Some players made a big splash with their new teams yesterday. Some old GMs made excuses. Also, did you know that there's an official MLB vodka? It may actually even exist, but we're not really sure!
Sure….but most teams don’t have stretches where they go 3-22. There were jokes going around about whether the Reds would have more wins than the Bengals this year. Playing .500 ball for 3 months is pretty impressive considering how they started.
Yea, I understand cherry-picking. But it’s perfectly fine to make the observation after a full month that the team looked like they’d be “historically bad”, but now 3 months later maybe they’re just “pretty bad”.
Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me we can’t actually call the team bad because the Reds have played 21,353 games in their history…and we can’t really judge their merits just on these 162 games.
Well, since you asked (and I’m looking for an excuse not to work)…it looks like their best 25 game stretch was 15-10, occurring immediately after that 3-22 start.
So now that we’ve removed half their season, that leaves us at 24-30. Make from that what you will…
Should also be noted that 22 of those first 25 games came against LAD, SD, ATL, STL, MIL, and CLE…which is a most unkind way to open the season.
My favourite bit of homerism nonsense will always be the local radio host who claimed, that if you don't count the games they played against the Yankees and Red Sox, the Blue Jays actually had a winning record that year.
I doubt that Batgirl is that bad. The directors are the guys who did the acclaimed Ms Marvel show. The writer did Birds of Prey, which has its detractors but also its vocal supporters. Its cast is really solid. And surely it can't be worse than Steel or Superman IV or Catwoman. My guess is that the white men from Discovery Communications looked at a film starring a woman of color, directed by two men of color and written by a woman and said "there is no audience for it." Hardly for the first time, there is barely any support for films with superheroines who aren't Wonder Woman. Or for films with minority leads who aren't The Rock (with the huge exception of Black Panther). I do think that someday the film will be released, and we'll find out it's actually pretty cool. And wonder why it was buried. And given all the absurd decisions being made by the new regime at Warner Bros, I suspect it won't be long till the new regime is fired and the film is released.
And aside from any racial/misogynistic reasons, there’s also the classic case of “new guy wants to do things his way and remove any signs of his predecessor”.
From what I’ve read, it seems like the reason for completely burying it (instead of just releasing it *somewhere*) is for a big fat tax write-off.
I fully expect to see HBO Max, which has the best selection of classic films and that HBO library, to be subsumed into the Discovery service and then gutted till it's just Discovery but more expensive. All the major streaming services just don't see offering classic movies and TV as profitable for some reason that I can't fathom.
I've already started watching all the important max original or older movies on max this week just in case they announce the whole platform is getting nuked.
There's always the Criterion Channel if you're looking for classics. But yeah, I'm not looking forward to seeing what HBO Max looks like in the near future.
I figure I will eventually subscribe. But it sucks that I will need to keep adding services to be able to watch all the things I want to watch. (And sooner or later, I will be able to subscribe to Mets games without cable, and that has to be a priority for me over even a channel of nothing but classics.)
I get Max through my AT&T phone service, which I know is going to end sooner or later since AT&T doesn't own HBO anymore. I will miss it, but I think they've added all the classics they are going to. (The "new this month" selection keeps shrinking.)
All we do know is that Yvonne Craig was great as Batgirl despite the terrible material she had to work with, and that she was probably the subject of a million crushes between this, her appearance on Star Trek, and her work opposite Elvis.
Re: Boras, Rizzo, and the Nats... I've seen reports that both MacKenzie Gore and James Wood are repped by Boras, so while they're a long way from free agency, the potential is there for this dance to play out again in several years. Hopefully the new owner will keep Boras at a proper adversarial distance, rather than the weird frenemy state they're in now, one that has had Boras quoted in the past as saying "Rizzo and I built this team."
Just like the Cherokee legend of the little boy and the rattlesnake, Rizzo knew exactly what Boras was when he picked him up. The fatal error was expecting that relationship to carry the team forever despite systemwide failures in drafting and player development.
