Stroman and the Yankees, Shota's money, the Sunday Night Baseball schedule, dangerous driving, Ohio once again chooses evil, kids are leaving red states for a reason, and dystopian ice
I was headed north out of DC this AM on 95. I was probably going about 80, people were passing me as if I was standing still and others seemingly riding up to almost my rear bumper moving to the right then back in front of me almost clipping my front.
One reason I never took to driving is that I am the sort who thinks the speed limit is, you know, the law, and I would be the one person on Earth who obeys the law. It's nuts to me that it's the norm to dismiss the law.
Not to poke fun at our poster above, but "I drive well above the posted speed limit ... but I'm not the problem" is such a perfect encapsulation of so many of our problems. Overall, 75% of people report that they are above average drivers and 80% of men so believe. Self evaluation errors are rampant whether in things largely immaterial (I'm better looking than most!) to very material (I can handle a handgun more safely than nearly anyone).
Because I like to keep my focus here on baseball ... this is also why teams have long tended to over-estimate the future performance of their own prospects and under-estimate the performance of others. GMs and Scouting Directors anchor their opinions and it takes a LOT of contrary fact to sway them.
I’m in the area and I too have seen the driving you describe. I’ve also seen incredibly reckless driving on city and suburban streets since the pandemic. I’m an avid cyclist but I’ve recently quit routes that require riding on any street or road where the posted speed is 35 or more. People are insane behind the wheel.
I drive from the Midwest to the east coast about once a year. When going through Indianapolis, the speed limit drops to 50, but the average speed stays at close to 70.
It made me wonder where the greatest disparity between the posted speed limit and average speed exists. 95 is insane, but my experience has been that there is too much traffic to get a high average speed.
And I’m looking for the total average, not the average of just the fast drivers.
Kansas City used to have a stretch of highway 71 where the posted speed limit went from 45 to 55 to 65 in about 5-10 miles. They got rid of the 55 zone because it was unsafe to drive the speed limit, because you don’t want people going drastically different speeds on the road. That was what they said anyway.
Sure, it makes sense that the safest driving conditions are when everybody's going the same speed, as that eliminates tailgating weaving to get ahead. The problem, of course, is that not everyone agrees on what that speed should be.
70 MPH? The joke around Indy is we have the Brickyard where cars can travel 230 MPH. Yet, the speed limit around the 465 loop is 50 - 55 and everyone goes 80 MPH - 90 MPH with very few (if any) people getting pulled over.
Several years ago the police in VA in suburban DC said they don’t pull people over for speeding on the beltway because it’s too dangerous to try to get back into traffic from the shoulder.
I used to take 70 through the city before all the construction. Now I realize it is all of the highways where people speed. I vaguely recall there might even be a spot on 70 where it went down to 45, and traffic did not slow down.
I went ahead and searched my tweets to find out when I first really noticed. 2017. I was worried about getting a ticket.
I live in the Indy metro as well, 465 is a free-for-all. I was going 75 in the 55 mph part to keep up with traffic this morning to work. Also, frequently see the random car going like 120 mph.
Yep. It's peddle down 24/7. During the height of the pandemic, when there were virtually no vehicles on the road...I could get to work on the NW side (I live about 30 minutes south of Indy) in 45 minutes. It's typically an hour to an hour fifteen.
I hear you--the Lake Wobegon effect is real. That said, going well below the speed of the flow of traffic can be a hazard too, which in some places is the posted speed limit. Unfortunately, most places IME aren't heavily policed enough to curb dangerous behavior, including speeding. If speeding (and hazardous driving in general) was an easy problem to solve, we would have solved it already.
This raises an issue that I am of two minds on. Clearly the technology to reduce speeding is available: cameras can clock your speed and your license plate and send you a ticket. One mind says - “these are public roads why shouldn’t big brother strive to keep them safer?”. The other mind says- “I would not like to have BB recording all my movements, because BB will always stretch the ‘inch’ to a ‘mile’”. However, as a big fan of UK detective shows, I am jealous that they can always pull out the CCTV footage!
Many years ago I rented a small U-Haul truck for a long distance move. As I recall, it had some kind of a restrictor on it so that I couldn't go faster than 55. I think the technology is available but obviously it is not used. I imagine that bragging about restricting top speeds has not tested out to be a good advertising ploy.
“teams have long tended to over-estimate the future performance of their own prospects and under-estimate the performance of others”. - you forgot to add the “except the Guardians and their hitters.”
I drive a lot on rural Interstate highways between cities, and my primary goal is to try to live by this rule:
"If another driver has to hit their brakes because of you, that is YOUR fault"
If everyone would use that as their starting point, it would make things much more pleasant.
(Granted, this is RURAL Interstate driving, where traffic isn't much of an issue. There's of course a massive difference between that and actual urban/city driving conditions.)
I think if everyone stayed rigth except to pass, it would be much better. THe right lane has become the new left lane. no one is there outside of most cities. I have seen people exiting on to the interstate and almost take out a car in the middle lane by tryng to merge there with no one in front of them in the right lane. no one at all in the right lane, crazy. and all you cruise control folks...gtf over to the right when no one is to the right of you. BTW I drive like I have to be somewhere. I rode with my mom over x-mas. SHe said my brother doesn;t scare her driving like I do. I pointed out to her I have had 0 accidents in my adult life, my brother and his family have several a piece. i do know I am not the greatest driver but I try to pay attention to the road and try to be kind to others and not let frustration get the best of me.
