Paid subscriber myself. I was done with the comments at The Athletic when the otherwise great Brewers beat writer Will Sammon wrote a piece about how Corbin Burnes was a "bulldog" who "wants to be on the mound" and is "determined to win". This, after he was one of the very, very few Brewers to refused to get vaccinated, and as a result got his ass Covidized in May (before Delta, before waning vax immunity) and missed a couple starts as a result. Yeah, it ended up not mattering in the playoff standings or otherwise, but it could have! Mr. Bulldog Burnes wasn't helping his team win on the mound when he was quarantined. The pushback against my pointing this out wasn't anything worse than Twitter crap, but I thought The Athletic readership was better.
That must have been a fun conversation. Like when I told my mom that my high school biology test was on "single-celled orgasms" by accident and immediately wanted to dig a deep hole to hide in.
"As through this life you travel, you'll meet all kinds of men. Some will rob you with a six gun... and some with a fountain pen." Or computer keyboard.
If Woody says you're guilty, you're guilty, Craig.
If the players were on strike, I would be loudly saying that I have no problem losing games if it lets the union achieve its goal. You would think that in theory, the owners would feel the same way about a lockout. But I doubt anyone from their side will say "in order to save our businesses, we are willing to make this sacrifice." Which might be the only hope that there aren't games lost. Though I wouldn't be too unhappy if the season were a month shorter. 162 games to eliminate only half the teams is too long.
Totally love WKRP. But not only do we have to deal with the unresolved rights issues, we can't stream it legally. There isn't so much as one season of the show anywhere. When I want to watch "Turkeys Away" on Thanksgiving, I have go find a bootleg version uploaded to DailyMotion, backwards. It's weird. But that show is a classic with a stellar cast. Huge fan of Hessman and Tim Reid. And i think I am not the only male my age who had a crush on Jan Smithers. (Yes, Loni Anderson is quite attractive and Jennifer was a really unusual character with more agency than most blonde bombshells ever have, but Bailey was the cute girl with glasses, and you know how nerds are.)
I know it won’t happen but I’d rather have the playoffs shorter than cut a single inning from 162. Baseball should not, imho, be treated as a short series sprint but rather a long season amble.
DLF, your eminently and 100% correct position is so obviously the way to go, and thus it's clear that the opposite will happen. I LOVE MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, INC.
The NHL caters to its devoted fans and doesn't worry too much about broadening the base of casual fans. And they do a pretty good job of it. The NBA obsesses over the casual fans and consistently tweaks to keep the entertainment hyped to the max. And they do a really darned good job of it. The NFL's fans, both devoted and casual, don't really care about history, so the league can do any damn fool thing and keep increasing its draw.
MLB doesn't have the breadth of support of the NFL and is trying to straddle the line between the NHL's focus on die hards and the NBA's on casual fans. But there is a problem when you straddle the fence: sooner or later, you will slip and if the feet come down on opposite sides it ain't gonna be pleasant.
Thinking about this, it seems that MLB has two camps of "die hard" fans - the younger ones, perhaps including most of us CoC subscribers in this group, who complain about the game because we see it as a potentially wonderful league and game that could and should be improved and adapted to modern times, and the older traditionalists who complain because they're old and they want baseball frozen in amber, 1965 or '55 or '75 forever. I think the move would be to toss the second group overboard and throw 'em a life jacket, they can swim back to the boat if they like, and focus on the former while *at the same time* reaching out to more casual fans and demonstrating an updated game and experience more suited for 2022.
I'd respectfully suggest that those two groups largely meet in the middle on most key on-field issues, like pace of play and the move towards TTO style.
And this may mark me as part of the old group, but I loved the variety on the field in the 1980s. You had fast teams and slugging teams, you had teams that relied on starters and you had ones that went quickly to the bullpen. You even had old traditional stadiums and the cookie cutter multi-purpose ashtrays. Other than the Rays, it seems that every team is now playing from the same playbook and the difference is in terms of quality rather than approach.
PS Baseball was perfect in 1977. I happened to turn 10 that year, but I'm sure that is nothing but a coincidence.
I love the Posnanski theory that the answer to the question "when was baseball at its best" is whatever year it was when you were 10. (Or 12, or 8, or something like that.) However, that isn't the case for me - I think baseball was at its best right around when you do - I'd say that I derive the most enjoyment from the late 70s and early 80s style of play, as you might, dlf. Any rule changes that make the game speedier and yet still smart would get my approval - '75 to '85 style. I was born during the last year of the Carter administration, so ya know.
The two groups may meet in the middle on pace and style of play preferences, but not so much on the displays of excitement and emotion, or what it means to "play the game the right way", views on the steroid era, and that sort of thing. Based on what I've seen, anyway. And one can be in group one and be of any age! The age range is a generality with many outliers on both sides.
I was definitely Team Bailey. PS Shouldn’t that have been “Mic fright” rather than Mike no matter what AV Club wrote?
…
The players absolutely are entitled to look out for their best financial interests. Same too for the owners. But as a fan, sign me up for Rosenthal’s ‘no games should be lost.’ My rooting interest is not found in the sides of a conference room table with labor lawyers on either side.
Too bad the timeline doesn’t match up and I can’t blame Costanza for Maddux. Although I want to do so anyway.