This feels a lot like Rizzo writing a pre-bituary to explain to potential new employers why he lost the job in DC. I think Boras is smart and self-interested enough not to hold a grudge, but all things being equal I can’t see him steering a player to the Nats while Rizzo is still in charge.
Boras knows that he makes for a convenient cartoon villain to serve as a scapegoat for the Rizzos of the world. He accepts that because it serves as good advertising for future clients: I’m the hard arse who’ll get you Top Dollar! And he knows that public statements <> private negotiations.
Exactly. He works at the behest of his clients, so if Soto wanted to take any of those deals, he would have. If Boras independently torpedoed a deal that a client wanted to take, he would be fired very quickly. Boras clients are a self-selecting group that are generally not amenable to team friendly deals, though they do happen on occasion still.
That was on my mind, though of course Close denies it happened. Regardless, Freeman was unhappy and fired his ass. And now Close has a very damaged reputation.
I'm not going to claim the Nats won it all in 2019 in spite of Rizzo or the Lerners; they clearly did something right beyond capitalizing on early draft picks to have a team consistently contend for eight seasons.
That said, there's clear evidence that the Nats aren't good at developing talent, in (large?) part because they've not fully embraced all the modern tools available. Look no further than Austin Voth and what he's been saying during his Lazarus act in Baltimore:
Hopefully the new owner will spend, not just on free agents but also on building up the player development staff, and that's going to have to include a new GM and a new field manager.
Sandy Alcantara's season is indeed amazing. This year there have been 16 cases of a major league pitcher going nine, and he is four of the 16. (One of his four wasn't a complete game because the game lasted ten.) No other pitcher has more than one.
The Marlins have had eleven games where the starter lasted at least eight innings: that's ten from Alcantara and just one from Pablo Lopez.
Incidentally, we're just past the tenth anniversary of Cliff Lee being the last starting pitcher (ever?) to get an out in the tenth inning.
Watching Alcantara pitch is fun. Amazing movement and control while throwing the ball a million miles an hour. Fun, that is, as long as it isn't against the team I root for.
No particular insight into the Distill thing but it reminds me of the situation earlier this year in which the Philadelphia 76ers partnered with a basically non-existent company that was some mix of metaverse crap and masterclass and turned out to be a big scam (shockingly). Defector ran a good series on it; the company was called Color World.
Yeah, I had the exact same thought. The "company" that the Sixers briefly partnered with was.... something? I know that it was headed by someone calling themselves Sir Lucas Capetian and that it kinda didn't really exist but was sorta tied to a Chinese company... maybe.
Anyway, they exited the deal pretty soon after everyone started laughing at them. Good times.
“Cup of Coffee by Craig Calcaterra is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.”
Say it fast, like the voiceover at the end of the Liberty Mutual commercials. Totally works.
"That fielder’s choice, by the way, was initially ruled an inning-ending double play but it was overturned when replay revealed that the hustling Realmuto reached the first base bag just ahead of the throw. Atlanta’s four-game winning streak is snapped. Viva hustling."
Viva replay! It ain't perfect. but it works quickly and well the vast majority of the time and it helps get the call right. It's limited enough to not affect the pace of the game too much. And the umps announcing the issue like NFL refs could have been cringey but has been helpful.
MLB gets a lot of stuff wrong. It's gotten this one right.
I'm all for getting the calls right, but still don't like the system they've chosen.
First, it shouldn't be up to the opposing team to ask for replay. There should be a 5th ump in the booth who reviews each call in real time and occasionally signals the on-field staff that s/he needs more time. Making getting calls right a strategic issue rather that simply being right or wrong is, itself, wrong.
Second, the number of challenges allowed should be unlimited. Is getting the 2nd, 3rd ... 10th blown call fixed less important than the 1st?
Third, I dislike the super-dooper-extra-slo-mo video to see if a runner has popped off the base by a milimeter or the runner beats the throw. If you can't see it in normal speed or something very close to that, it isn't a bad call, particularly since we know that there are a limited number of angles to show.
Replay? Sure. MLB has "gotten this one right"? Nope, not by a long shot.
