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People feel very strongly about him. He was by far the most interesting non-tender.

Not many I can think of. I would never suggest they do.

Makes it way easier to get away with graft.

Teams that totally avoid free agency don’t win as much as teams that know how to effectively sign key free agents.

OK, that’s fine, we can leave it there, although don’t be surprised if I continue to acknowledge it at times, and I won’t be surprised when you continue to push back on it.

It’s based on all the years under the prior administration, which was well-reported in the national media while being pretty much ignored by the access-dependent local guys. You might have heard about it. Sure, the Avila people are mostly gone now, but the smell is still lingering around the organization, and the Harris front office has to work through that and establish that they are not more of the same. The changed talk and the hires are a good start, but they still have to prove themselves to complete the turnaround, which they were never going to accomplish within the first six weeks of the offseason. Once they do accomplish that, though, they should have a fair shot at getting the top guys at market value, instead of having to overpay to lure in the remaining free agents that are left, such as the Baezes and the Eduardos.

There may well be more than one, and they may also rotate to other positions. Malloy may be one, Kreidler may be another, Ibañez yet another, Schoop may get some reps there, the way people are talking. The way Harris is assembling the team for 2023, versatility may be the watchword.

I’m willing to give Harris some rope on the upcoming year since bad teams with bad reputations usually have a tough time getting good free agents to sign, for obvious reasons. They need to prove themselves to be serious about recasting the organization from top to bottom, even beyond announcing the right hires. That’s gonna take time, maybe even more than a year.

Sure, he’s old news now, I agree. But attended to the right set of circumstances, this kind of thing can wax as well as wane.

He may have had lots of money before, but if he wanted to take his personal wealth into the stratosphere, he could always use the help of a nation-state hostile to America, and with trillions of dollars at its disposal.

Would the government just look the other way with the hope that Trump exiles himself? That strikes me as off-brand, but also, the danger is that if Trump’s Q score somehow increases as people come to believe he was politically martyred, he could become even more dangerous as a leader-in-exile, outside the reach of US control. If he were to go to a country hostile to the US, which I believe to be the leading probability if he does leave, he could do way more damage to America than he ever could under house arrest at one of his properties here.

Always struck me as a guy who takes himself heart attack seriously.

I know they are still at least a couple of steps away from this, but that whatever point these charges go to court, are they actually going to apprehend Trump? And if so, how will they apprehend him? Or do they expect he’s going to just walk into court and face the music like a good little boy?

“Fund” right there in the name of the thing. Wonder whether red hats will notice.

If they believe him to be a 1 WAR player next year, then I’m glad they let him go.

Even if he does technically step away, I can't help but believe he will still be dictating policy, strategy and tactics from wherever afar is.

The first contracts that came in like that, the Diaz and Suarez contracts, struck me that way. But the more contracts like that which get signed, the less like overpays they look and the more like it's the market shifting, taking the line of what constitutes "overpay" upward with it. I think only if the market shift back down to 2019-21 levels can all these contracts signed this offseason be considered overpays.

This dovetails into the crux of where I am coming from on all this. For Harris to make a calculation along the lines, we expect Candelario to deliver X value—let's make it easy and say 1 WAR—for which we would gladly pay $3 million, but for which would never pay $7 million, is perfectly logical business-wise. Such a fiduciary-based calculation falls squarely within his budgeting and spending responsibilities as PBO. But for fans to say, I think Candelario will produce 1 WAR this season, and I'll be happy if the team pays only $3 million for that, but I'll be angry if the team pays $7 million instead—that's just bonkers to me. Because it's still 1 WAR either way, which would result in the same number of wins for the team, which is really all that fans care about. And since we have no way of knowing whether the other $4 million would have gone back into payroll for other, better players, I don't think we can use that as the self-evident argument to defend it, because there's no way for us to know that's what would have happened. In fact, because of the low level of money we're talking about, I believe the fairest conclusion would be that the roster would look exactly the same whether they paid Jeimer $3MM or $7MM, unless Harris were to specifically declare he took the $4MM he saved on Jeimer and got such and such another player for it, which of course he would never declare publicly. Semi-related to this: if the Harris Analytics team projected Jeimer to be only a 1 WAR player in 2023, then I totally support showing him the door, because we need more from third base—and every position, really—than 1 WAR. BUT: if Analytics projects him to be a 3 WAR player, but we let him go because they wouldn't pay $7 million for that simply because he underperformed so poorly this past season, then that would be equally bonkers. So, giving Harris the benefit of the doubt on this, I gotta conclude that they projected him to be a lot closer to 1 WAR than 3 WAR.

So ... 130?

I have never seen one exactly like that, but I don't think it's a problem, either. At least they change the pitch of the slid halfway through so you don't keep accelerating a la Newton until you crash at the bottom.

It's ba-a-a-ack ...

My pet peeve with this spot is that any time you watch a program on Amazon's FreeVee service, they play it at least twice per episode. They are 90 seconds long and not fast-forwardable. It also features a few scenes of PDA, which I don't particularly care for even in shows, let alone commercials. I get why they put it in there, though.

I see, OK. But probably not during the dark days of @jack's liberal Twitter during which bots and their human minions spewed COVID disinfo and got banned for it, to the horror of MAGAnation?

I agree. I've never taken a job I felt i couldn't succeed at, either.

If it flopped during the midterms, I would imagine it will flop even harder when they try the same or something else equally stupid in 2024.