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That would empty out two-thirds of Congress!

I would never have considered Musk liberal, but I wouldn’t call the people who revered him liberals, either. True liberals generally have a distinct, defined ideology they base their belief systems on. The people in the Musk cult are basically contrarians who crave the recognition that they’re smarter than anyone else, so they embrace whatever new idea or icon that comes along that they believe will help prove that. That’s what I think the sudden surge of red hats was all about: people who discovered “politics” for the first time through RW online media and now want to demonstrate how smart they are about it by endlessly spouting all the talking points to the rest of us. It’s also why I believe people like this will bounce from new extreme left-wing ideas to new extreme right-wing ideas in basically the snap of a finger. They want to stay one step ahead of the sheeple.

Except he’s not a woman, so he won’t get crushed by the justice system.

That’s one of the reasons they’ve been doing it in international games, too. I like it better than declaring a tie after x innings. We ain’t Japan. 😉

Will Smith is as decent a flyer to take as anyone. He’s been bubbling around league average for the last three or so year so I wouldn’t expect much from him, but another LHP out of the pen can’t hurt. Sure, he’s not the future, but we gotta put big league pitchers on the field today while we’re waiting.

I don’t mind it starting in the 11th. I’d like them to play the 10th as normal. If they would have decided that I would have been totally cool with it.

But that also works against the scoring of runs and deciding a winner more quickly.

I think they don’t put them on first because that would just set up a double play.

Speaking of coaching, here's an anecdote reminding us the damage bad coaching can wreak on a player. https://theathletic.com/4198162/2023/02/15/tigers-spring-training-pitching/?source=dailyemail&campaign=601983 The Tigers are implementing science into their pitching programs more than ever before, thanks largely to Lund’s professorial background. They’ve had Faedo throw at Joker Marchant Stadium with Hawkeye radars monitoring his every movement. They analyzed the results and worked to optimize his mechanics. That, in part, led to Faedo returning to a three-quarters delivery that he abandoned not long after coming to the Tigers organization. How’s this for an interesting quote? “I think it’s more of my natural arm slot,” Faedo said. “They’ve always been like, ‘When did you start trying to raise your arm slot?’ I was like, ‘When I first got here.’ I felt it was one of those things with prior people that I wasn’t throwing correctly … and as a player your like, ‘OK, I have to change, this is what I’m being told.’ “(The new staff) kind of relayed to me that that was incorrect and what I was doing was correct, like the guy that they drafted. Use more of that three-quarters arm slot, play more like an athlete.”

I don't think we'll be worse, either. PECOTA takes into account only past stats and works mainly if nothing about how players are coached changes, but I believe we will see significant changes in hitting instruction approach, particularly around improvements in fixing players who drift away from their strengths, that may result in improvement all by itself, in addition to simple regression to the mean for key players.

I would be OK with starting it in the 11th, which I believe is what they do with international rules. At least player the 10th inning like real baseball.

Without doing any math on actual BABIP from the last few years, I could see batting averages leaping by 20 points or more, tempered, of course, by the strikeout increase. BTW, here’s a clarification on the rule limiting throws over to first that I did not realize: the technical limitation is not on throws, but on “disengagements”, meaning, a disengagement of the pitcher’s foot from the pitcher plate to engage with the runner on first. IOW, a step off the rubber and a movement toward first counts the same against the limit as an actual throw. I don’t love the rule, but if they’re gonna have it anyway, I rather like this.

Between this, the shift ban, the pitch clock, and, I assume, a juiced ball, run scoring is going to leap by perhaps a whole run per team per game. The only thing that’s going to keep it down will be record strikeouts by a record number of pitchers per game.

The state income tax savings alone will save Jacob deGrom close to $19 million during the course of his contract versus if he’d made the same salary with the Mets,

The government taxpayer will, and the money will go to the biggest companies, who will pocket the lion’s share of it and use the rest of it to pay employees who will generate that portion back into the economy. Rinse and repeat until corporations with government connections and their bought-and-paid-for lackeys in Washington and America’s capitals control literally all the money and then parcel it out on an as-needed basis to keep the workers showing up for those jobs. Oh … wait …

Score one for the free market!

Oh, man, how many 2A people on the old board maybe 10 to 15 years ago did I enrage by making fun of their “I can fight and defeat the tyrannical government with my Glock” claim?

By the time many students get to college, they’re already used to the prison-like atmosphere of schools in the age of mass shootings.

Ha ha ha, no shit …

That's a really big part of it, I think—it's about whether players believe the team they're signing with can win. For all the money they spent on Semien and Seager and Gray last winter, they won only 68 games, so what happened this winter? They then signed deGrom (and Eovaldi and Perez on a QO for high AAV) this winter. With so many good guys on the team, how can they not win, right? Who wouldn't want to play for a team like that? I remember the team preview programs on MLB Network in the early 2010s, and they would have guys like Harold Reynolds and Mark DeRosa and Carlos Pena predicting, every year, that the Tigers would win the the World Series. They were right on the pennant one year, but no rings. Didn't matter: basically every year from 2011 to 2014, and maybe even 2015, it was going to be the Tigers hoisting the trophy at the end. And the reason they always gave for that was because the Tigers had all the superstars, and players believe in the power of superstars to make winning happen. I think that provided a pretty good window into how players view things. I think that's a big reason why the Rangers are able to get good players to go there even without a recent track record. Another reason, mentioned here, is that Texas is a preferred geography for a lot of players: it's in the South, which American southerners like, and they have an embedded Hispanic culture there, which appeals to Latinos. Detroit has neither of those things. And, of course, the Tigers weren't going to throw 5/185 or 10/325 or 7/175 at anyone, anyway, so there's that, too.

Once again, I'm talking about this year. Not last year, not 2016, not 2013 or 2012 or 2011. This year is not anything like any of those years. If you like, you can believe that playing for a winner doesn't matter to players and that it's all about the money. I find that surprising, frankly, but there are a lot of people who would agree with you on that. I just don't happen to believe it's all about the money. I may never be able to convince you or anyone else here of that, but I will express the opinion that playing for a winner does matter to players, when the topic comes up and I believe it's appropriate to express it. I won't back down from that.

Well, that went without saying. At least for a couple of minutes.

Give me liberty or give me death. Unless we can decrease the chance of being shot by 5 or 10%. In that case, forget liberty and give me lockdowns.

It knocks me out that any cop would be a 2A absolutist, as though he would prefer that the civilian crowd he is monitoring for trouble all be carrying concealed weapons rather than being unarmed.