I wouldn't mind the 5th umpire thing as long as it was limited in scope, like the "last 2 minutes of the half" rule in the NFL. Because I do not think challenges should be unlimited. It's not practical; it would make the game take forever. I can hear quibbles w/the number of challenges - maybe it should be 2? - but unlimited doesn't work.
I do not understand the resistance to the use of slo-mo to decide whether a runner is safe or out. There is no judgment in that call - the runner is either safe or out. It's a binary choice, and it's one to which we can almost always learn the real, actual answer. The fact that the play is close and we need super-slo-mo to figure out the answer is exactly why replay works, not why it doesn't.
Saying that challenges shouldn't be unlimited and saying that we should use a microscope to see if a runner's foot slides off the base are mutually contradictory. We should get some calls right no matter how miniscule the advantage, but completely ignore many big ones?
Saying that a 5th umpire in the booth would slow the game seems wrong to me. If the call is close, the ump in the booth can see 2-3 replays in 15 seconds (and give him/her access to the complete feed, not just what is shown on the broadcast) well before the next pitch. As it is, a manager tells the players to stall so he can see what is being shown on tv. That seems slower.
I hate the super slow-mo on stolen bases to see if the runner has millimeters of distance between himself and the bag after reaching it first. If we're going there, the rule needs to be changed allowing for a small amount of separation if the runner reaches the bag first and doesn't overslide.
How about a softer base that will give just a little when a player slides into it rather than the hard surface that acts as a trampoline?
(Of course I don't know how that would work for a guy going, for example, first to third on a single to the OF and stepping on the softer bag as he cuts the bases.)
RE: Batgirl, reports I've read have indicated it was NOT bad to the point you would shelve it. Also, it is EXPENSIVE to release a film. It's unusual, but "they" might have felt they didn't want to spend that extra money on it. Finally, giving WB/DC WAY more credit than they deserve, they might be getting ready to rethink/relaunch a new DC film universe (starting with Black Adam) and they felt that Batgirl would not fit in that new world. I still can't believe they wouldn't put it on HBO+ (except for the last reason). RE Soto, even if the Nats wanted to build around Soto and keep him through his contract, they are not close to contending so even if they did build a nice nucleus around him in his remaining time, he's walking before they get competitive. It really sucks that a franchise can't keep a generational talent like Soto, it really does. Not sure what else to do except to only allow owners committed to spending, but there are only so many billionaires out there. Cleveland could spend the doors off most teams but current ownership simply won't.
i am looking forward to the inevitable unauthorized release so that it can play in an unauthorized double feature with the mid 90's Fantastic Four. Who's buying the popcorn?
There is evidence that the 90s FF movie is horrible, as befits a Roger Corman epic. But I bet it's better than the first attempt to reboot the property.
Oddly, the closer I get to retired, the more I know. Ask me about baseball, or law, or the weather, or the best way to organize a dishwasher, or the proper way to create a shopping list, or ...
my father had a rule that once you hit 60 you are now allowed to be Entitled. I'm a decade away and even though i feel pretty f'n entitled now, i'm going to wait until i have 50 glorious years of entitlement ahead of me.
The reports on Batgirl are it’s nothing more than a tax write off. Evidently if they don’t use the character in anything they can get a partial tax write off and decided that would make them slightly more money in the short term than releasing it on streaming, and long term be damned because the CEO wants to look good NOW, not do things that will benefit the company long term when he might not be there.
Daniel Vogelbach reminds me of how far we've come since the steroid era. From perfectly chisled specimens of the late 90's back to the 70's/80's look of an everyman throwin' on a uniform and playin' ball, the common man is once again back in the game!
It is almost as if we forgot Livan Hernandez, David Wells, Prince Fielder and steroid era Tony Gwynn. The mid Selig era had some players with Body by Budweiser tattoos all over.
also worth noting that CC Sabathia has said he pitched far better bigger than svelte. In the Wellsian/Ruthian mode, where gout was a plus and smaller illegal ballcaps worn after all night benders didn't seem to affect pitching performance.