I’ve always gotten the sense that Rosenthal goes “both ways” in the way that a lot of older writers and columnists do. They focus on a specific objective — “the Hall of Fame is for the greatest players” or “no games should be lost” — without seeing the forest, and I think it works at times. It helps that Rosenthal has cultivated a reputation as someone who genuinely loves and appreciates baseball’s history in addition to the modern era and wants to find positives where he can, as opposed to those with a prominent voice in sports media who tend to always focus more on the negatives.
I do think, though, that the “one objective” approach is flawed — and I say that as someone who respects Rosenthal. We KNOW that losing games is a bad thing and we KNOW that it takes two to tango. But you said it best, Craig. A fan can get away with the “no games should be lost” stance … and that’s who I think Rosenthal is writing for. The average fan, not the baseball fan who has used social media to become especially well-versed in service time manipulation or MLB’s hiring process.
Is that an excuse? I don’t know. But I do think there’s far more people who would take the simple stance of “both sides have to figure this out so no games are lost” as opposed to a more nuanced argument, and if that’s who Rosenthal is writing for, I 100% understand it.
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OK on a less of a ramble, you know it’s a good sign when new cases in Florida are significantly down.
Ideally, the virus itself will become endemic sooner rather than later, I agree. I just have no idea how we begin the rebuilding phase (for lack of a better term) or where to even start societally. We know what parts of three academic years affected by the pandemic are doing to kids. There’s the people who are still recovering from having COVID. The people who lost their jobs or their businesses.
Maybe the first step of the rebuild is just continuing to support small businesses and restaurants? Bring in the wings and fries from a local pub on Super Bowl Sunday. Especially if the pub doesn’t have a sign.
It's what I refer to as the "lowest common denominator" audience. Talk to friends who don't bother to read up on what's behind these issues or those who hold some union grudge (usually b/c they didn't take that civil service test 30 years ago) and sooner or later you'll hear a "well, I dunno, the players make SO much money ..." I always stop those arguments cold b/c I bother to and am versed well enough to engage, but most others in that circle just nod. THAT is the audience. Their bad ideas get reinforced. And, as with all the misinformation, it's dangerous.
It really helps here in Boston, because I can frame it as "Yeah, they make tons of money, but the way I see it, there's no way this discussion ends with money going to me. It's either going to end up with the players, or John Henry. And I'd MUCH rather the players get money over John Henry."
I'm sure there are teams whose fanbases don't hate their owners as much, but it's still a good way to reframe. But we all know that already.
Constanza would would have faked the heart attack so “Mr Steinbrenner” would give him time off, paid of course, then he’d use it to spend time away from Susan so he doesn’t get “over excited” seeing her.
I don't think this lack of positive movement in the labor negotiations is at all surprising. Despite the fact that we all know neither side will get everything they want in the end, there's not enough pressure to give ground on your position until spring training and (much more importantly) the regular season are threatened.
At the moment it's the owners who are unwilling to make a good faith proposal. But I doubt the union is at a point yet where they'd be willing to fold on their core demands either. But I guess we can't say that for sure without the owners being willing to really negotiate to find out.
The caveat here is that nobody has to make a good faith proposal at first. The owners just showed the players what's important to THEM. The players need to counter with SOMETHING, and the pressure is currently on them to do so. I think losing games will damage the owners more than the players in the short run because they get no revenue if there are no games being played.
1. Someone needs to make a good faith move towards the other. I don't care if it's players towards the owners or owners towards the players. If I was the players, I'd identify one thing I could give on, and give on it in this response. If the owners come back with a good faith response -- which may be unlikely -- great. If not, you go hard in the court of public opinion ...
2. Because, like Rosenthal says, no game should be lost. This isn't labor in a chicken factory negotiating with Costco. I'll just buy a roti chicken from the supermarket. There's a third party here with an interest in what happens. And while that third party's influence is obviously the smallest of the three parties, it does have influence.
3. It's cool to say that owners make more money off the game so they have more to lose, but players need the money way more than most owners do. The players may have a fund to keep the non-superstars afloat for a while, but in a labor disaster, where do they go? Do they really want to leave their families to play in the KBL?
4. While I agree with you about how the media at large is utterly failing in its job to describe the party whose platform is simply "owning the libz" accurately, here part of the problem is Dems sniping at Manchin and Sinema instead of getting behind a mic and blasting *all 50 Republicans* for being against voting. All. 50. Republicans. 100% of the party. Just like Dems should be doing every damn time Rs block something that most of the country supports, and every time they hypocrisy it up (Ds utterly failed in the court of public opinion when it came to Amy Coney Barrett). But they don't. They'd rather knock AOC.
5. When pre-crazy Giuliani was the mayor, his crackdown on minor crime really did clean up Manhattan south of 96th Street and really did make it safer and really did turn it into a grander economic powerhouse. While the Giuliani approach obviously was not ideal overall, there has to be a better way to address societal impacts than simply not prosecuting low level crime. I wish I was smart enough to have an idea. But the fact that I successfully powered my computer on this morning was an upset.
Giuliani absolutely cleaned up NYC. The city proper was an absolute shit hole with crime running rampant. Usually movie portrayals are BS, but what you see in some of those mid 80’s movies, Including Death Wish and Tax Driver, are facts.