In my state, you can get a ticket for cruising in the left (passing!) lane. The mythos that the left lane is the fast lane instead of passing lane causes a fucketonne of problems. My favorite highway design is a 3 lane. Stay in the middle so that it's easy for cars to enter and exit, and only use the left lane to pass.
That would be perfect. If I'm on a highway with more than 2 lanes, and it's a long stretch before I need to exit, I always getnin the 2nd from right. I don't drive too fast and that way people can pass on my left but the rightmost lane is clear for merging and exiting cars.
One of the happiest moments I had as a driver was when I watched a guy going 60 in a 65 in the far left lane for miles with a cop behind him before the lights went on and he was pulled over. And I hope it was a ticket and not just a warning.
Knew someone who got ticketed fairly shortly after she got her license. She was moving along in the left lane, passing cars in the next lane, when a cop came up behind her. She slowed down to the speed limit, but since she was going slower than the next lane, she couldn't get over. Expensive way to find out that cops don't care what you do as long as you're moving with traffic.
Absolutely! That's the 2nd rule of rural interstate driving: "Unless you're actively overtaking another vehicle, or there's a vehicle stopped on the shoulder, you should ALWAYS be in the rightmost lane."
(Driving in the left lane on a rural Interstate with little traffic isn't bad per se, but the problem is that people who do it tend be the same type of people who don't pay attention to their surroundings, which ends with them slowing down cars behind them - a violation of the "don't force other drivers to hit their brakes" rule.)
In some places there are left lane exits. There’s one on I-70 east heading into Hagerstown. And there are certainly a lot of interstates where the left lane is so much smoother than the right that traffic gravitates there. I-88 between Binghamton and Schenectady is a good example of that.
Years ago I thought I was a great driver until my staff told me that most of the calls coming to my business about erratic driving with one of our toppers on the roof fit the description of my car.
I like to think this feedback - along with aging and having kids - has since slowed my toll on the roads, but I haven’t had to drive with a topper on my car in years, so who knows...
This reminds me, I have an app from my car insurance that tracks my driving for discount purposes. I'm more focused than average, and am lower mileage than average. My time of day is a bit higher risk than average, my speeding is right on average, and I hard brake a bit more than average (I think this is more because I brake a lot for animals in my neck of the woods rather than cars). Lake Wobegon be damned, I think I'm at least an average driver.
Is it weird that today's drivers have made me extra-cautious at intersections where I *don't* have a stop sign (but the cross-street does)!?!?!?
Also, my hand hovers over the horn whenever I'm behind anyone in a left-turn lane waiting for the turn arrow, as it's almost even money that the vehicle ahead of me will be driven by someone playing on their phone.
You'd think I'd be braver, having cheated death in a rural highway head-on caused by another driver who decided they wanted to be in my lane back in 2016 that left me in a wheelchair for months due to leg and arm breaks....
The only accident I've ever been in [knock on head] was a driver pulling out in front of me where they had a stop and I didn't, and since that day I've always been overly cautious in the scenario you describe.
There was a recent Doctor Who episode where the big bad caused chaos by making everyone in the world think that everyone else was wrong and they were right. There was a bit where someone was driving on the sidewalk because, well, he was a taxpayer and paid for that sidewalk and it was his right, darnit! I thought that screenwriter Russell T. Davies was being a bit on the nose in that episode, but seeing that stuff about being a driver in 2024, I might have to say he was more right than I realized. Even if he was not referring to the US (since Doctor Who almost always takes place in the UK).
I had forgotten about Stroman and his dog whistle. I really did like him as a Met, in part because he spoke his mind in a sport that discourages it. But while it might be fun to see the conformity factory in the Bronx struggle with him, those tweets make me think a return to NYC would just be a bad idea. Though the bigger question is why the Yankees aren't chasing Snell or Montgomery. The money they budgeted for Yamamoto is still there.
Wow, ESPN still wants Yankees-Red Sox. Notably absent from prime time: the NL champs, and also the Phillies. But games with the Cubs and Cards. Weird.
Couldn’t stand Stroman, glad to see he’s signing with the yanks though - I’m sure he’ll be a great addition to the locker room and definitely help their chances of succeeding.
In about 24 hours the story went from, the Yankees haven’t made Stroman an offer and weren’t interested to the Yankees are the favorites to sign him. I wonder if this is all noise generated by his agent to drum up interest or if Stroman’s camp dropped their asking price or number of years dramatically.
For sure it’s silly season. Agents and teams have been negotiating for two months and haven’t worked out a deal.
I think we’re hit the point where reality has set in that while these guys might be Top 5 free agents THIS YEAR, they’re merely solid starters not all stars. And no one wants to pay Bellinger like a franchise SS or anything close.
There was a post yesterday, allegedly from Trevor Bauer’s Instagram account but I was unwilling to check, showing him in a Braves uniform with four other starters surrounding him. Scared the bejebers out of me. I’m not claiming that “my” team has any particular moral compass, but they’ve never sought out controversy.
Fake info can be so easily accepted. More so when it confirms our priors but even like this when it doesn’t.
I'm often surprised when I see stats on just how much violence men commit against women -- but then I wade into a comments section on articles about the likes of Bauer and am reminded just how trash our menfolk are.
Beltre is in, I’m not sure about the rest. Mauer I think barely misses out, we’ll call it 72%. I can see voters who don’t publicly post theirs leaving him off for the reason I did a couple months back. (I have since been swayed on Mauer and Utley!)
Helton should get in, we’ll guess he gets around 77%. Wagner and Sheffield? Wagner being +5 helps him right now. I don’t think Sheffield gets in. I’ll guess 75.4% for Wagner and about 67% for Sheffield. That’s a 12% jump from last year but still not enough.