The original point was that after players looking like body builders during the height of the Selig era, we have returned to the bit of pudge of the 1970s. Kruk, Gwynn, etc. were called out as examples of pudgy players even during the days of free PEDs.
I miss him. I know he was on the wrong team for me, but he was something special in the game. Though from what I can tell, he is still one of the good guys in his role as an activist in retirement.
As a Yankee fan growing up in NYC I always liked taking part in the Stadium heckling (my father's dislike of Winfield for 'replacing' Reggie aside). Then during one Red Sox visit the fans on the third base side started heckling Mike Greenwell as he went out to play left; specifically, they were, to put it in a polite way, yelling at Mike that they hoped Mike's wife lost her ongoing battle against cancer. Since I saw the look on Greenwell's face, I've never heckled a player. Umps, yes.
The/my Twins had a center fielder in the 80s with Tourette's Syndrome. He (Jim Eisenrich) was pretty good but exhibited symptoms on the field. Fans were horrible with lots of "Jump for me, Jimmy" and "nice dancing" comments. He must have really loved baseball to put up with that crap.
Apparently they also get a tax write-off if they don't release it anywhere. So I guess they think the tax write-off is worth more than the amount of money they'd get if they did release it
I think the "can only happen if you do not monetize the movie at all" line though is referring to the damage to the brand, not the tax deduction. That is, the write down still exists if they release it (albeit less since they'd get _some_ revenue even if not much) but the smaller after tax dollars even with greater deduction AND saving of the brand is more valuable than more net after tax dollars but with the brand damaged.
Full key paragraph: "Past that, the decision to release it neither in theaters nor on HBO Max may be inspired by WB believing the tax writedown they’ll get from the loss will serve them better than releasing a DCEU-damaging feature into the wild. Variety reports this as the most likely reason the movie was killed, as it would be a way to recoup its costs and not further damage the DC brand at the same time. But that can only happen if you do not monetize the movie at all, no release in theaters, nor on HBO Max, and it cannot be sold do a different studio either.
Not releasing it does damage the brand, but only with people like myself who care about the brand and who aren't likely to abandon it. I did want to see this film, more than I want to see, say, Super-Pets or Black Adam. But they know they already have my money, That is not enough to sustain the profits.
I hope Juan Soto has a blast in San Diego.
I hope the prospects the Nats got are as good as advertised.
And I hope my wife’s ghost pushes Mike Rizzo down a flight of stairs.
One of these things is less likely than the others. (HINT: It’s not the ghost thing.)
Mmmm fish tacos.
Especially when it rains https://youtu.be/npjF032TDDQ
San Diego has amazing fish tacos. In the ballpark too. It’s ridiculous how well you can eat (and drink) at PetCo and the city as a whole.
I had barramundi tacos in Sydney. Dear Buddha. I've had pompano tacos here in.Macondo. Yogurt Sothoth! But I had Dungeness crab tacos in San Francisco
And could have died happy that very night.
And make no mistake: Rizzo is LYING when he claims the offers were not leaked by him or the Nats FO. Even Stevie Wonder can see that.
You say the Reds are inept, Craig, but since their 3-22 start, they've gone 39-40. For a team that blew up in the off-season, that's not too shabby.
Sure….but most teams don’t have stretches where they go 3-22. There were jokes going around about whether the Reds would have more wins than the Bengals this year. Playing .500 ball for 3 months is pretty impressive considering how they started.
Yea, I understand cherry-picking. But it’s perfectly fine to make the observation after a full month that the team looked like they’d be “historically bad”, but now 3 months later maybe they’re just “pretty bad”.
Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me we can’t actually call the team bad because the Reds have played 21,353 games in their history…and we can’t really judge their merits just on these 162 games.
Well, since you asked (and I’m looking for an excuse not to work)…it looks like their best 25 game stretch was 15-10, occurring immediately after that 3-22 start.
So now that we’ve removed half their season, that leaves us at 24-30. Make from that what you will…
Should also be noted that 22 of those first 25 games came against LAD, SD, ATL, STL, MIL, and CLE…which is a most unkind way to open the season.
For the Nationals that would be the 2021 and 2022 seasons inclusively.
