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A.J. Hinch helped hire Scott Harris, so he isn't going anywhere. You know the phrase, "To whom much is given, much is expected?" The flip side of that is that you can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit. When a manager a given a roster dominated by rookies and AAAA players, demanding him to turn that into a playoff contender is too much. It's a total O.G. move to blame the manager for the failures of an entire organization, but I think most people recognize that any manager can do only so much with a roster of ciphers given to him by an organization that has spent the last seven years spinning its tires in the mud. When the tunnel is completely dark, it's easy to understand how the human beings on the roster would mentally check out. People can blame the manager 100% for failing to turn that around and inspire a .400 team to run through the wall every single night to avoid losing this individual game, but I think most reasonable folks can see how mentally taxing, maybe even impossible, that is to expect over the course of 162 games played for six straight months. Now that we appear to have plugged the gaping hole in leadership at the top of front office, once Hinch is given a solid roster to contend with, if he falls well short of expectations, then he will deserve to be shit-canned. Now is not that time.

Fox doing god’s work, is god is the NRCC.

This segment is brought to you by the good folks at Maverick cigarettes and Busch Light beer.

Economic power is a precursor to political power.

I do think had Germany landed in the US with the goal of invading it, they would have gotten more collaboration from locals than if Japan had done the same.

I won't write off Putin until he's out for good. How many times have we prematurely danced on Trump's grave?

The thing that's most upsetting about it all is just how easily the US could have entered the war on the side of the Nazis, had someone like a Lindbergh won the presidency in 1940. A distressingly high percentage of people were sympathetic to Nazi values, and another high percentage were apathetic about it all because of our isolation. Even with Roosevelt in office, If I'm Hitler in 1941, I'm thinking, there is no way the United States, a country so obviously divided along these kinds of ideological lines, could ever pull together to effectively fight a European war against them. With American isolationism in the bag, Hitler could have continued to run roughshod over country after country in Europe, including the UK, before finally subduing the Soviet Union and having, what, half a billion or more subjects in their Reich, minus the Jews? Then they could have conscripted every man in the Reich to enter their armed forces and turned their sights on the US, a country of, what, 130 million? With a Reich four times the size of America, Hitler could have reasonably calculated that he could run roughshod over America as well—particularly given another reasonable calculation that maybe a quarter or more of all Americans at the time would have collaborated with the Nazis, given their like-mindedness on genocidal racism. The collaboration rate could easily have been much higher during an American invasion than in the invasion of any European country. What Hitler didn't bank on, however, was Japan attacking Pearl Harbor. That woke a lot of people up because here was a nation of "yellow bastards" trying to invade America, which people racist to their core would never withstand. And since the friend of my enemy is my enemy, and Germany was considered the friend of Japan, once they declared war on the US after the bombing, that was pretty much it for any idea Hitler could waltz in and take over America.

@Motor City Sonics? Where did you hear this?

Where are you hearing this?

I've been watching the US and the Holocaust, and as I do so, I'm becoming convinced that QAnon is quite literally the new Nazi party. They really believe in the same things: the anti-semitism and cultishness and dedication to white supremacy, yes, but also the Blood Libel, the "Jew control" of international finance and media, the need to cleanse the earth of their subhuman enemy scum—all of it. They are most responsive to rhetoric based on fear of an alien and unknowable other, they blame their eroding situation on racial and ideological scapegoats, and they yearn for a narcissistic demagogues to rescue them. This is exactly what Nazism was in the 1930s, and it is exactly what QAnon is today. This is what makes Trump's embrace of it last week actually dangerous, rather than silly. Trump is giving red hats permission to fully embrace QAnon and its genocidal philosophy, and I will bet that by the time Trump leaves the scene, QAnon will already have rushed in to replace him as the red hats' unifying principle. Once we start seeing people fly QAnon flags at their homes, farms and businesses, that's when we know shit's gonna really start getting real. I'm thinking within two years, tops.

Oh darn, if we’d only waited a few days, we could’ve had Dayton Moore … 😝

Don't look now, but since August 31, Javy Baez is slashing .352/.378/.563, good for a 169 wRC+ and enough to raise his season WAR by almost a full point. How he got there is kind of interesting, though. He's still striking out a lot and not walking enough—he was in the bottom sixth for BB/K ratio of all 161 qualifiers during that time frame. He was still a groundball machine, although he did up his line drive game. He crushed sliders better than 96% of other qualifiers, and clobbered curve balls, too. He had among the fewest soft hits, but he didn't hit the ball hard much, either. He still paced all qualifiers in chasing pitches and swinging and missing. So how did he get so much production these past three weeks? How about a .468 BABIP?

This one was ... wow. Wordle 459 3/6 🟨🟨🟨⬛🟨 🟨🟨🟩🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

What the Ford Frick is this about?

Wait a minute—is that for CarShield?

How about this? Not sure what to think about it yet ...

Now that they’ve shit-canned the ugly blonde, I see DraftKings has reduced their rotation to a single spot about talking about baseball in the way a football or basketball fan would. And they’re hammering us with it. Every. Single. Half-Inning.

Enjoy it while you can, they’re trying to fix it right now. I saw them just use MASN’s graphic with Mountcastle’s stats. MASN actually has the cleanest view of any baseball broadcast this year: a scorebox in the upper left corner, and that’s it. Not even a MASN logo. Great decision.

I don’t see any Bally crawl on the screen. Just a clean open view of the game. Just like the old days, except in HD and without blurry lines or snow. I love it.

Probably just as well.

I might normally hope that Scott Harris replaces Shep and Old Guys, but it really doesn’t matter since I do radio audio overlay anyway.

I wouldn't say flat out this could never happen, but I really do think giving the gate to Miggy would create more noise around the organization than Baby Doc would want to put up with. I think he'll get limited ABs and spend a lot of time next year on the IL, perhaps even the 60-day at the end.

"Risk-adverse", says the guy who writes for a living. 😏

Got my reply from Scott's dad. We got a date once the ring is here.

Two million easy!