Andruw Jones is the interesting one. He’s at 69.9% as of this morning. He’s got three years left on the ballot after this. Unless something drastic happens, he’s in, it just comes down to WHEN? If it’s next year, you may be looking at a class of three 2012 Yankees: Andruw, Ichiro, and CC*.
*The CC HOF argument is for another day, I think he’s gonna get in but he’s by no means a first-year lock. But I do expect him to at least clear 70% in year one.
- Sheffield: IN because we all imitated his bat waggle as kids
- Wagner: IN because as a Cubs fan the game was over if he was on the mound
- Utley: IN because of the It’s Always Sunny in Philly Mac love letter bounce
- Helton: IN eventually but Coors effect makes him wait a few more years
- Beltre: IN because he somehow survived playing 3B in MLB for years without wearing a cup (I think that was him...)
- Jones: IN because his peak CF defense was beyond elite and we shouldn’t penalize him for staying on the shelf past his expiration date
- Mauer: IN because he was the rare overall first pick who lived up to the hype while staying with his hometown team for his entire career. AND a vote for him allows Mark Grace to live vicariously through his induction as the OBP and D inductee that the Slump-Buster fell short of being.
Put Will Clark in Coors instead of Candlestick, and he's in. They were basically the same offensive player (Clark was slightly better offensively but played slightly less--they have nearly identical oWARs).
Your "idiots and maniacs" link is especially poignant today, given the arrival of A.I. George Carlin upon the comedy scene. Talk about signs of the apocalypse, I can't even....
I really appreciated Kelly's (his daughter) response to it. If you want him, look at his old stuff. Otherwise, plenty of comedians EXIST that you could check out!
I know I'm like 12 hours too late on this one but I just wanted to say that the AI Carlin "special" was more or less a tongue-in-cheek joke done by Will Sasso and co. on his Dudesy podcast. Sasso is not out there pretending like this is new Carlin material or that this is anything other than the insane ramblings of a LLM that was fed all of Carlin's original material. He went so far as to say that nobody wants this and compared it to Nirvana with a holographic/AI Cobain and how awful that would be. The context is completely lost in all the fear-mongering. Regarding Kelly Carlin's response, her heart is in the right place but I think she's slightly misguided. Now if Warner Bros or HBO or someone was trying to sell this as a new special, that would be a different story. There are a lot of ethical, moral, and legal questions around AI today but what Will Sasso is doing on a dumb YouTube show that is, itself, wholly built on screwing around with AI / LLM tech ain't it.
This explanation, particularly given the wholly predictable public attention it has lavished on the project, sounds like the definition of trying to have one's cake and eat it too.
I've also seen covid itself (specifically, the neurological effects and brain fog that often linger) implicated in the bad driving, which also makes sense. If I'm tired I'm not as sharp and I realize that, but if it was a constant fogginess that was my everyday background to normal functioning I'd likely not even notice, and I certainly wouldn't notice if it made me less likely to notice road signs, less likely to pay attention to cues, and more short-tempered behind the wheel.
I find this very plausible because the biggest observation I have about drivers in the last couple years is that they are less skilled. Not necessarily more aggressive, more selfish, or less attentive (though all of those can be issues too) - just worse at the skill of driving. People seem to have more trouble staying in their lane, navigating stop signs, etc, than before.
Anecdotally I've read of a few airline pilots having to retire after they had covid, because they weren't as sharp mentally as they needed to be even after they had recovered. And if that's in a profession that really tries to pay attention to that so that hundreds of people don't die in a firey crash, I wonder how many other random people are walking around doing their routine daily tasks with a bit of muzziness in the head.
I mean, that stuff isn't really even a skill. If you can't "navigate a stop sign", you're just a careless jerk who's likely jacking around on your phone.
Does that imply there is a need to have a tease on the days when it's not Free Thursday? I'm guessing non-subscribers can see the tease those days. I always thought the tease was unnecessary, but that must be the reason for it.
It's invisible to subscribers, but on non-Thursdays, I put in a paywall break just before "The Daily Briefing" or "And That Happened." Free subscribers who only get Thursday's newsletter get an email that day and they can read up to the break, after which they're prompted to subscribe if they'd like to read more. Thus the intro/summary most days. I never used to do that, actually, but Bill Baer began doing that when he was running the newsletter in September/October and it converted a lot of free subscribers to paid, so I kept it up. It's not a massive number or anything, but seeing that it comes every day and helps neutralize the "out of sight, out of mind" thing and snags some folks.
Sometimes when I’m doing odd sorts via bb-ref (all hail Sean Forman!), Silver King will pop up. Over a three-year period, he had 14.7, 8.3 and 13.2 bWAR. The game sure was different for a boy born on this day in 1868.
Born on the same day, but just a couple years later is Elly De La Cruz. What a tremendous, and tremendously odd set of skills. I really hope that he can put it all together. EDLC turns 22 today.
Max Patkin is mostly known to people my age for his appearance in Bull Durham. He had a real baseball life, first as a pitcher in the minors and then as a coach for the Bill Veeck era Cleveland squads before becoming an attraction at minor league parks for decades. He was born on this day in 1920.
It is the birthday of both a General and Napoleon. For many, many decades, our politicians were largely former members of the military so General Crowder was a Senator, of course. He lead the AL in wins twice in the 1930s. Danny Napoleon was a really bad outfielder for some really bad mid 1960s Mets squads.
