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It can be an accident when a pitcher loses control and hits a batter with a pitch, but there’s also some skill by the batter to getting hit by the pitch, which is why the same players tend to be on the HBP leaderboards year after year.

These projectors spend so much time talking about how they were frauded in 2020 that it’s fair to wonder how much fraud played a role in 2016. No one thought much about how fraud might affect 2016 before the election, but then Trump himself raised everyone’s antennae by talking about fraud so incessantly in the run-up to 2020 that we were actively defending against it.

Brian Kenny on MLB Network has been waging a campaign against the error for a few years now. His thing is, if the batter puts the bat on the ball and gets on base, it should be credited as a hit, because he did what he was supposed to do.

Just because A.J. Hinch was quoted saying the word "kids" doesn't mean that mom took a powder and Rodriguez had to step in to save the family, or that the issue was even the kids or the wife or anyone in the family at all. It's along the range of likelihoods, of course, but concluding such is as much speculation as anything else. After all, if the situation were truly a family emergency, then someone—if not Rodriguez himself because he's too indisposed, then his agent, whose entire job is to represent the player on a professional basis—should have been available to update the team on the situation. That part still smells a little funny, does it not?

I wonder how he will be received by the teammates he abandoned in the middle of the season.

Wyoming is decidedly not Illinois.

Seems to me they are doubling down on pulling the ball for home runs by rewarding batters with a hit if they just miss it, since there will be less incentive to try taking the ball the other way to avoid fielders.

One of my good buddies who’s from there is in the area for his annual back-home summer trip and was at the game. He texted me that he had just seen an inside-the-park-grand slam and I gave him a thumbs up. Didn’t hear back by 10 or 15 minutes later and when I looked at the game score, I saw why he had ignored my text. He sent me a video later: they still sang Sweet Caroline. So morale was still high.

Like it or not, with the announcement that the Jan 6 Hearings are stretching into September, at the very least, they will now become a front-and-center issue for the midterms, with both sides trying their hardest to make hay off it. And I don't think Republicans are gonna have to work very hard putting the fear of god into their voters and convincing them to vote straight-ticket Republican in November, or else you—and I mean YOU, Mr. and Ms. Everyday Ordinary Red Hat living in BFE in some non-coastal state—are going to be next on the Marxist Democrat hit list.

This is starting to make the Gilded Age look like kind of a good alternative to all this. So where's our trust-busting TR?

Ex-Tiger alert.

There are a lot of moments that stuck with me—yesterday's hearing will definitely go down in history as momentous. But the one in mind right now is one with the Murtaugh texts.

The 1999 All Star Game when he was brought onto the field in a golf cart, and all the players surrounding him like they were little kids. That was also when Ted asked McGwire whether he could smell the smoke coming off the bat after a particularly good hit. Nice moment.

Well, maybe you could, junior ... 😉

Meaning my feeling that his skill set is literally off the established charts? Sure. He is what he is right now and that wouldn't change if he had to stop playing. He will always have what he's done, what we've seen.

Speaking of Ted Williams, look where he's "buried" ...

I've joked that Ohtani himself magically transported himself from 2072, where he is merely an ordinary decent ballplayer, to 2022, where he gets to use his unique size and skills to take advantage of a game half century behind what he trained for. Either that or he comes from another planet that plays superior baseball. His skill set is literally off the charts that have been established over time. I heard a baseball podcast the other day declare, with complete certainty, that there can never, ever be another player like Ohtani. I don't necessarily agree with that—if a player like Ohtani happened once, another player like him could certainly happen again. But it did take 140+ years for us to get an Ohtani, so I could see how it could take a few hundred years before baseball sees another player like him..

Sure it's ridiculous, but let's play, anyway. If the guy in question were born decades later, raised in a very different era, growing to a different size, and having a completely different set of nutritional and developmental tools at his disposal—as well as completely different educational, social, sociological and broadly historical experiences, especially from a baseball perspective—I don't see how he could still be the Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams, even with similar familial experiences. He would develop in a completely different way and become a person with a completely different set of experiences and skills and points of view about practically everything, including the art of hitting. Ted Williams was a guy born in 1918, the "half-breed" son of a Mexican-American single mother who essentially abandoned him to his own devices in favor of a career in the Salvation Army. He was the unique product of his specific time and place and situation in history. Even if a person born eighty years later is named Ted Williams (and really, who in 1998 names their kid “Ted”, anyway?), I don't believe he could still the same person. Because of all the differences surrounding him, he’s a completely different person, because of the circumstances surrounding his time and place. Instead he’d be somebody like … oh, I don’t know … maybe Juan Soto. I think an only slightly less ridiculous but fun-to-contemplate hypothetical is to imagine transporting Ted Williams out of 1942 and plopping him into the middle of Major League Baseball 2022 and trying to imagine how he would do. That would definitely be the same guy, same background and experiences, same level of development, same skill set, same everything, just magically transported into another era, handed a bat, and told here you go, try to keep up—which I think he would struggle to do, since he'd be facing pitches he'd never seen before coming at speeds much faster than even Feller. He might figure out how to make a go of it in time, but I don't believe he would be performing anywhere near his Hall of Fame level.

If he would be bigger and stronger and taking advantage of nutrition and training and medical advances and analytics and all the rest of it, he wouldn’t be Ted Williams at all. He’d be somebody else.

It’s a mental health problem.

Wait, what? “The way (Hawley and the others like him) behave outside of the camera’s eye is very different”? I want some examples.

Liz killed it, too. This night is going to live on as providing some of the most memorable moments in the history of this nation.

Speaking of Kinzinger, hell of a finishing statement. Same for Luria.

Kinzinger could run for senator of Illinois and probably have a decent chance.

Cool. Now do smallpox.