My favourite bit of homerism nonsense will always be the local radio host who claimed, that if you don't count the games they played against the Yankees and Red Sox, the Blue Jays actually had a winning record that year.
I doubt that Batgirl is that bad. The directors are the guys who did the acclaimed Ms Marvel show. The writer did Birds of Prey, which has its detractors but also its vocal supporters. Its cast is really solid. And surely it can't be worse than Steel or Superman IV or Catwoman. My guess is that the white men from Discovery Communications looked at a film starring a woman of color, directed by two men of color and written by a woman and said "there is no audience for it." Hardly for the first time, there is barely any support for films with superheroines who aren't Wonder Woman. Or for films with minority leads who aren't The Rock (with the huge exception of Black Panther). I do think that someday the film will be released, and we'll find out it's actually pretty cool. And wonder why it was buried. And given all the absurd decisions being made by the new regime at Warner Bros, I suspect it won't be long till the new regime is fired and the film is released.
And aside from any racial/misogynistic reasons, there’s also the classic case of “new guy wants to do things his way and remove any signs of his predecessor”.
From what I’ve read, it seems like the reason for completely burying it (instead of just releasing it *somewhere*) is for a big fat tax write-off.
What a mess over at HBO.
Yeah, I agree with this take over any sort of purely ideological motivation. It's not just Batgirl at stake, it's potentially the entirety of HBO Max.
https://www.thewrap.com/hbo-max-layoffs-warner-bros-discovery-q2-earnings-preview/
I fully expect to see HBO Max, which has the best selection of classic films and that HBO library, to be subsumed into the Discovery service and then gutted till it's just Discovery but more expensive. All the major streaming services just don't see offering classic movies and TV as profitable for some reason that I can't fathom.
I've already started watching all the important max original or older movies on max this week just in case they announce the whole platform is getting nuked.
There's always the Criterion Channel if you're looking for classics. But yeah, I'm not looking forward to seeing what HBO Max looks like in the near future.
I figure I will eventually subscribe. But it sucks that I will need to keep adding services to be able to watch all the things I want to watch. (And sooner or later, I will be able to subscribe to Mets games without cable, and that has to be a priority for me over even a channel of nothing but classics.)
Yeah, I get HBO Max through my cable HBO subscription so I don't pay explicitly for Max itself, but Criterion is my next sub as the landscape shifts.
I get Max through my AT&T phone service, which I know is going to end sooner or later since AT&T doesn't own HBO anymore. I will miss it, but I think they've added all the classics they are going to. (The "new this month" selection keeps shrinking.)
The song on the Batgirl video asks the crucial question "Are you a chick who fell in from outer space, or are you real with a tender warm embrace?"
But now we will never know.
All we do know is that Yvonne Craig was great as Batgirl despite the terrible material she had to work with, and that she was probably the subject of a million crushes between this, her appearance on Star Trek, and her work opposite Elvis.
It also was going to have the return of Michael Keaton as Batman which would have sold tickets on its own.
In 2022 all the things you mentioned as reasons why it wouldn’t be released are explicitly reasons that it would be.
Thanks for the "Soap" callout in the intro.
Re: Boras, Rizzo, and the Nats... I've seen reports that both MacKenzie Gore and James Wood are repped by Boras, so while they're a long way from free agency, the potential is there for this dance to play out again in several years. Hopefully the new owner will keep Boras at a proper adversarial distance, rather than the weird frenemy state they're in now, one that has had Boras quoted in the past as saying "Rizzo and I built this team."
Just like the Cherokee legend of the little boy and the rattlesnake, Rizzo knew exactly what Boras was when he picked him up. The fatal error was expecting that relationship to carry the team forever despite systemwide failures in drafting and player development.
This feels a lot like Rizzo writing a pre-bituary to explain to potential new employers why he lost the job in DC. I think Boras is smart and self-interested enough not to hold a grudge, but all things being equal I can’t see him steering a player to the Nats while Rizzo is still in charge.