Bonus baseball related content: baseball wouldn’t be baseball without peanuts. And peanuts wouldn’t be peanuts without George Washington Carver, born on this day in 1864.
And poor Don Mossi, a fine pitcher winning over 100 games across a dozen years. But known these days solely for his truly misbegotten appearance. His SABR biography: “By this time Mossi had appeared on enough bubble-gum cards to have caught the attention of millions of young fans, who marveled at his unusual visage. He did not have the classic country-boy good looks of a Mickey Mantle or the dark, handsome face of a Sandy Koufax. Don was, well, different. He had a long, slightly crooked nose, his eyes were close together, and his ears stuck out to the edges of the cardboard. Indeed, some of his teammates called him Ears. Others nicknamed him The Sphinx. Later, when these young fans grew up, they were less diplomatic. One said he looked like ‘Mount Rushmore on a rainy day.’ Bill James wrote that Don was the ‘complete ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly, and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields.’” Mossi would have turned 95 today.
I know there could be recency bias at play, but Elly has the best raw power-speed combination I've ever seen. Bonds was great at both, but his raw power peaked way later after his speed faded, and I don't think he was ever regarded as *the* fastest player in the league. Elly seems like an even more tooled out Eric Davis or Bo Jackson. With close to Michael Jordan's build. Never seen anything like it.
The Eric Davis comp is a good one. Bo was, of course, really fast, but we didn't get to see it on the baseball field very often. But the comp that is stuck in my mind is a direct peer: Oneil Cruz.
Edit: I don't know what "raw" power speed really means, but there was this guy who had seventy steals and forty homers this season. Perhaps he wouldn't win a footrace against EDLC, but as far as effective baseball speed, that should do it.
I was just think statcast's exit velo & sprint speed. Acuna is obviously a great power-speed guy and had the top exit velo this year (Elly had the 3rd highest). Elly was #1 in sprint speed, while I think there is something wrong with Acuna's (he's listed as 208th, but 33rd in 'bolts.' I'm guessing that he was picking his spots to let loose to protect the knee). Acuna is tooled out as well, and obvs is the single season power-speed leader by a long shot. Elly likely will never reach those heights, but his raw tools are amazingly even louder IMO.
Worth noting that the Times article on driving is kind of bullshit. Really surface level exploration of stuff that other reporters have been working on for years. See Aaron Gordon, who has been on the transportation beat for years (and once had a really great substack on the NYC Subway)
“Voting with glee” for something (or someone) obviously motivated by evil and hate could be the tag line for MAGAism. Yet we keep being told by the chattering pundits that we need to try to understand better people who vote this way.
Jane was fine, but the rest of Glee was autotuned garbagio (of course, ymmv.) If we want to hang with Jane voting to Party Down would be much better (and better for society most like.)
When I was 23, I told the 5 year old kindergarten I was babysitting for that I would never use my phone in my car. I have kept my word since then. Teaching kids things works and I believe that kids can have a great moral influence on the adults in their lives.
This is probably why states ban learning about queer people and Black history and queer, Black people’s history. (Stonewall was a riot.)
Who knows what a) the youth will grow up to think but b) who knows how much they can influence their circle of adults.
My Orioles win 101 games and no Sunday Night Baseball. Sigh ... no, wait, that's a good thing! I don't want to stay up that late on a work night, anyway.
Exactly. One annoying thing about my Kansas City football team becoming really good, is that I have all these SNF and MNF games to stay up and watch now.
I am generally vice-free but having a lead foot is definitely a problem for me. I'm super careful on suburban/city streets but I'll admit I tend to go 15-20% over the limit on highways. Not an excuse but "beating the GPS" is 100% a factor in my case. I would say I'll do better but I likely won't.
PS Not sure punching down politically hasn't always been with us in America - but seeing it on such unrepentant display with regard to trans kids is thoroughly discouraging.
PPS I feel the same way about my team on Sunday Night Baseball as I do being shot at - nothing quite like the feeling of having been missed. And yes, ESPN's devotion to Red Sox-Yankees and Cubs-Cards is amusing.
I for one welcome the computer overlords who will one day soon let me drive from Kansas City to Denver at 100mph while I sleep.
I was headed north out of DC this AM on 95. I was probably going about 80, people were passing me as if I was standing still and others seemingly riding up to almost my rear bumper moving to the right then back in front of me almost clipping my front.
One reason I never took to driving is that I am the sort who thinks the speed limit is, you know, the law, and I would be the one person on Earth who obeys the law. It's nuts to me that it's the norm to dismiss the law.
Many laws suck and should be dismissed.
Not to poke fun at our poster above, but "I drive well above the posted speed limit ... but I'm not the problem" is such a perfect encapsulation of so many of our problems. Overall, 75% of people report that they are above average drivers and 80% of men so believe. Self evaluation errors are rampant whether in things largely immaterial (I'm better looking than most!) to very material (I can handle a handgun more safely than nearly anyone).
Because I like to keep my focus here on baseball ... this is also why teams have long tended to over-estimate the future performance of their own prospects and under-estimate the performance of others. GMs and Scouting Directors anchor their opinions and it takes a LOT of contrary fact to sway them.
I’m in the area and I too have seen the driving you describe. I’ve also seen incredibly reckless driving on city and suburban streets since the pandemic. I’m an avid cyclist but I’ve recently quit routes that require riding on any street or road where the posted speed is 35 or more. People are insane behind the wheel.
I drive from the Midwest to the east coast about once a year. When going through Indianapolis, the speed limit drops to 50, but the average speed stays at close to 70.
