Jamie Moyer was the last active major leaguer who was older than I, so seeing him referred to as a youngster in the zine reprint has me feeling my age.
I'm just a couple of months younger than Omar Vizquel who outlasted Moyer by about half a season. I haven't counted in a bit, but I believe that I am now older than about 2/3rds of the managers.
I deep sixed mine in...January 2019. You can download all of your data to keep pictures and such. It's a pain not to be able to keep track of events/venues and such on there, but I signed up for more mailing lists/followed on twitter to try to make up for it. ymmv.
I killed mine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and haven't missed it for a moment. I don't get birthday greetings from people I haven't had any actual contact with since high school, but other than that, my life has been a-ok.
As is normally the case, Manfred is totally out of touch with public sentiment. He said there's more of a split opinion on the Manfred Man than 7 inning doubleheaders, when the opposite is actually true.
He does care about public opinion as revealed in television ratings. I suspect that he has very good data on viewership - and thus advertising rates - as the games go later. Ownership doesn't care about the aesthetics qua aesthetics; just how it affects the financial bottom line.
You and I can speculate all we want. But Manfred has actual data and absolutely cares about that revenue source. Facts - which you and I lack - are always preferable to informed guesses.
The regional contracts get negotiated for a team or two every year. Do you think that the owners, or their representative, the Commissioner don't care about local television?
And your speculation about when and why people turn off the tv is just that - speculation. The stations have minute by minute tracking. If a game goes long vs. a game that is short. Extra innings now with the MM and extra innings two years ago without. Data vs. guesses with literally billions of dollars on the line ... well, I'm siding with data.
re: dumping facebook, I got rid of mine I think three or four years ago after having been on it since it launched when I was in college. As you note, it's a cesspool of internet-illiterate old people posting unhinged Dan Bongino articles and digital chain letters, plus a dash of Let's Remember Some Guys You Went To High School With. I realised there was nothing on there for me and paired with Facebook's myriad scummy business practices, it was an easy call to click the delete button. I don't miss it a lick and don't feel like I'm any less connected to any of my friends or family with whom I actually want to have a connection.
Dubya is right that leaving Afghanistan will have bad consequences, but what's the alternative? Stay there forever? The consequences are going to be bad whenever the U.S. leaves, be that now, 10 years from now, or if we left 10 years ago.
Except for China of course, they enslave their people, amongst other awful things, but America continues sending tons of dough over there for their crap
We actually were very justified in going into Afghanistan (at the time, the Taliban was harboring Osama bin Laden, who, as you well know, had just attacked us). We even had international support! Problem 1 was that we went in without having a clear idea of what we were supposed to actually DO there; Problem 2 was that the Bush Administration (Darth Rove and Emperor Cheney, specifically) decided that it was more important to depose Sadaam Hussein than complete our mission in Afghanistan.
With regards to your "post-WWII" comment, I can refer you to "The Savage Wars of Peace" by Max Boot. It's a look at all the little wars and military actions the US has done on foreign soil from the 1800s up to WWII. Boot maintains that these little wars are actually the norm; the big wars with massive troop movements are the exception. Unfortunately, after we had learned how to do the little wars, along came WWII - the biggest of the BIG WARS. All that we had learned got thrown out and forgotten. I'd add that after the Soviet Union collapsed, we came to believe that as the only remaining superpower, we could do no wrong - so we stopped even *trying* to learn how to do an intervention or peacekeeping mission. Now our willful ignorance has come back to bite us. Haiti has turned on the bat signal and wants - *needs* - our help - but we're too afraid to respond.
Right. Going into Afghanistan to get OBL needed to happen. But it's like killing a hitman hired by a criminal gang - you need to take down the gang itself, too, or else there will just be more hitmen hired.
I can't endorse deactivating Facebook more highly. As a self-employed journalist myself, I found that any negligible benefit I was getting – either personal or professional – was far outweighed by the soul-crushing feeling of supporting one of the evilest entities ever and the constant exposure to how horrible and moronic the miasma of our species is. I get that for some organizations, it's where their customer base lives. However, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you ever get an urge to enjoy some good old-fashioned self-flagellation, you can still find harrowing examples of terrible things on Twitter. Also, the kids these days aren't using it. Like Manfred, if your only interest is in turning the product into an embodiment of Steve Buscemi carrying a skateboard on his shoulder because you're convinced you have to work fervently to make sure Gen Z thinks it's rad, then there's no reason to waste time on the platform.
My scenario is a bit different than Craig's in that I am a single person with no kids to take care of. The responsibilities simply aren't the same for me. But from a pure business standpoint of "I make money online but don't actually sell a physical product" - which I do think is very important here (if you are selling t-shirts or artwork or something, canning facebook could actually really hurt your bottom line) - I just don't think there's much benefit in having facebook.
Cutting off Facebook didn't hurt traffic for me on two different sites I've been running forever that get millions of views a year. Even when an article would "catch on", it's just baseball stuff and we're talking a few thousand hits a day. That's what, $20 if ad rates are great that day? As a private newsletter, that thousands of clicks is never going to happen. Even on a free Thursday, what are the odds that something's going to catch fire often enough to make it worth it? How many subs do you need to deal with all of the absolute garbage that brings facebook into your life?
I don't know your financial situation, Craig. But I do know that you've shared that things have gone better than your "goal". If that's the case, delete it all and let it burn.
The cruise lines just need to be better than Florida on the transmission of communicable diseases for them taking a role to be an improvement, and that's not a high bar. And in their defense, at this point is clearly in their own self-interest to minimize Covid cases as much as possible. Enhancing the notion that cruises are a Covid petri dish or having more shutdowns isn't something they can really afford.