Boras knows that he makes for a convenient cartoon villain to serve as a scapegoat for the Rizzos of the world. He accepts that because it serves as good advertising for future clients: I’m the hard arse who’ll get you Top Dollar! And he knows that public statements <> private negotiations.
If he's well liked by management, he's not doing his job.
Nah. You can be a great negotiator and an aggressive advocate without being a jackwagon.
Exactly. He works at the behest of his clients, so if Soto wanted to take any of those deals, he would have. If Boras independently torpedoed a deal that a client wanted to take, he would be fired very quickly. Boras clients are a self-selecting group that are generally not amenable to team friendly deals, though they do happen on occasion still.
See, e.g. the end of the Casey Close / Freddie Freeman relationship.
That was on my mind, though of course Close denies it happened. Regardless, Freeman was unhappy and fired his ass. And now Close has a very damaged reputation.
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
I'm not going to claim the Nats won it all in 2019 in spite of Rizzo or the Lerners; they clearly did something right beyond capitalizing on early draft picks to have a team consistently contend for eight seasons.
That said, there's clear evidence that the Nats aren't good at developing talent, in (large?) part because they've not fully embraced all the modern tools available. Look no further than Austin Voth and what he's been saying during his Lazarus act in Baltimore:
https://www.audacy.com/thefandc/sports/nationals/austin-voth-comment-hints-nationals-lagging-behind-analytically
Hopefully the new owner will spend, not just on free agents but also on building up the player development staff, and that's going to have to include a new GM and a new field manager.
Sandy Alcantara's season is indeed amazing. This year there have been 16 cases of a major league pitcher going nine, and he is four of the 16. (One of his four wasn't a complete game because the game lasted ten.) No other pitcher has more than one.
The Marlins have had eleven games where the starter lasted at least eight innings: that's ten from Alcantara and just one from Pablo Lopez.
Incidentally, we're just past the tenth anniversary of Cliff Lee being the last starting pitcher (ever?) to get an out in the tenth inning.
Watching Alcantara pitch is fun. Amazing movement and control while throwing the ball a million miles an hour. Fun, that is, as long as it isn't against the team I root for.
No particular insight into the Distill thing but it reminds me of the situation earlier this year in which the Philadelphia 76ers partnered with a basically non-existent company that was some mix of metaverse crap and masterclass and turned out to be a big scam (shockingly). Defector ran a good series on it; the company was called Color World.
Came here to say the same thing. Craig, if you have a subscription to Defector, start at the beginning and read the whole series. It's hilarious.
Yeah, I had the exact same thought. The "company" that the Sixers briefly partnered with was.... something? I know that it was headed by someone calling themselves Sir Lucas Capetian and that it kinda didn't really exist but was sorta tied to a Chinese company... maybe.
Anyway, they exited the deal pretty soon after everyone started laughing at them. Good times.
“Cup of Coffee by Craig Calcaterra is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.”
Say it fast, like the voiceover at the end of the Liberty Mutual commercials. Totally works.
Seeing as how I work in public media, I want it read like it would be prior to and after Nova.
"WGBH Boston presents..." I'd love to see Craig voice over "sponsored by the letter "Manfred" and the number "755"
Viewers Like You.
I hope so. They're paying my salary!
…by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the Cup of Coffee Trust.
First thing I thought of.
This is what happens when you base your entire economy around the "1. Steal Underpants, 2. ???, 3. Profit!" method of business planning.
I'm feeling some deja vu over the vodka story... any word on whether Curt Schilling has a stake in Distill Brands?
"That fielder’s choice, by the way, was initially ruled an inning-ending double play but it was overturned when replay revealed that the hustling Realmuto reached the first base bag just ahead of the throw. Atlanta’s four-game winning streak is snapped. Viva hustling."
Viva replay! It ain't perfect. but it works quickly and well the vast majority of the time and it helps get the call right. It's limited enough to not affect the pace of the game too much. And the umps announcing the issue like NFL refs could have been cringey but has been helpful.
MLB gets a lot of stuff wrong. It's gotten this one right.
I'm all for getting the calls right, but still don't like the system they've chosen.