It made me wonder where the greatest disparity between the posted speed limit and average speed exists. 95 is insane, but my experience has been that there is too much traffic to get a high average speed.
And I’m looking for the total average, not the average of just the fast drivers.
Kansas City used to have a stretch of highway 71 where the posted speed limit went from 45 to 55 to 65 in about 5-10 miles. They got rid of the 55 zone because it was unsafe to drive the speed limit, because you don’t want people going drastically different speeds on the road. That was what they said anyway.
Sure, it makes sense that the safest driving conditions are when everybody's going the same speed, as that eliminates tailgating weaving to get ahead. The problem, of course, is that not everyone agrees on what that speed should be.
70 MPH? The joke around Indy is we have the Brickyard where cars can travel 230 MPH. Yet, the speed limit around the 465 loop is 50 - 55 and everyone goes 80 MPH - 90 MPH with very few (if any) people getting pulled over.
Several years ago the police in VA in suburban DC said they don’t pull people over for speeding on the beltway because it’s too dangerous to try to get back into traffic from the shoulder.
I suspect that plays a role in Indy as well. 50 - 55 does seem to be a rather slow speed limit when some areas have 4 or 5 lanes. It's
I used to take 70 through the city before all the construction. Now I realize it is all of the highways where people speed. I vaguely recall there might even be a spot on 70 where it went down to 45, and traffic did not slow down.
I went ahead and searched my tweets to find out when I first really noticed. 2017. I was worried about getting a ticket.
https://x.com/FrankSchloegel/status/944247091534204929?s=20
You nailed it with respect to I-70 as well. And there is a very small stretch where it drops to 45.
I live in the Indy metro as well, 465 is a free-for-all. I was going 75 in the 55 mph part to keep up with traffic this morning to work. Also, frequently see the random car going like 120 mph.
Yep. It's peddle down 24/7. During the height of the pandemic, when there were virtually no vehicles on the road...I could get to work on the NW side (I live about 30 minutes south of Indy) in 45 minutes. It's typically an hour to an hour fifteen.
I hear you--the Lake Wobegon effect is real. That said, going well below the speed of the flow of traffic can be a hazard too, which in some places is the posted speed limit. Unfortunately, most places IME aren't heavily policed enough to curb dangerous behavior, including speeding. If speeding (and hazardous driving in general) was an easy problem to solve, we would have solved it already.
This raises an issue that I am of two minds on. Clearly the technology to reduce speeding is available: cameras can clock your speed and your license plate and send you a ticket. One mind says - “these are public roads why shouldn’t big brother strive to keep them safer?”. The other mind says- “I would not like to have BB recording all my movements, because BB will always stretch the ‘inch’ to a ‘mile’”. However, as a big fan of UK detective shows, I am jealous that they can always pull out the CCTV footage!
the easiest technology approach: Put a speed limiter into the car's electronics.
I never understood why cars are even made to go that fast.
Don’t think a Vette that topped out at 65-70 would be a big seller.
Many years ago I rented a small U-Haul truck for a long distance move. As I recall, it had some kind of a restrictor on it so that I couldn't go faster than 55. I think the technology is available but obviously it is not used. I imagine that bragging about restricting top speeds has not tested out to be a good advertising ploy.
The rolling roadblock drivers are as bad as the hotrodders.
“teams have long tended to over-estimate the future performance of their own prospects and under-estimate the performance of others”. - you forgot to add the “except the Guardians and their hitters.”
I drive a lot on rural Interstate highways between cities, and my primary goal is to try to live by this rule:
"If another driver has to hit their brakes because of you, that is YOUR fault"
If everyone would use that as their starting point, it would make things much more pleasant.
(Granted, this is RURAL Interstate driving, where traffic isn't much of an issue. There's of course a massive difference between that and actual urban/city driving conditions.)
I think if everyone stayed rigth except to pass, it would be much better. THe right lane has become the new left lane. no one is there outside of most cities. I have seen people exiting on to the interstate and almost take out a car in the middle lane by tryng to merge there with no one in front of them in the right lane. no one at all in the right lane, crazy. and all you cruise control folks...gtf over to the right when no one is to the right of you. BTW I drive like I have to be somewhere. I rode with my mom over x-mas. SHe said my brother doesn;t scare her driving like I do. I pointed out to her I have had 0 accidents in my adult life, my brother and his family have several a piece. i do know I am not the greatest driver but I try to pay attention to the road and try to be kind to others and not let frustration get the best of me.
In my state, you can get a ticket for cruising in the left (passing!) lane. The mythos that the left lane is the fast lane instead of passing lane causes a fucketonne of problems. My favorite highway design is a 3 lane. Stay in the middle so that it's easy for cars to enter and exit, and only use the left lane to pass.
That would be perfect. If I'm on a highway with more than 2 lanes, and it's a long stretch before I need to exit, I always getnin the 2nd from right. I don't drive too fast and that way people can pass on my left but the rightmost lane is clear for merging and exiting cars.
One of the happiest moments I had as a driver was when I watched a guy going 60 in a 65 in the far left lane for miles with a cop behind him before the lights went on and he was pulled over. And I hope it was a ticket and not just a warning.
Knew someone who got ticketed fairly shortly after she got her license. She was moving along in the left lane, passing cars in the next lane, when a cop came up behind her. She slowed down to the speed limit, but since she was going slower than the next lane, she couldn't get over. Expensive way to find out that cops don't care what you do as long as you're moving with traffic.
Absolutely! That's the 2nd rule of rural interstate driving: "Unless you're actively overtaking another vehicle, or there's a vehicle stopped on the shoulder, you should ALWAYS be in the rightmost lane."