Wrong on Rudy, wrong that "someone" need to make a "good faith move" and just wrong.
Crime rates were dropping prior to Rudy. Crime rates in other cities dropped at the same rate it dropped in NYC. And also, 40 other things.
Rudy Giuliani is an "errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill."
Always has been what he is now and the above quote should be his epitaph. Carve it now.
Rudy put the Emergency Response Center in the WTC, played fast and loose with radio contracts that hurt FDNY communication on 9-11, and used his 9-11 "fame" to personally enrich himself as an international "security expert" in a field he knew nothing about.
20-year FDNY vet here. Put Rudy sans sunglasses on a rocket to the sun.
Apparently not good enough. Look at the stats again. And again, I don’t care to argue about anything else, so you can continue to point out irrelevant items completely unrelated to CRIME STATISTICS, and I won’t address. Thanks !
Jesus effing Christ. Nobody is praising Giuliani as a person, a mayor, a lawyer, a traitor, or anything else. It was a statement of fact about how Manhattan -- in particular the Times Square area -- became a different place because he -- perhaps ruthlessly -- cracked down on small time crime. That's it. Nobody is celebrating the guy who, when running against Dinkins, had rallies where watermelons were proudly displayed. Settle down, Beavis.
Mr Niss, crime stat expert, did not personally know 4 dozen of those who perished at ground zero, did not have his life torn asunder that day, suffer health issues, and then witness Rudy plant a flag in the corpses for personal profit. He did however, once cross a street safely in Midtown and now spends his life paying tribute to the man he thinks is personally responsible for that event.
Thanks, Niss, don't forget your "Never forget" tweet next Sept 11.
Very little of what you said has anything to do with proving me to be "wrong", and all of it is irrelevant to the point about the Giuliani administration and what it did with respect to places like 42nd Street. And just saying "wrong" about a "good faith move" both proves that you know little about negotiation and comes across as little more than being an ass. Most people don't like participating in conversations where the other side acts like an ass, FYI.
I live in the urban core of Los Angeles and we've got the largest unhoused population in the country, so you see folks sleeping rough pretty much everywhere.
The one exception near where I live is the block surrounding the Scientology Center, which is perpetually humming with Sea Org people soliciting passersby to get their thetans tested and chasing off people they don't want around. Unlike the surrounding streets, it has cobblestone paving, which gives the illusion of it being a private road to deter motorists. It's really pretty nice.
The block itself contains a massive church, admin buildings and a bunch of dorms for the Sea Org people to stay in during their lives of more or less indentured servitude.
I find this to be pretty instructive, because it proves that you can have a Downtown Disney feel to a real American urban center, while also illustrating the cost of creating that.
Endemicity also means updating vaccines so that we're not immunizing against a spike protein that's now extinct. I'm hopeful that we can fast track safety trials on variant vaccines, as the ability to quickly update the sequence is one of the best features of RNA vaccines.
It seems like most authorities I have seen quoted remain unsure we need an Omicron vaccine, even though it's likely any new variants will evolve from Omicron. It's "well, this still works, so we can still use it" and "by the time we make it, it won't be needed." As someone who wants to do everything possible to avoid catching Omicron, I want that new vaccine ASAP. But beyond that, and appreciating that it is a game of whack-a-mole, Omicron is not the same thing as the original virus and needs a new vaccine, and I don't get the resistance to this.
That's a terrible take. Israel (predictably) just found that a 4th dose does not offer any more protection against catching Omicron. Protecting against contracting COVID means lower viral loads worldwide, which means fewer chances for 'random' novel escape variants to arise. And while boosters protect fairly well against severe Omicron disease, they're still worse than they were against earlier variants. More lives will be saved by updating the vaccine. The public response has been paternalistic and infuriating from a scientific standpoint on things ranging from masks to testing to boosters.
But it's not just the public response. This article quotes only scientists and doctors, and most are saying "too soon" about a new vaccine, though that was before the study in Israel.
That article is both-siderism* that I don't think matches the consensus of immunologists--it's certainly not case for the ones that I regularly interact with. Hell, most of them thought that we should have updated upon Delta or at least had a bivalent vaccine with Delta plus Alpha (there's zero reason to use the original Wuhan strain anymore). And based on some shared mutations, a Delta vaccine would be expected to work better against Omicron anyway.
* Curious that someone working on the J&J vaccine that can't be updated as quickly as the RNA vaccines is arguing against making their vaccine obsolete.
Edited to add that there is never 100% consensus, and politicians and reporters can easily find 'experts' that go against consensus. It's obvious when this is being done to push denialism (HIV historically and COVID contemporaneously--see Dr. Robert Malone), but less obvious for things more nuanced.
Scientific American recently published a dreadful ‘obituary’ for EO Wilson accusing him (unfoundedly) of racism whilst completely misunderstanding the concept of the normal distribution, so I wouldn’t hold out any hope of them publishing any accurate science anytime soon.
I'm curious if you'd like to share your opinion of Dr. Malone and his views or claims?
A good friend of mine asked me to watch one of his interviews. This friend has always had views closely aligned with mine, also similar to Craig's, until the pandemic where, while claiming not to be anti vax, he has not been vaxxed including wife and young kids. I watched the interview and he sounded knowledgeable and believable but at times seemed to be a little shady, driving a narrative or just using lame terms like the jab, woke cancel culture etc.
