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His career looks not unlike Al Avila’s: scouting director background, emphasis in St Louis on player procurement, long tenure, zero mention of analytics or decision sciences—e.g., baseball man. His topline resume doesn’t seem to address the Tigers’ most glaring need, which is integrating analytics into performance analysis, biomechanics, and health recovery and maintenance. Thank you, pass.

Even with the benefit of a mental health leave available, a lot of workers aren't comfortable yet asking for one. There's some work to do to get workers comfortable with the idea. This might be one benefit in which the employers are actually ahead of the employees when it comes to acceptance. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/paid-leave-covers-mental-health-days-but-stigma-still-clouds-use

I can see why you'd be hesitant to just assume that nobody from a blue collar industry can avail themselves of help when they need it. Tens of millions of working people definitely cannot, though, and with that in mind, that's why I said I could see what @gkelly meant.

So you're the TikTok guy?!

True though this may be, there are also tens of millions of working people who can't take advantage of mental health leaves at all. Retail clerks, restaurant workers, rideshare drivers, truck drivers, general maintenance and repair workers, CSRs, farm workers, security guards, at-will sales reps, and basically anyone working in the gig economy, a lot of whom are subbing in for a white-collar job that might normally afford this as a benefit. If people working these kinds of jobs know or suspect they have mental health issues, they simply plow through it so the income can keep flowing, because if they don't, it won't. Many of us college-educated white-collar professionals tend to forget how absent this kind of safety net is for too many folks.

You may have missed my post from a couple days ago saying that as well.

If it's not considered incorrect, I would think at one time it was, but this usage has become so ubiquitous that no one notices it anymore. I would guess copy editors don't look for this at all.

Maybe for certain higher-level employee classes at some white collar industries.

NOTE: this is a grammar pet peeve, not a political pet peeve … In this morning’s paper, Clarance Page wrote of Biden’s speech this week: “Like Biden I know that all Republicans are not MAGA-red-to-the-bone Trump loyalists.” So, are you saying no Republicans are that? That all, meaning 100%, of Republicans are definitely not that? Or did you mean to say “Not all Republicans are MAGA-red-to-the-bone Trump loyalists”? And this guy writes for a living …

Who’s John Lester? 😉

This is a little harsh, but I see what you mean. It’s defensible to be irked at the idea of someone being practically celebrated for something that would lose most people their jobs. The difference here is that Austin Meadows is a star employee, and star employees in some industries have the ability to leverage their star status to obtain this kind of leeway, while the vast majority of us do not. I’m pretty sure this same industry would not give this kind of leeway to Zack Short or Jacob Barnes, guys who are a couple bad games from having their careers end for them, anyway. File that one under “Life Ain’t Fair”, I guess.

Exactly. They are public personalities by choice, and part of that bargain is that people talk in public about them. They can’t expect that we regular people will only cheer for them, and shut the hell up about them otherwise. Life in the fame lane doesn’t work that way. It’s not as though our speculating into what’s happening behind the scenes on some no-account message board is breaching their privacy or inhibiting their comeback. And besides, I don’t recall anyone here being disrespectful to either Rodriguez or Meadows, even if we are wrong about what’s going on behind the scenes which, given the recent tendency of the press to respect public figures’ private affairs, we’ll probably never know, anyway.

If it were painkiller addiction Meadows was dealing with, would he be hanging around the clubhouse and dugout every day, as he has said he has been and will continue to? Painkiller addiction sounds urgent enough to have to take time away from the team to address immediately. Otherwise, either he’s putting his addiction on pause to hang around the team for the next month, or it’s not a serious-enough problem to address immediately even though it’s serious enough to prevent him from playing.

True, and it’s not just that he’s an asshole. His garbage explanation can’t work if he doesn’t have willfully, aggressively stupid acolytes who will accept it.

He actually said much more: “They’re against God, guns, oil, law enforcement, tax cuts, regulation cuts, the Constitution, and they’re against our Founding Fathers. Other than that, they’re actually quite good …” How about him slyly slipping “regulation cuts” in there? That’s the big magilla [sic] right there. Nothing capitalists want more than the freedom to operate without any restrictions whatsoever.

I know. I wasn’t criticizing you or suggesting you’re naive. I was building on what you said.

How popular was the deadly public violence against Jews and other marginalized groups in 1930s Europe? How many in the Aryan majority actively cheered it on? How many of the majority contributed to the marginalization of these people by firing them from their jobs, cutting off cordial relations with them, and excluding them from public spaces they managed? And how many of the majority simply kept their heads down, trying to ignore it so they could try to just live their own “normal” lives? I’m not sure we’ll ever know the actual numbers, but I do know this: only a small percentage of people in Germany were actively engaged in the actual violent repression, and the rest of Aryan society succumbed to the pressure to accept it just so they could get along with as little drama in their own lives as possible. That could be instructive for America today. It doesn’t take a majority of people answering a poll to politically approve of a violent anti-democracy to make a violent anti-democracy happen. All that’s really needed is a highly-motivated, well-resourced, establishment-supported minority to put it in motion, coupled with a well-fed, constantly-entertained, moderately affluent majority base that will passively accept what’s happening in the background so they can just live out their lives in comfort. That majority base doesn’t have to be active red hats, participate in pogroms, vote for Trumpy candidates, or anything like that. With their well-bring and livelihoods being a higher priority than any group representing a small fraction of the population, groups who are constantly demonized as “leftists”, “Antifa”, BLM”, “marxists”, “groomers”, or as an otherwise dangerous threat, all the majority will need to do for it all to succeed is to overlook the real threats to the red hat targets and mind their own fucking business.

Come on. To be fair—I do believe your concern about your military friends and how they might as a group react has some basis in legitimacy. A lot of people the past few days have portrayed red hats as being butt-hurt crybabies who will simply retreat and suck their thumbs. But some of the people you refer to have done military stuff overseas before, are willing to do it again here, and are out training for that right now. So while I don’t anticipate them waging anything like years-long quasi-military campaigns against liberal enclaves and slaughtering civilians by the tens of thousands, I can envision them doing guerrilla strikes here and there, perhaps even attempting the assassination of certain government executives. I agree they are a threat that needs to be monitored and dealt with appropriately, and I’m trusting that the federal police are amping up surveillance of them in the wake of this speech, and will continue to do so after future aggravating events.

MAGA ideology being fueled by foreign-influenced right-wing media seems as likely to simply fade away as does a tea kettle settling back to room temperature while sitting on a lit stove. I don’t know what, but it seems likely something dramatic, much more dramatic than J6, will have to happen to finally wake this country up. I saw that someone recently referred to what’s happening now as the beginning of our own version of The Troubles. That’s imaginable.

You’re being serious about reeducation camps for red hats?

This one I believe because the idea that Rodriguez and his agent were in touch with the team, but that Al Avila lied and said they weren’t, makes no logical sense. It could have been disproved as easily as Mato publicly saying that the team is lying, which he would have been motivated to do having been publicly accused of doing something that essentially breaches his clients’ contractual responsibility to the team.

Yeah, I saw that, too. He looks a little more weathered than 24.

I like being evenly matched with an opponent. Makes for a more interesting game.

In his statement, Austin Meadows says he has been in the clubhouse and will remain with the team through the end of the season. That would seem to rule out painkiller addiction, right? Because if that were it, wouldn’t he be away from the team so he could urgently deal with that?

Man, what a laser by Willi. I did not imagine that liner going out.