(Driving in the left lane on a rural Interstate with little traffic isn't bad per se, but the problem is that people who do it tend be the same type of people who don't pay attention to their surroundings, which ends with them slowing down cars behind them - a violation of the "don't force other drivers to hit their brakes" rule.)
A couple of other points of view:
In some places there are left lane exits. There’s one on I-70 east heading into Hagerstown. And there are certainly a lot of interstates where the left lane is so much smoother than the right that traffic gravitates there. I-88 between Binghamton and Schenectady is a good example of that.
Years ago I thought I was a great driver until my staff told me that most of the calls coming to my business about erratic driving with one of our toppers on the roof fit the description of my car.
I like to think this feedback - along with aging and having kids - has since slowed my toll on the roads, but I haven’t had to drive with a topper on my car in years, so who knows...
Classic Car Talk:
Click: Don't drive like my brother.
Clack: And don't drive like MY brother.
I miss Tommy.
This reminds me, I have an app from my car insurance that tracks my driving for discount purposes. I'm more focused than average, and am lower mileage than average. My time of day is a bit higher risk than average, my speeding is right on average, and I hard brake a bit more than average (I think this is more because I brake a lot for animals in my neck of the woods rather than cars). Lake Wobegon be damned, I think I'm at least an average driver.
Is it weird that today's drivers have made me extra-cautious at intersections where I *don't* have a stop sign (but the cross-street does)!?!?!?
Also, my hand hovers over the horn whenever I'm behind anyone in a left-turn lane waiting for the turn arrow, as it's almost even money that the vehicle ahead of me will be driven by someone playing on their phone.
You'd think I'd be braver, having cheated death in a rural highway head-on caused by another driver who decided they wanted to be in my lane back in 2016 that left me in a wheelchair for months due to leg and arm breaks....
The only accident I've ever been in [knock on head] was a driver pulling out in front of me where they had a stop and I didn't, and since that day I've always been overly cautious in the scenario you describe.
What I read from Craig was that MOST fatal accidents are NOT caused by people driving over the speed limit.
If you weren’t driving that fast you’d risk being run over by traffic behind you.
There was a recent Doctor Who episode where the big bad caused chaos by making everyone in the world think that everyone else was wrong and they were right. There was a bit where someone was driving on the sidewalk because, well, he was a taxpayer and paid for that sidewalk and it was his right, darnit! I thought that screenwriter Russell T. Davies was being a bit on the nose in that episode, but seeing that stuff about being a driver in 2024, I might have to say he was more right than I realized. Even if he was not referring to the US (since Doctor Who almost always takes place in the UK).
I had forgotten about Stroman and his dog whistle. I really did like him as a Met, in part because he spoke his mind in a sport that discourages it. But while it might be fun to see the conformity factory in the Bronx struggle with him, those tweets make me think a return to NYC would just be a bad idea. Though the bigger question is why the Yankees aren't chasing Snell or Montgomery. The money they budgeted for Yamamoto is still there.
Wow, ESPN still wants Yankees-Red Sox. Notably absent from prime time: the NL champs, and also the Phillies. But games with the Cubs and Cards. Weird.
The show really seems to be in a good place now. The newest Doctor is amazing.
Couldn’t stand Stroman, glad to see he’s signing with the yanks though - I’m sure he’ll be a great addition to the locker room and definitely help their chances of succeeding.
The fact that the opening series isn't Diamondbacks-Dodgers shows that ESPN isn't even pretending anymore.
In about 24 hours the story went from, the Yankees haven’t made Stroman an offer and weren’t interested to the Yankees are the favorites to sign him. I wonder if this is all noise generated by his agent to drum up interest or if Stroman’s camp dropped their asking price or number of years dramatically.
Or it could just be we are deep in the silly season for free agency.
For sure it’s silly season. Agents and teams have been negotiating for two months and haven’t worked out a deal.
I think we’re hit the point where reality has set in that while these guys might be Top 5 free agents THIS YEAR, they’re merely solid starters not all stars. And no one wants to pay Bellinger like a franchise SS or anything close.
There was a post yesterday, allegedly from Trevor Bauer’s Instagram account but I was unwilling to check, showing him in a Braves uniform with four other starters surrounding him. Scared the bejebers out of me. I’m not claiming that “my” team has any particular moral compass, but they’ve never sought out controversy.
Fake info can be so easily accepted. More so when it confirms our priors but even like this when it doesn’t.
There's a video of his "apology" on Twitter. I didn't watch it, but I clicked on it and read the comments. Don't read the comments.
I'm often surprised when I see stats on just how much violence men commit against women -- but then I wade into a comments section on articles about the likes of Bauer and am reminded just how trash our menfolk are.
Only a couple weeks left until the Hall announcement, and here’s where we stand: https://onedrive.live.com/edit?id=F2E5D8FC5199DFAF!54244&resid=F2E5D8FC5199DFAF!54244&ithint=file%2cxlsx&authkey=!AGrU1OUsbz4WHyU&wdo=2&cid=f2e5d8fc5199dfaf
Beltre is in, I’m not sure about the rest. Mauer I think barely misses out, we’ll call it 72%. I can see voters who don’t publicly post theirs leaving him off for the reason I did a couple months back. (I have since been swayed on Mauer and Utley!)
Helton should get in, we’ll guess he gets around 77%. Wagner and Sheffield? Wagner being +5 helps him right now. I don’t think Sheffield gets in. I’ll guess 75.4% for Wagner and about 67% for Sheffield. That’s a 12% jump from last year but still not enough.