Dr. Malone calls himself the inventor of RNA vaccines, which totally misstates how science works (he was one of many who contributed). The self-proclaimed title does allow him to make an argument from authority (and also seems rather driven by professional jealously and perhaps sexism). He has a fucketonne of fallacious claims. Some of the highlights. The spike protein is toxic (there's no evidence for that) and somehow especially dangerous to children (and that there are a bunch of vaccine deaths that are being hidden). He overstates the risk of myocarditis in children from vaccination and understates the risk of both myocarditis and death from COVID in children. He claims that vaccination leads to escape variants, which is wrong (vaccination decreases the amount of virus, thus decreasing the amount of random mutants arising, and immune-escape variants will be selected for whether immunity is induced by infection or vaccination).
Also, freely available anti-viral agents. There was an article in the Times yesterday by a doctor detailing her difficulties getting an anti-viral (Paxlovir?) for her mother who had tested positive. Given that the first anti-virals have just in the past month been approved, it's going to take a few months for them to make their way to all of our neighborhood pharmacies.
It very well may have happened anyway. But the Democrats voting to end the filibuster even when they knew it wasn't going to work gave the Republicans all the cover they need to go ahead and do it next time they hold the Senate. And they hold the Senate more often than the Democrats do. How are the Democrats even going to argue against ending the filibuster at that point when they voted to do it themselves yesterday?
(While the Senate Republicans will face the opposite quandary having argued vociferously against ending the filibuster yesterday, they have much less problem with being a hypocrite so it's not really an issue for them)
The Democrats better hold onto the House most of the time (harder given Republican gerrymandering) or else every law Republicans oppose (Obamacare will be one of the first priorities) will be overturned. And perhaps voted in and out repeatedly as control of Congress changes.
The GOP are shameless and would do it anyway with the flimsiest of reasoning. And if the republic indeed survives the anti-democratic push of the GOP, good riddance to the filibuster.
As a Democrat, i worry what happens without it. Even though it's not like we were good at using it. As a democrat with a small d and a knowledge of its history, yes, good riddance.
Republicans are going to steamroll the Democrats this year. Congress is going full red unless they do something monumentally stupid from now to November. I have zero (0) confidence in Democratic Party. None. They absolutely don’t know what they’re doing meanwhile Republicans are winning victories all around.
Never? Not when they were great. Which granted was a long time ago. But I had more joy from them the last two seasons than I've had from any team I root for in ages. Certainly more than from the Mets, who I love with an irrational passion.
My childhood kid's introduction to chess book 50 years ago said pawns only attack diagonally because they held a big shield in front of them making it impossible to thrust their spear straight ahead. So they only attack diagonally to either side of the big shield.
Which was probably just a made up explanation to help kids remember how pawns attack. And it apparently worked, since I still remember it from a book I had 50 years ago.
Craig: Thanks for the heads-up on the Railroad’s drastic cut-back on their police force, (Railroad “Bulls”). It makes much more sense of those pictures than blaming big-city DAs, or bail reform.
For more information, please see this ACLU report on PA’s situation. The graphs make it a quick, but shocking read.
RE: Rusney Castillo: The reason he was in Pawtucket so long was some sort of loophole where his salary didn't count against the luxury tax if he wasn't on the 40 man (a loophole that was closed shortly after Castillo was removed, so he was basically the only player impacted). As a result, Boston let him wither in Triple A rather than have his $10 million count against their bottom line
You're still moving diagonally, though - guess this is like stabbing your fellow prole in the back instead of from the side ;)
From what I’ve seen in the comments section at The Athletic, I’m shocked at how “reasonable” these results are
Paid subscriber myself. I was done with the comments at The Athletic when the otherwise great Brewers beat writer Will Sammon wrote a piece about how Corbin Burnes was a "bulldog" who "wants to be on the mound" and is "determined to win". This, after he was one of the very, very few Brewers to refused to get vaccinated, and as a result got his ass Covidized in May (before Delta, before waning vax immunity) and missed a couple starts as a result. Yeah, it ended up not mattering in the playoff standings or otherwise, but it could have! Mr. Bulldog Burnes wasn't helping his team win on the mound when he was quarantined. The pushback against my pointing this out wasn't anything worse than Twitter crap, but I thought The Athletic readership was better.
That must have been a fun conversation. Like when I told my mom that my high school biology test was on "single-celled orgasms" by accident and immediately wanted to dig a deep hole to hide in.
My favourite line from today:
"the bit at the end about it being the best job I’ll ever had is no longer true — this is..."
Even if it were fan service - which I don’t think it is - I’m glad you enjoy what you do … because I enjoy what you do.
It's certainly not! I pinch myself a hundred times a week that I get to do what I do for a living. It's almost a crime.
We’ll arrange your defense.
We're going with insanity as the backup plan, right?
Maybe primary
"As through this life you travel, you'll meet all kinds of men. Some will rob you with a six gun... and some with a fountain pen." Or computer keyboard.
If Woody says you're guilty, you're guilty, Craig.
