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I actually think it would work better for the batter. As things stand, the pitcher can wait as long as he wants, and who knows how long that's going to be? Only the pitcher, because he's in total control of the timing. With a pitch clock, the batter knows the pitcher is on a timer, so he better knows when to expect the ball to be thrown, and can better mentally prepare for that. You know who else is going to like the pitch clock? Fielders.

I'm not so sure Vlad sees what's happening as mistakes, just yet. The failures of the cannon fodder brigades he sent in as ground forces may be giving him the pretext he needs to go nuclear on Ukraine. I'm thinking he's relishing the idea so that he can join America in the drop-a-nuke-on-another-country club. After all, look how well America did after nuking Japan in 1945? 🤷🏼‍♂️ I don't know. Who knows what that guy is thinking. But I wouldn't necessarily assume a conventional reaction by Putin to anything that's happened so far.

What they need at first base is a safety base extending beyond the foul line for the batter-runner to touch, so as to remove basically any opportunity for a player collision or spike mishap on ground ball plays there. Like so:

I am basically for pitch clocks to snappy up pace of game, but I can imagine the players, pitchers and catchers in particular, fighting the pitch clock because they'll want to maximize recovery time after hurling pitches at 100% max effort each and every time. If this goes through, I could see a slight spike in offense, including walks and HBPs, as starters tire in the middle innings. This might also lead to more pitchers/pitching changes.

Projection Junction. That's their function.

Following Trump relieves one of the responsibility to think critically.

From the Department of Projection Junction, That’s Your Function: Paper tiger accuses NATO of paper tigerism, and also, newsflash: there was vote fraud.

They won’t be the only ones.

Well, it didn’t take long to prove me wrong on that one! 😂

It’s the kind of thing that would have made sense to us in sixth grade.

You’re joking.

That low? Were there other nuclear powers on the brink of confrontation with us on that one?

I was thinking about this a few days ago, wondering whether we will see the dead bodies, and I’m guessing we won’t, because sensitivities. Remember Vietnam? Each night, the network news would show video of soldiers wounded in the field, or coffins of soldiers coming home. It was instrumental in shifting American sentiment against the war. The then-current presidential administration and its military complex did not like that. So, in the wars after that, starting with Lebanon and Grenada and on through Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and all the post-9/11 wars, the military embedded the media with the troops to get them on the same sympathetic side as the soldiers, and there was exactly zero footage of facts on the ground like dead soldiers blown up by IEDs made available for the media to air. This worked to prevent Americans from seeing as they did with Nam just how dirty and deadly war actually is. It didn’t necessarily keep all Americans invested in pursuing those wars, because other reasons, but grim footage of death on a nightly basis was not a factor in people’s opposition to, for instance, America’s Middle East wars. I think it would be beyond shocking for the media to foist close-up images of dead people at all, let alone children, on any basis, let alone nightly. There are probably websites out there that will feature that kind of imagery, but people would have to seek that out, and I don’t think anyone save for a few NGO professionals and perhaps some ghoulish people would do so. So unless there is a dramatic shift in the perspective of presenting raw war footage in the media, I think the closest we will get to anything like that is grainy or blurry or heavily edited images of unidentifiable adult people falling down from a distant camera angle, and maybe not even that.

Much like Trump, his red hats and his inner circle, Putin believed in the Kool-Aid he was drinking. He believed that Ukraine is an illegitimate state; that “Ukrainian” is a fake nationality; that in their hearts people living there identity as Russian; that they were duped by an faux-democratic globalist conspiracy into leaving Mother Russia; and that once they realize this they would welcome his soldiers with open arms; since they are going there only to eliminate the Uki-Nazi leadership and their sympathizers. Now he’s going to get bogged down by a super expensive occupation that is going to complete the bankruptcy of his country that began with the withdrawal of the world economic and business community. His people are going to starve, there will be protests and even riots in the street, and his soldiers will have to decide whether to draw blood from their fellow countrymen in defense of whatever the fuck Putin tells them the principles at hand are. As for Putin himself, he’ll be like Kim Jong Un for at least a while: a guy who owns everything and everyone in an entire country, with which and whom he can do as he pleases. He can steal from anyone, torture anyone, fuck anyone, kill anyone he wants, with complete impunity. For now, anyway. It’s very possible that the sheer ugliness of the story that will eventually be told about the Russia of this era will be as shocking as anything we learned about Nazi Germany.

You are not the only one, and I need to do better as well. Great post.

The increase under Biden in 2021 can't be well-defended, for sure, but Trump certainly liked his Russian oil too. Especially near the end there. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTIM_NUS-NRS_1&f=M FWIW, Russia's never more than 8% of all oil imports in any given year.

No proof, but …

So called creation of jobs.

Cruz misspelled “Trump” and “Pence”.

Trump would have been strong with Putin.

I presented a poster on this in Pittsburgh a few years ago where I showed that deadening the ball by just 1% to 2% could result in double digit percent decrease in homers.

This is so far nestled in between Invasion of Poland and Cuban Missile Crisis. 9/11 has turned out to be pretty much what I was filleted for saying about it at the time: a heinous criminal act blown way out of proportion, up to the level of state action, for political, military, and profit purposes. I think COVID is/was bigger than 9/11.