Andruw Jones is the interesting one. He’s at 69.9% as of this morning. He’s got three years left on the ballot after this. Unless something drastic happens, he’s in, it just comes down to WHEN? If it’s next year, you may be looking at a class of three 2012 Yankees: Andruw, Ichiro, and CC*.
*The CC HOF argument is for another day, I think he’s gonna get in but he’s by no means a first-year lock. But I do expect him to at least clear 70% in year one.
My personal anecdotal feelings:
- Sheffield: IN because we all imitated his bat waggle as kids
- Wagner: IN because as a Cubs fan the game was over if he was on the mound
- Utley: IN because of the It’s Always Sunny in Philly Mac love letter bounce
- Helton: IN eventually but Coors effect makes him wait a few more years
- Beltre: IN because he somehow survived playing 3B in MLB for years without wearing a cup (I think that was him...)
- Jones: IN because his peak CF defense was beyond elite and we shouldn’t penalize him for staying on the shelf past his expiration date
- Mauer: IN because he was the rare overall first pick who lived up to the hype while staying with his hometown team for his entire career. AND a vote for him allows Mark Grace to live vicariously through his induction as the OBP and D inductee that the Slump-Buster fell short of being.
Put Will Clark in Coors instead of Candlestick, and he's in. They were basically the same offensive player (Clark was slightly better offensively but played slightly less--they have nearly identical oWARs).
If personal anecdote feelings moved the needle, the mass of Mets fans would prevent Utley from getting a single vote.
This Dodgers fan will be just fine if Utley doesn't get in.
Your "idiots and maniacs" link is especially poignant today, given the arrival of A.I. George Carlin upon the comedy scene. Talk about signs of the apocalypse, I can't even....
Yeah that one is INSANE. I was so angry when I saw that last night that I decided it'd be better to wait a day.
I really appreciated Kelly's (his daughter) response to it. If you want him, look at his old stuff. Otherwise, plenty of comedians EXIST that you could check out!
I know I'm like 12 hours too late on this one but I just wanted to say that the AI Carlin "special" was more or less a tongue-in-cheek joke done by Will Sasso and co. on his Dudesy podcast. Sasso is not out there pretending like this is new Carlin material or that this is anything other than the insane ramblings of a LLM that was fed all of Carlin's original material. He went so far as to say that nobody wants this and compared it to Nirvana with a holographic/AI Cobain and how awful that would be. The context is completely lost in all the fear-mongering. Regarding Kelly Carlin's response, her heart is in the right place but I think she's slightly misguided. Now if Warner Bros or HBO or someone was trying to sell this as a new special, that would be a different story. There are a lot of ethical, moral, and legal questions around AI today but what Will Sasso is doing on a dumb YouTube show that is, itself, wholly built on screwing around with AI / LLM tech ain't it.
This explanation, particularly given the wholly predictable public attention it has lavished on the project, sounds like the definition of trying to have one's cake and eat it too.
I mean they definitely wanted to generate buzz for the show - mission accomplished, I'd say.
I've also seen covid itself (specifically, the neurological effects and brain fog that often linger) implicated in the bad driving, which also makes sense. If I'm tired I'm not as sharp and I realize that, but if it was a constant fogginess that was my everyday background to normal functioning I'd likely not even notice, and I certainly wouldn't notice if it made me less likely to notice road signs, less likely to pay attention to cues, and more short-tempered behind the wheel.
I find this very plausible because the biggest observation I have about drivers in the last couple years is that they are less skilled. Not necessarily more aggressive, more selfish, or less attentive (though all of those can be issues too) - just worse at the skill of driving. People seem to have more trouble staying in their lane, navigating stop signs, etc, than before.
Anecdotally I've read of a few airline pilots having to retire after they had covid, because they weren't as sharp mentally as they needed to be even after they had recovered. And if that's in a profession that really tries to pay attention to that so that hundreds of people don't die in a firey crash, I wonder how many other random people are walking around doing their routine daily tasks with a bit of muzziness in the head.
I mean, that stuff isn't really even a skill. If you can't "navigate a stop sign", you're just a careless jerk who's likely jacking around on your phone.
Does that imply there is a need to have a tease on the days when it's not Free Thursday? I'm guessing non-subscribers can see the tease those days. I always thought the tease was unnecessary, but that must be the reason for it.
It's invisible to subscribers, but on non-Thursdays, I put in a paywall break just before "The Daily Briefing" or "And That Happened." Free subscribers who only get Thursday's newsletter get an email that day and they can read up to the break, after which they're prompted to subscribe if they'd like to read more. Thus the intro/summary most days. I never used to do that, actually, but Bill Baer began doing that when he was running the newsletter in September/October and it converted a lot of free subscribers to paid, so I kept it up. It's not a massive number or anything, but seeing that it comes every day and helps neutralize the "out of sight, out of mind" thing and snags some folks.
Snagging some folks. Like putting out the trap and closing the door behind them. Well done, Craig.
Sometimes when I’m doing odd sorts via bb-ref (all hail Sean Forman!), Silver King will pop up. Over a three-year period, he had 14.7, 8.3 and 13.2 bWAR. The game sure was different for a boy born on this day in 1868.
Born on the same day, but just a couple years later is Elly De La Cruz. What a tremendous, and tremendously odd set of skills. I really hope that he can put it all together. EDLC turns 22 today.
Max Patkin is mostly known to people my age for his appearance in Bull Durham. He had a real baseball life, first as a pitcher in the minors and then as a coach for the Bill Veeck era Cleveland squads before becoming an attraction at minor league parks for decades. He was born on this day in 1920.