If the players were on strike, I would be loudly saying that I have no problem losing games if it lets the union achieve its goal. You would think that in theory, the owners would feel the same way about a lockout. But I doubt anyone from their side will say "in order to save our businesses, we are willing to make this sacrifice." Which might be the only hope that there aren't games lost. Though I wouldn't be too unhappy if the season were a month shorter. 162 games to eliminate only half the teams is too long.
Totally love WKRP. But not only do we have to deal with the unresolved rights issues, we can't stream it legally. There isn't so much as one season of the show anywhere. When I want to watch "Turkeys Away" on Thanksgiving, I have go find a bootleg version uploaded to DailyMotion, backwards. It's weird. But that show is a classic with a stellar cast. Huge fan of Hessman and Tim Reid. And i think I am not the only male my age who had a crush on Jan Smithers. (Yes, Loni Anderson is quite attractive and Jennifer was a really unusual character with more agency than most blonde bombshells ever have, but Bailey was the cute girl with glasses, and you know how nerds are.)
I know it won’t happen but I’d rather have the playoffs shorter than cut a single inning from 162. Baseball should not, imho, be treated as a short series sprint but rather a long season amble.
And I really am not looking forward to the first guy crowned "Mr. November ".
That's Jeter. There's no Mr. December yet though. Neutral site playoffs in warm weather sites? Hmmm... (please no)
Oh, I agree that we should have less playoffs. But since we won't, I want to see the regular season adjusted accordingly.
DLF, your eminently and 100% correct position is so obviously the way to go, and thus it's clear that the opposite will happen. I LOVE MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, INC.
The NHL caters to its devoted fans and doesn't worry too much about broadening the base of casual fans. And they do a pretty good job of it. The NBA obsesses over the casual fans and consistently tweaks to keep the entertainment hyped to the max. And they do a really darned good job of it. The NFL's fans, both devoted and casual, don't really care about history, so the league can do any damn fool thing and keep increasing its draw.
MLB doesn't have the breadth of support of the NFL and is trying to straddle the line between the NHL's focus on die hards and the NBA's on casual fans. But there is a problem when you straddle the fence: sooner or later, you will slip and if the feet come down on opposite sides it ain't gonna be pleasant.
Thinking about this, it seems that MLB has two camps of "die hard" fans - the younger ones, perhaps including most of us CoC subscribers in this group, who complain about the game because we see it as a potentially wonderful league and game that could and should be improved and adapted to modern times, and the older traditionalists who complain because they're old and they want baseball frozen in amber, 1965 or '55 or '75 forever. I think the move would be to toss the second group overboard and throw 'em a life jacket, they can swim back to the boat if they like, and focus on the former while *at the same time* reaching out to more casual fans and demonstrating an updated game and experience more suited for 2022.
I'd respectfully suggest that those two groups largely meet in the middle on most key on-field issues, like pace of play and the move towards TTO style.
And this may mark me as part of the old group, but I loved the variety on the field in the 1980s. You had fast teams and slugging teams, you had teams that relied on starters and you had ones that went quickly to the bullpen. You even had old traditional stadiums and the cookie cutter multi-purpose ashtrays. Other than the Rays, it seems that every team is now playing from the same playbook and the difference is in terms of quality rather than approach.
PS Baseball was perfect in 1977. I happened to turn 10 that year, but I'm sure that is nothing but a coincidence.
I love the Posnanski theory that the answer to the question "when was baseball at its best" is whatever year it was when you were 10. (Or 12, or 8, or something like that.) However, that isn't the case for me - I think baseball was at its best right around when you do - I'd say that I derive the most enjoyment from the late 70s and early 80s style of play, as you might, dlf. Any rule changes that make the game speedier and yet still smart would get my approval - '75 to '85 style. I was born during the last year of the Carter administration, so ya know.
The two groups may meet in the middle on pace and style of play preferences, but not so much on the displays of excitement and emotion, or what it means to "play the game the right way", views on the steroid era, and that sort of thing. Based on what I've seen, anyway. And one can be in group one and be of any age! The age range is a generality with many outliers on both sides.
Bailey > Jennifer
I was definitely Team Bailey. PS Shouldn’t that have been “Mic fright” rather than Mike no matter what AV Club wrote?
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The players absolutely are entitled to look out for their best financial interests. Same too for the owners. But as a fan, sign me up for Rosenthal’s ‘no games should be lost.’ My rooting interest is not found in the sides of a conference room table with labor lawyers on either side.
"Mike" used to be the more common spelling. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66196/microphone-mic-or-mike
Too bad the timeline doesn’t match up and I can’t blame Costanza for Maddux. Although I want to do so anyway.
I’ve always gotten the sense that Rosenthal goes “both ways” in the way that a lot of older writers and columnists do. They focus on a specific objective — “the Hall of Fame is for the greatest players” or “no games should be lost” — without seeing the forest, and I think it works at times. It helps that Rosenthal has cultivated a reputation as someone who genuinely loves and appreciates baseball’s history in addition to the modern era and wants to find positives where he can, as opposed to those with a prominent voice in sports media who tend to always focus more on the negatives.
I do think, though, that the “one objective” approach is flawed — and I say that as someone who respects Rosenthal. We KNOW that losing games is a bad thing and we KNOW that it takes two to tango. But you said it best, Craig. A fan can get away with the “no games should be lost” stance … and that’s who I think Rosenthal is writing for. The average fan, not the baseball fan who has used social media to become especially well-versed in service time manipulation or MLB’s hiring process.
