge Parkway. My wife and I drove it a few weeks ago, luckily just as the leaves were at peak, and it was spectacular. But just as spectacular was driving from Mount Airy, NC to Lexington, KY and letting the car take you on literally the most direct route. Talk about a back road trip! You will see some hundreds of miles of winding roads through the mountains and wave at a lot of locals in front of their houses along the way. Can't recommend it highly enough!

Anyone else experience this? Around one in four people sneeze when they see a bright light I used to sneeze at the sun or bright lights a lot when I was a kid—in fact, when I felt like I needed to goose a sneeze, I would seek out a bright light or the sun to help it along. I haven’t had that in a long time, though.

This. Now a team can’t sign Turnbull and freely assign him to their minor leagues without rostering and waiver implications. Plus he creates distractions in the clubhouse with his me-first jerking around. He was more trouble than he was worth, and Harris couldn’t find another team to take him in trade. The Tigers are trying to remake their culture and that kind of guy, like Eduardo before him, doesn’t fit into that. Maybe there’s a team somewhere that will put up with that kind of thing from a slight talent like Turnbull, or is too clueless to know about it. That team might be in Asia, and maybe not even Japan. Turnbull won the battle, but he’s probably going to lose the war.

😉😁

Oh my god, I still have nightmares from 2018 from when I was stuck on the PA Turnpike after making the first stop on it to get some McDonald’s, the only restaurant there, and which was closed for renovations. I thought it would be like Michigan—there’s another exit in a couple or three miles. Nope.I was on that damn thing for almost 100 miles before the next exit came up. I was practically starving and my kidneys were swimming so much it was literally painful. I don’t know how I made it from the car to the can without leaking! 💀

It happens to all the right people in that party.

I think it probably would, but hey, he won the battle, didn’t he? Isn’t that the most important thing? Seems like he believes it is. Maybe Ed can tell us what the practical implications along the lines you suggest are?

Also, FWIW, nothing we say here, no matter what side of the coin any of us are on, matters to the Tigers, or Correa, or MLB, even if what we say agrees with them. We are all here talking to each other, in a nonprofessional capacity, sharing thoughts, having fun, and sometimes we have strong debates with strong opinions. As long as the debates stick to the subject at hand and things don't get personal, I think that's great!

I'm sorry that sticking to my opinion and not changing my mind is upsetting you. I just feel very strongly about it, is all. If it makes you feel any better, the guys on the other side of the debate also feel very strongly about it, are also sticking to their opinion. and are not changing their minds, either!

Dan, I am not sure how you got the idea that I am making assumptions about what conclusion you or anyone else should or should not arrive at, but I have said nothing along those lines. All I am doing is sticking to my position in the face of unanimous opposition, and I believe I am presenting my case persistently without prejudice or malice toward anyone, unless you show me otherwise?

Correa didn't demand a billion dollars. He set his floor as 330 million, and the Tigers as the first team to make an offer lowballed him by 55 million. Either they made the offer knowing upfront Correa was going to reject it—which makes sense because everyone knew he would—or they made the offer dreaming that he would accept it without fielding another offer, which would happen only in a fantasy. Either way, theirs was an unserious approach.

"Jackass" and "asshat" seem to me such wildly insufficient epithets to use in reference to a genocidal dictator.

He's giving them permission to be their worst selves in public.

Sure, let him have his service time. He's somebody else's problem now.

If there's no chance the other side is going to accept the offer—and you must know that Correa was never going to accept an offer from the very first team making one that lowballed his publicized target by $55 million—then it can't be a serious offer. I don't know how much simpler it can be.

I've listened to it all the way through three times now and I like it about as much as I like John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy".

I felt that way about them in 1981. I "hated" a lot of bands at that time for their overexposure on a rapidly-calcifying Detroit rock radio scene. It's not for nothing that WLLZ seemed to be an acronym for "We Love Led Zeppelin". Funnily enough, I softened up toward AC/DC in the 2010s thanks to, of all entities, the Chicago White Sox. For years the team would enter the field for a game to the strains of "Thunderstruck", which seemed like a really perfect super-energetic entrance theme. I really dug that, and that led me to start going through more of AC/DC's catalog, re-listening to the songs I "hated" for their overexposure way back then, and started enjoying even songs like "Back in Black" more. Funny how great gobs of time can change your mind about things you felt so immutably sure of (which Jeff Tweedy can certainly attest to).

That happened to me once at an exit that did not have an immediate on-ramp back to the freeway. Argh!

Yes, I now. 😉

Sure it is, but the AAV was the yardstick being used in the post you pointed to. If that's the measure of competitiveness or seriousness we're going to use, then the Astros' offer was more competitive and serious than the four offers originally listed.

Yeah, it was ridiculous all right, but they made the offer in all seriousness, and Correa accepted it, so it looks like the Giants dodged a bullet on that one.

What did the Astros offer Correa? 5 years $160 mill = $32.0MM AAV. By your yardstick, that was the most serious offer by a mile and a half.

The Tigers offer was 55 million lower than Correa's stated goal of 330, and 75 million lower than Giants offer of 350 he accepted. So, not so competitive.

They might have well have offered one year for eight million, because that had as much chance of being accepted as 10/275 was, which was zero. And an offer that everyone knows will not be accepted by the other side is not a serious offer.

It’s true Correa didn’t get a $330 million offer. What he got instead was a $350 million offer, from the Giants. When that fell apart because of health, he then got a $315 million offer from the Mets, which fell apart for the same reasons. Point being, $275 million (which, as I just looked it up now, was the actual number) was never, ever going to cut it with Correa on the day it was offered him, and everybody paying attention at the time knew it wouldn’t. Why would Avila make an intentional lowball offer? It could be one of two reasons that I can imagine: The Tigers just came off a 77-win season and it looked like we’d turned a corner, and we definitely needed a shortstop. There was a lot of buzz that we should be in on Correa but Ilitch probably did not want to spend anything like $330MM on him, but we couldn’t be seen not going after the biggest free agents because optics. So we made the lowball offer we knew was going to be rejected so we could say see? We made a serious offer and he turned us down. Not our fault, we were serious. In fact it’s his fault that he didn’t take the life-changing money, so what the hell is wrong with that guy? Who wants a guy like that, anyway? And hey, that worked, because people were and are satisfied that it was a serious offer and Correa was an idiot for not taking it. Of course, for this reason to make sense would require Avila to be devious enough to come up with such a scheme, which you yourself imply is not at all likely, or else he was taking a marching order from Ilitch on it. But either way, this might not be what the case was, anyway, which leads to the second reason I can imagine: Al Avila is an ignorant negotiator who honestly didn’t understand that lowballing his target by more than $50 million on the very first offer made by any team was never going to fly. I would grant that under these circumstances, Avila made the offer with the serious intention of signing Correa for that amount, but that would also mean Avila is too ignorant to realize that Correa was never, ever, ever going to take a lowball offer like that as long as ten-plus-year deals were still on the table, as they still were in November of 2021. (Correa did end up taking 3/105 from the Twins not because he grossly overestimated his own worth, but because the health issues that were revealed after the Giants and Mets fiascos screwed up his market, and at that point, no way were the Tigers going to make 10/275 available to him again.) I would still conclude that despite the possibility the Tigers honestly miscalculated the sufficiency of the offer, it still can’t be regarded as a serious offer, because both sides, not just one, need to regard it as a serious offer for it to actually be so. Otherwise, the Tigers could have offered Correa one year at $8 million and said it was a serious offer, and by your defintion, you would have to agree that it was.