It is the birthday of both a General and Napoleon. For many, many decades, our politicians were largely former members of the military so General Crowder was a Senator, of course. He lead the AL in wins twice in the 1930s. Danny Napoleon was a really bad outfielder for some really bad mid 1960s Mets squads.
Lloyd McClendon was, as a player, Just Another Guy. But when he managing, he could do it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhnoCkp2QUo Happy 65th!
Bonus baseball related content: baseball wouldn’t be baseball without peanuts. And peanuts wouldn’t be peanuts without George Washington Carver, born on this day in 1864.
And poor Don Mossi, a fine pitcher winning over 100 games across a dozen years. But known these days solely for his truly misbegotten appearance. His SABR biography: “By this time Mossi had appeared on enough bubble-gum cards to have caught the attention of millions of young fans, who marveled at his unusual visage. He did not have the classic country-boy good looks of a Mickey Mantle or the dark, handsome face of a Sandy Koufax. Don was, well, different. He had a long, slightly crooked nose, his eyes were close together, and his ears stuck out to the edges of the cardboard. Indeed, some of his teammates called him Ears. Others nicknamed him The Sphinx. Later, when these young fans grew up, they were less diplomatic. One said he looked like ‘Mount Rushmore on a rainy day.’ Bill James wrote that Don was the ‘complete ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly, and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields.’” Mossi would have turned 95 today.
I know there could be recency bias at play, but Elly has the best raw power-speed combination I've ever seen. Bonds was great at both, but his raw power peaked way later after his speed faded, and I don't think he was ever regarded as *the* fastest player in the league. Elly seems like an even more tooled out Eric Davis or Bo Jackson. With close to Michael Jordan's build. Never seen anything like it.
The Eric Davis comp is a good one. Bo was, of course, really fast, but we didn't get to see it on the baseball field very often. But the comp that is stuck in my mind is a direct peer: Oneil Cruz.
Edit: I don't know what "raw" power speed really means, but there was this guy who had seventy steals and forty homers this season. Perhaps he wouldn't win a footrace against EDLC, but as far as effective baseball speed, that should do it.
I was just think statcast's exit velo & sprint speed. Acuna is obviously a great power-speed guy and had the top exit velo this year (Elly had the 3rd highest). Elly was #1 in sprint speed, while I think there is something wrong with Acuna's (he's listed as 208th, but 33rd in 'bolts.' I'm guessing that he was picking his spots to let loose to protect the knee). Acuna is tooled out as well, and obvs is the single season power-speed leader by a long shot. Elly likely will never reach those heights, but his raw tools are amazingly even louder IMO.
Could have sworn the asterisk was going to be about the Cybertruck.
And I've watched enough horror movies to know that you should not put ancient ice anywhere near your body.
Worth noting that the Times article on driving is kind of bullshit. Really surface level exploration of stuff that other reporters have been working on for years. See Aaron Gordon, who has been on the transportation beat for years (and once had a really great substack on the NYC Subway)
https://bsky.app/profile/awgordon.bsky.social/post/3kinkfu6ykk2w
“Voting with glee” for something (or someone) obviously motivated by evil and hate could be the tag line for MAGAism. Yet we keep being told by the chattering pundits that we need to try to understand better people who vote this way.
Voting with Glee? What is wrong with Jane Lynch and why wouldn't I want to go to the polls with her?!?!?
Jane was fine, but the rest of Glee was autotuned garbagio (of course, ymmv.) If we want to hang with Jane voting to Party Down would be much better (and better for society most like.)
When I was 23, I told the 5 year old kindergarten I was babysitting for that I would never use my phone in my car. I have kept my word since then. Teaching kids things works and I believe that kids can have a great moral influence on the adults in their lives.
This is probably why states ban learning about queer people and Black history and queer, Black people’s history. (Stonewall was a riot.)
Who knows what a) the youth will grow up to think but b) who knows how much they can influence their circle of adults.
If I wasn’t so burnt out I’d create one of those “## Days Since Ohio wasn’t a F*cking Embarrassment to Humankind” memes.
At least you'd only have to make it once and never have to worry about changing the number.
My Orioles win 101 games and no Sunday Night Baseball. Sigh ... no, wait, that's a good thing! I don't want to stay up that late on a work night, anyway.
IYKYK
One of the many reasons to live on the West Coast - sports broadcasts end at a decent hour.
Yeah but you also have to deal with the fact you'll eventually be plunged into the dark depths of the ocean by the Cascadian Subduction Zone
Unless you're here down in SoCal, where the San Andreas fault going off will make you get squished by a dingbat building.
Exactly. One annoying thing about my Kansas City football team becoming really good, is that I have all these SNF and MNF games to stay up and watch now.
Oh, if only Terry Francona retiring got one tenth of the coverage that certain coaches of another sport retiring was getting.
I am generally vice-free but having a lead foot is definitely a problem for me. I'm super careful on suburban/city streets but I'll admit I tend to go 15-20% over the limit on highways. Not an excuse but "beating the GPS" is 100% a factor in my case. I would say I'll do better but I likely won't.
PS Not sure punching down politically hasn't always been with us in America - but seeing it on such unrepentant display with regard to trans kids is thoroughly discouraging.
PPS I feel the same way about my team on Sunday Night Baseball as I do being shot at - nothing quite like the feeling of having been missed. And yes, ESPN's devotion to Red Sox-Yankees and Cubs-Cards is amusing.