First, it shouldn't be up to the opposing team to ask for replay. There should be a 5th ump in the booth who reviews each call in real time and occasionally signals the on-field staff that s/he needs more time. Making getting calls right a strategic issue rather that simply being right or wrong is, itself, wrong.
Second, the number of challenges allowed should be unlimited. Is getting the 2nd, 3rd ... 10th blown call fixed less important than the 1st?
Third, I dislike the super-dooper-extra-slo-mo video to see if a runner has popped off the base by a milimeter or the runner beats the throw. If you can't see it in normal speed or something very close to that, it isn't a bad call, particularly since we know that there are a limited number of angles to show.
Replay? Sure. MLB has "gotten this one right"? Nope, not by a long shot.
I wouldn't mind the 5th umpire thing as long as it was limited in scope, like the "last 2 minutes of the half" rule in the NFL. Because I do not think challenges should be unlimited. It's not practical; it would make the game take forever. I can hear quibbles w/the number of challenges - maybe it should be 2? - but unlimited doesn't work.
I do not understand the resistance to the use of slo-mo to decide whether a runner is safe or out. There is no judgment in that call - the runner is either safe or out. It's a binary choice, and it's one to which we can almost always learn the real, actual answer. The fact that the play is close and we need super-slo-mo to figure out the answer is exactly why replay works, not why it doesn't.
Saying that challenges shouldn't be unlimited and saying that we should use a microscope to see if a runner's foot slides off the base are mutually contradictory. We should get some calls right no matter how miniscule the advantage, but completely ignore many big ones?
Saying that a 5th umpire in the booth would slow the game seems wrong to me. If the call is close, the ump in the booth can see 2-3 replays in 15 seconds (and give him/her access to the complete feed, not just what is shown on the broadcast) well before the next pitch. As it is, a manager tells the players to stall so he can see what is being shown on tv. That seems slower.
I hate the super slow-mo on stolen bases to see if the runner has millimeters of distance between himself and the bag after reaching it first. If we're going there, the rule needs to be changed allowing for a small amount of separation if the runner reaches the bag first and doesn't overslide.
How about a softer base that will give just a little when a player slides into it rather than the hard surface that acts as a trampoline?
(Of course I don't know how that would work for a guy going, for example, first to third on a single to the OF and stepping on the softer bag as he cuts the bases.)
Cover the base with a fucketonne of chalk so that the dust cloud obscures all but the initial tag.
So is the first version of today's email now a collector's item?
If anything, the version with corrected spelling might be the collector’s item due to its scarcity
The other one is the collector’s item. Far more comments here than over there.
RE: Batgirl, reports I've read have indicated it was NOT bad to the point you would shelve it. Also, it is EXPENSIVE to release a film. It's unusual, but "they" might have felt they didn't want to spend that extra money on it. Finally, giving WB/DC WAY more credit than they deserve, they might be getting ready to rethink/relaunch a new DC film universe (starting with Black Adam) and they felt that Batgirl would not fit in that new world. I still can't believe they wouldn't put it on HBO+ (except for the last reason). RE Soto, even if the Nats wanted to build around Soto and keep him through his contract, they are not close to contending so even if they did build a nice nucleus around him in his remaining time, he's walking before they get competitive. It really sucks that a franchise can't keep a generational talent like Soto, it really does. Not sure what else to do except to only allow owners committed to spending, but there are only so many billionaires out there. Cleveland could spend the doors off most teams but current ownership simply won't.
i am looking forward to the inevitable unauthorized release so that it can play in an unauthorized double feature with the mid 90's Fantastic Four. Who's buying the popcorn?
There is evidence that the 90s FF movie is horrible, as befits a Roger Corman epic. But I bet it's better than the first attempt to reboot the property.
So far, ALL FF movies have been horrible. Really.
Next on my to-do list is making a "What the hell do I know? I'm retired" t shirt. If you let me know your dad's size, I can make one for him, too.