Is that an excuse? I don’t know. But I do think there’s far more people who would take the simple stance of “both sides have to figure this out so no games are lost” as opposed to a more nuanced argument, and if that’s who Rosenthal is writing for, I 100% understand it.
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OK on a less of a ramble, you know it’s a good sign when new cases in Florida are significantly down.
Ideally, the virus itself will become endemic sooner rather than later, I agree. I just have no idea how we begin the rebuilding phase (for lack of a better term) or where to even start societally. We know what parts of three academic years affected by the pandemic are doing to kids. There’s the people who are still recovering from having COVID. The people who lost their jobs or their businesses.
Maybe the first step of the rebuild is just continuing to support small businesses and restaurants? Bring in the wings and fries from a local pub on Super Bowl Sunday. Especially if the pub doesn’t have a sign.
https://youtu.be/IRrBlLeZENU
It's what I refer to as the "lowest common denominator" audience. Talk to friends who don't bother to read up on what's behind these issues or those who hold some union grudge (usually b/c they didn't take that civil service test 30 years ago) and sooner or later you'll hear a "well, I dunno, the players make SO much money ..." I always stop those arguments cold b/c I bother to and am versed well enough to engage, but most others in that circle just nod. THAT is the audience. Their bad ideas get reinforced. And, as with all the misinformation, it's dangerous.
It really helps here in Boston, because I can frame it as "Yeah, they make tons of money, but the way I see it, there's no way this discussion ends with money going to me. It's either going to end up with the players, or John Henry. And I'd MUCH rather the players get money over John Henry."
I'm sure there are teams whose fanbases don't hate their owners as much, but it's still a good way to reframe. But we all know that already.
I think it's true of pretty much every owner. They are all hanging together now, one renegade owner could fracture them right now IMO.
Constanza would would have faked the heart attack so “Mr Steinbrenner” would give him time off, paid of course, then he’d use it to spend time away from Susan so he doesn’t get “over excited” seeing her.
Remember: it's not a lie, if you believe it.
I don't know if you have Spotify, but they have a playlist of every song ever played on WKRP in Cincinnati.
I don't think this lack of positive movement in the labor negotiations is at all surprising. Despite the fact that we all know neither side will get everything they want in the end, there's not enough pressure to give ground on your position until spring training and (much more importantly) the regular season are threatened.
At the moment it's the owners who are unwilling to make a good faith proposal. But I doubt the union is at a point yet where they'd be willing to fold on their core demands either. But I guess we can't say that for sure without the owners being willing to really negotiate to find out.
The caveat here is that nobody has to make a good faith proposal at first. The owners just showed the players what's important to THEM. The players need to counter with SOMETHING, and the pressure is currently on them to do so. I think losing games will damage the owners more than the players in the short run because they get no revenue if there are no games being played.
But the owners recent proposal was their 2nd proposal - with nothing new ... or maybe I'm just thinking of all the leaked ideas as a proposal?
The second proposal was the equivalent of a kid arguing about his 9 PM bedtime and the parent coming back with “Okay…how about 8:30”
Or..how about 8:60?
1. Someone needs to make a good faith move towards the other. I don't care if it's players towards the owners or owners towards the players. If I was the players, I'd identify one thing I could give on, and give on it in this response. If the owners come back with a good faith response -- which may be unlikely -- great. If not, you go hard in the court of public opinion ...
2. Because, like Rosenthal says, no game should be lost. This isn't labor in a chicken factory negotiating with Costco. I'll just buy a roti chicken from the supermarket. There's a third party here with an interest in what happens. And while that third party's influence is obviously the smallest of the three parties, it does have influence.
3. It's cool to say that owners make more money off the game so they have more to lose, but players need the money way more than most owners do. The players may have a fund to keep the non-superstars afloat for a while, but in a labor disaster, where do they go? Do they really want to leave their families to play in the KBL?
4. While I agree with you about how the media at large is utterly failing in its job to describe the party whose platform is simply "owning the libz" accurately, here part of the problem is Dems sniping at Manchin and Sinema instead of getting behind a mic and blasting *all 50 Republicans* for being against voting. All. 50. Republicans. 100% of the party. Just like Dems should be doing every damn time Rs block something that most of the country supports, and every time they hypocrisy it up (Ds utterly failed in the court of public opinion when it came to Amy Coney Barrett). But they don't. They'd rather knock AOC.
5. When pre-crazy Giuliani was the mayor, his crackdown on minor crime really did clean up Manhattan south of 96th Street and really did make it safer and really did turn it into a grander economic powerhouse. While the Giuliani approach obviously was not ideal overall, there has to be a better way to address societal impacts than simply not prosecuting low level crime. I wish I was smart enough to have an idea. But the fact that I successfully powered my computer on this morning was an upset.
Giuliani absolutely cleaned up NYC. The city proper was an absolute shit hole with crime running rampant. Usually movie portrayals are BS, but what you see in some of those mid 80’s movies, Including Death Wish and Tax Driver, are facts.
Wrong on Rudy, wrong that "someone" need to make a "good faith move" and just wrong.
Crime rates were dropping prior to Rudy. Crime rates in other cities dropped at the same rate it dropped in NYC. And also, 40 other things.
Rudy Giuliani is an "errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill."
Always has been what he is now and the above quote should be his epitaph. Carve it now.
Rudy put the Emergency Response Center in the WTC, played fast and loose with radio contracts that hurt FDNY communication on 9-11, and used his 9-11 "fame" to personally enrich himself as an international "security expert" in a field he knew nothing about.
20-year FDNY vet here. Put Rudy sans sunglasses on a rocket to the sun.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/19/trumps-claim-attributing-the-20-year-new-york-city-crime-decline-to-giulianis-policies/
Perhaps you should check. I agree they were trending down, until Dinkins (worst mayor until DeBozo took over), then crime almost fell off a cliff.
https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm
I’m not going to debate what other crap Giuliani did or didn’t do or what he turned into, but while he ran the city, crime went way down.
I DID check, that's what the article link is.
Your anti-crime, cousin-marrying, disbarred ambulance chaser had a police commish who did felony time. Anti-crime, huh?
Apparently not good enough. Look at the stats again. And again, I don’t care to argue about anything else, so you can continue to point out irrelevant items completely unrelated to CRIME STATISTICS, and I won’t address. Thanks !
Jesus effing Christ. Nobody is praising Giuliani as a person, a mayor, a lawyer, a traitor, or anything else. It was a statement of fact about how Manhattan -- in particular the Times Square area -- became a different place because he -- perhaps ruthlessly -- cracked down on small time crime. That's it. Nobody is celebrating the guy who, when running against Dinkins, had rallies where watermelons were proudly displayed. Settle down, Beavis.
…So at least under Rudy the trains ran on time?
Mr Niss, crime stat expert, did not personally know 4 dozen of those who perished at ground zero, did not have his life torn asunder that day, suffer health issues, and then witness Rudy plant a flag in the corpses for personal profit. He did however, once cross a street safely in Midtown and now spends his life paying tribute to the man he thinks is personally responsible for that event.
Thanks, Niss, don't forget your "Never forget" tweet next Sept 11.
Very little of what you said has anything to do with proving me to be "wrong", and all of it is irrelevant to the point about the Giuliani administration and what it did with respect to places like 42nd Street. And just saying "wrong" about a "good faith move" both proves that you know little about negotiation and comes across as little more than being an ass. Most people don't like participating in conversations where the other side acts like an ass, FYI.
Re: Point 5.
I live in the urban core of Los Angeles and we've got the largest unhoused population in the country, so you see folks sleeping rough pretty much everywhere.
The one exception near where I live is the block surrounding the Scientology Center, which is perpetually humming with Sea Org people soliciting passersby to get their thetans tested and chasing off people they don't want around. Unlike the surrounding streets, it has cobblestone paving, which gives the illusion of it being a private road to deter motorists. It's really pretty nice.
The block itself contains a massive church, admin buildings and a bunch of dorms for the Sea Org people to stay in during their lives of more or less indentured servitude.
I find this to be pretty instructive, because it proves that you can have a Downtown Disney feel to a real American urban center, while also illustrating the cost of creating that.
Endemicity also means updating vaccines so that we're not immunizing against a spike protein that's now extinct. I'm hopeful that we can fast track safety trials on variant vaccines, as the ability to quickly update the sequence is one of the best features of RNA vaccines.
It seems like most authorities I have seen quoted remain unsure we need an Omicron vaccine, even though it's likely any new variants will evolve from Omicron. It's "well, this still works, so we can still use it" and "by the time we make it, it won't be needed." As someone who wants to do everything possible to avoid catching Omicron, I want that new vaccine ASAP. But beyond that, and appreciating that it is a game of whack-a-mole, Omicron is not the same thing as the original virus and needs a new vaccine, and I don't get the resistance to this.
That's a terrible take. Israel (predictably) just found that a 4th dose does not offer any more protection against catching Omicron. Protecting against contracting COVID means lower viral loads worldwide, which means fewer chances for 'random' novel escape variants to arise. And while boosters protect fairly well against severe Omicron disease, they're still worse than they were against earlier variants. More lives will be saved by updating the vaccine. The public response has been paternalistic and infuriating from a scientific standpoint on things ranging from masks to testing to boosters.
But it's not just the public response. This article quotes only scientists and doctors, and most are saying "too soon" about a new vaccine, though that was before the study in Israel.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-holding-up-new-omicron-vaccines1/
The scientific community has really disappointed me more than the politicians since the politicians take their lead from the scientists.
That article is both-siderism* that I don't think matches the consensus of immunologists--it's certainly not case for the ones that I regularly interact with. Hell, most of them thought that we should have updated upon Delta or at least had a bivalent vaccine with Delta plus Alpha (there's zero reason to use the original Wuhan strain anymore). And based on some shared mutations, a Delta vaccine would be expected to work better against Omicron anyway.
* Curious that someone working on the J&J vaccine that can't be updated as quickly as the RNA vaccines is arguing against making their vaccine obsolete.
Edited to add that there is never 100% consensus, and politicians and reporters can easily find 'experts' that go against consensus. It's obvious when this is being done to push denialism (HIV historically and COVID contemporaneously--see Dr. Robert Malone), but less obvious for things more nuanced.