Oddly, the closer I get to retired, the more I know. Ask me about baseball, or law, or the weather, or the best way to organize a dishwasher, or the proper way to create a shopping list, or ...
my father had a rule that once you hit 60 you are now allowed to be Entitled. I'm a decade away and even though i feel pretty f'n entitled now, i'm going to wait until i have 50 glorious years of entitlement ahead of me.
The reports on Batgirl are it’s nothing more than a tax write off. Evidently if they don’t use the character in anything they can get a partial tax write off and decided that would make them slightly more money in the short term than releasing it on streaming, and long term be damned because the CEO wants to look good NOW, not do things that will benefit the company long term when he might not be there.
Daniel Vogelbach reminds me of how far we've come since the steroid era. From perfectly chisled specimens of the late 90's back to the 70's/80's look of an everyman throwin' on a uniform and playin' ball, the common man is once again back in the game!
John Kruk lives!
It is almost as if we forgot Livan Hernandez, David Wells, Prince Fielder and steroid era Tony Gwynn. The mid Selig era had some players with Body by Budweiser tattoos all over.
also worth noting that CC Sabathia has said he pitched far better bigger than svelte. In the Wellsian/Ruthian mode, where gout was a plus and smaller illegal ballcaps worn after all night benders didn't seem to affect pitching performance.
Sure, but without looking it up (facts? who needs facts?) I think his career was mostly after mandatory testing.
CC? He noted that being fatter helped him pitch better than when he lost weight - not sure what that has to do with testing :)
The original point was that after players looking like body builders during the height of the Selig era, we have returned to the bit of pudge of the 1970s. Kruk, Gwynn, etc. were called out as examples of pudgy players even during the days of free PEDs.
I miss him. I know he was on the wrong team for me, but he was something special in the game. Though from what I can tell, he is still one of the good guys in his role as an activist in retirement.
If the Mets don't do a Daniel Vogelbach Funko Pop giveaway (with the body as wide as the head) what the hell are we even doing here?!?!!
He looks kinda like the second coming of Babe Ruth.
As a Yankee fan growing up in NYC I always liked taking part in the Stadium heckling (my father's dislike of Winfield for 'replacing' Reggie aside). Then during one Red Sox visit the fans on the third base side started heckling Mike Greenwell as he went out to play left; specifically, they were, to put it in a polite way, yelling at Mike that they hoped Mike's wife lost her ongoing battle against cancer. Since I saw the look on Greenwell's face, I've never heckled a player. Umps, yes.
The/my Twins had a center fielder in the 80s with Tourette's Syndrome. He (Jim Eisenrich) was pretty good but exhibited symptoms on the field. Fans were horrible with lots of "Jump for me, Jimmy" and "nice dancing" comments. He must have really loved baseball to put up with that crap.
Apparently they also get a tax write-off if they don't release it anywhere. So I guess they think the tax write-off is worth more than the amount of money they'd get if they did release it
I'm no tax expert, but that doesn't sound right. The costs are a deduction whether or not it is released, at least under U.S. law.
This is the article I got my info from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/08/03/this-may-be-why-wb-killed-batgirl-despite-it-being-finished/?sh=9eb05ff9e29d
Thanks.
I think the "can only happen if you do not monetize the movie at all" line though is referring to the damage to the brand, not the tax deduction. That is, the write down still exists if they release it (albeit less since they'd get _some_ revenue even if not much) but the smaller after tax dollars even with greater deduction AND saving of the brand is more valuable than more net after tax dollars but with the brand damaged.
Full key paragraph: "Past that, the decision to release it neither in theaters nor on HBO Max may be inspired by WB believing the tax writedown they’ll get from the loss will serve them better than releasing a DCEU-damaging feature into the wild. Variety reports this as the most likely reason the movie was killed, as it would be a way to recoup its costs and not further damage the DC brand at the same time. But that can only happen if you do not monetize the movie at all, no release in theaters, nor on HBO Max, and it cannot be sold do a different studio either.
Not releasing it does damage the brand, but only with people like myself who care about the brand and who aren't likely to abandon it. I did want to see this film, more than I want to see, say, Super-Pets or Black Adam. But they know they already have my money, That is not enough to sustain the profits.