Another thing to be disappointed in: Scientific American. If they aren't covering the pandemic well, who will?
They also had a terrible fucking article on E.O. Wilson's legacy. I've written them off.
Scientific American recently published a dreadful ‘obituary’ for EO Wilson accusing him (unfoundedly) of racism whilst completely misunderstanding the concept of the normal distribution, so I wouldn’t hold out any hope of them publishing any accurate science anytime soon.
I'm curious if you'd like to share your opinion of Dr. Malone and his views or claims?
A good friend of mine asked me to watch one of his interviews. This friend has always had views closely aligned with mine, also similar to Craig's, until the pandemic where, while claiming not to be anti vax, he has not been vaxxed including wife and young kids. I watched the interview and he sounded knowledgeable and believable but at times seemed to be a little shady, driving a narrative or just using lame terms like the jab, woke cancel culture etc.
Dr. Malone calls himself the inventor of RNA vaccines, which totally misstates how science works (he was one of many who contributed). The self-proclaimed title does allow him to make an argument from authority (and also seems rather driven by professional jealously and perhaps sexism). He has a fucketonne of fallacious claims. Some of the highlights. The spike protein is toxic (there's no evidence for that) and somehow especially dangerous to children (and that there are a bunch of vaccine deaths that are being hidden). He overstates the risk of myocarditis in children from vaccination and understates the risk of both myocarditis and death from COVID in children. He claims that vaccination leads to escape variants, which is wrong (vaccination decreases the amount of virus, thus decreasing the amount of random mutants arising, and immune-escape variants will be selected for whether immunity is induced by infection or vaccination).
The Atlantic had a good article with those and more: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/robert-malone-vaccine-inventor-vaccine-skeptic/619734/
Also, freely available anti-viral agents. There was an article in the Times yesterday by a doctor detailing her difficulties getting an anti-viral (Paxlovir?) for her mother who had tested positive. Given that the first anti-virals have just in the past month been approved, it's going to take a few months for them to make their way to all of our neighborhood pharmacies.
I'm also looking forward to the GOP nuking the filibuster for tax cuts for rich people, with both Sinema and Manchin voting in favor.
It very well may have happened anyway. But the Democrats voting to end the filibuster even when they knew it wasn't going to work gave the Republicans all the cover they need to go ahead and do it next time they hold the Senate. And they hold the Senate more often than the Democrats do. How are the Democrats even going to argue against ending the filibuster at that point when they voted to do it themselves yesterday?
(While the Senate Republicans will face the opposite quandary having argued vociferously against ending the filibuster yesterday, they have much less problem with being a hypocrite so it's not really an issue for them)
The Democrats better hold onto the House most of the time (harder given Republican gerrymandering) or else every law Republicans oppose (Obamacare will be one of the first priorities) will be overturned. And perhaps voted in and out repeatedly as control of Congress changes.
The GOP are shameless and would do it anyway with the flimsiest of reasoning. And if the republic indeed survives the anti-democratic push of the GOP, good riddance to the filibuster.
As a Democrat, i worry what happens without it. Even though it's not like we were good at using it. As a democrat with a small d and a knowledge of its history, yes, good riddance.
Republicans are going to steamroll the Democrats this year. Congress is going full red unless they do something monumentally stupid from now to November. I have zero (0) confidence in Democratic Party. None. They absolutely don’t know what they’re doing meanwhile Republicans are winning victories all around.
They're going to impeach Biden for Benghazi.
For the record, it's never good to follow the New York Islanders.
Never? Not when they were great. Which granted was a long time ago. But I had more joy from them the last two seasons than I've had from any team I root for in ages. Certainly more than from the Mets, who I love with an irrational passion.
It wasn't a futility based statement. The Yankees have certainly had plenty of success. It's never good to follow them either.
(As one might surmise, I'm a NY Rangers fan)
I know this is outdated and all but...
1940!
(Devils fans laugh at both of us in terms of last Stanley Cup won. Assuming there are any besides my brother.)
My childhood kid's introduction to chess book 50 years ago said pawns only attack diagonally because they held a big shield in front of them making it impossible to thrust their spear straight ahead. So they only attack diagonally to either side of the big shield.
Which was probably just a made up explanation to help kids remember how pawns attack. And it apparently worked, since I still remember it from a book I had 50 years ago.
There was a similar explanation to why knights don't attack straight ahead. The knight has to attack on one side of his horses head or the other.
Craig: Thanks for the heads-up on the Railroad’s drastic cut-back on their police force, (Railroad “Bulls”). It makes much more sense of those pictures than blaming big-city DAs, or bail reform.
For more information, please see this ACLU report on PA’s situation. The graphs make it a quick, but shocking read.
https://aclupa.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/broken_rules_statewide_bail_report.pdf
RE: Rusney Castillo: The reason he was in Pawtucket so long was some sort of loophole where his salary didn't count against the luxury tax if he wasn't on the 40 man (a loophole that was closed shortly after Castillo was removed, so he was basically the only player impacted). As a result, Boston let him wither in Triple A rather than have his $10 million count against their bottom line
That loophole indeed sucks. I did look up his minor league line, and it was very uninspiring. Not enough pop or walks to play a corner regularly.