I don't think COVID is going anywhere, and Florida vs the cruise carriers is going to be a very tough fight as one can't lose the other. I've enjoyed cruises but am not clamoring to (a) get back on one or (b) go to Florida so there's a bit of an element of Schadenfreude for this with me.
I was NEVER on Facebook; never had an account, never will. I never even had an urge to monitor it. Therefore, I never had the problem that friends did have trying to unsubscribe. A few years ago, I was told that it was very hard and frustrating to quit. Good luck.
Bold move by the Angels to Suttonly fire their other broadcaster after they already cast Vasgersians on their fans’ asparagus. Let’s see how it works out for them.
Nancy was a much better editor than whoever you’re paying now. The lack of typos in today’s blast-from-the-past was a little disorienting. (Or would it be orienting?)
The secret: you can start recapping "last night's" games at 4pm the day before when they're throwback games, allowing more time. When you're recapping stuff that actually happened the night before you're either doing it after you've been awake for 17 or 18 hours or else you're doing it at 5:30AM, and that's WAY more fertile typo territory.
Sutton wasn’t very good, no. Seems nice enough but went on strange tangents and made the kind of goofball-sequel Mark Gubizca eeem like the adult in the room. Just a lot of weird energy. I would often turn the sound off, myself. Some commenters at the Athletic also noted he seemed to refer to his faith a lot, too, which seems odd for a baseball broadcast.
Keeping a national voice like Vasgersian on while filling in the gaps with someone else seems like the Platonic ideal of Moreno’s style, though. Find something shiny that doesn’t work all that great instead of the real best answer.
I pride myself and think of myself as a man of faith, as there’s a drive into deep left field by Castellanos and that’ll be a home run. And so that’ll make it a 4-0 ballgame.
I can't say that I listened to more than a handful of Darron Sutton called games over the years and have no real memory of those calls. I did, however, listen to probably a couple of thousand games that Don Sutton called for Atlanta. He was fun, funny, self deprecating, but had a good understanding of the game. He did occasionally get on a riff about pitch counts and harkened back to his v-e-r-y long career with a ton of IPs. He seemingly forgot just how short the careers of some of his great teammates like Koufax or Drysdale were or how fast others like Fernando went from outstanding to eh through overuse. And the statement "not every hit is on a bad pitch, not every out is on a good one" was used over and over and over again. But overall, Dad Don was a good color man.
I deleted my Facebook account last year and really haven’t missed it. I have a little less ambient awareness of what some casual acquaintances are up to but honestly that’s fine. I really hope Facebook has some meaningful regulation in their future.
I have Facebook for keeping up with a tiny number of friends and interest groups. I never post. And I still get annoyed with it. (There is at least one person who friended me who links to some awful right wing nonsense on occasion.) But my wife doesn’t use it at all and I often have to fill her in on stuff she needs to know. So I keep going.
This is my strategy, too. A smallish number of friends and relatives and I removed the people who annoyed me. Nice to keep up with stuff that's happening with kids and grandkids and pets.
Same. I use it for friends, family, and a very few organizations (local animal shelter, my public library, and a local nature center so I can get notifications of their events). Mostly so I can see pictures and video of various kids and pets that I'd miss otherwise.
Anything that annoyed me I got rid of. I have to admit it is fun to block a random commenter in a conversation on a friend's post and see all their comments go POOF! If only real life worked like that!
Two semi-related comments. Facebook is garbage, and I know I should delete my account but I mainly use it to monitor my boomer parents to make sure they're not getting radicalized any more than the standard "angry fox news viewing" boomer. My mother especially has never been good about determining what's real and what's fake news online. And I have a few other family members who, while they did not go whole hog on qanon, I suspect they are at least q-curious.
A couple weeks ago I was talking to my mother and she started telling me about this great book she had read called "Hillbilly Elegy" and it was just such a great book and the author was so interesting and he had such a great story and it was so informative and on and on and on. Thought my eyes were going to roll out of my head.
My wife is part of a "movie club" and one of the ladies recently picked HE. When the time came for their Zoom discussion, MrsCj (who had skipped the movie) waited until almost the end and said "Hey Doug - come in here and tell them what YOU think of JD Vance."
Friends - find yourself somebody who lets you lay waste to a fascist wannabe to her friends; it was glorious. Love that woman.
Jamie Moyer was the last active major leaguer who was older than I, so seeing him referred to as a youngster in the zine reprint has me feeling my age.
I'm just a couple of months younger than Omar Vizquel who outlasted Moyer by about half a season. I haven't counted in a bit, but I believe that I am now older than about 2/3rds of the managers.
Nolan Ryan's career was only 2 years longer than Jamie Moyer's.
LaTroy Hawkins was the last active player older than me. I spammed his Twitter account on the regular BEGGING him to pitch forever. Alas.
Pujols is the only current MLB player older than I am. Yikes.
I deep sixed mine in...January 2019. You can download all of your data to keep pictures and such. It's a pain not to be able to keep track of events/venues and such on there, but I signed up for more mailing lists/followed on twitter to try to make up for it. ymmv.
I personally found deleting my twitter account far better for my mental health and online habits.
I found never starting either habit does wonders for the mind and heart!
I killed mine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and haven't missed it for a moment. I don't get birthday greetings from people I haven't had any actual contact with since high school, but other than that, my life has been a-ok.
As is normally the case, Manfred is totally out of touch with public sentiment. He said there's more of a split opinion on the Manfred Man than 7 inning doubleheaders, when the opposite is actually true.
And in the case of the players, he’s likely looking for the inverse correlation.
He does care about public opinion as revealed in television ratings. I suspect that he has very good data on viewership - and thus advertising rates - as the games go later. Ownership doesn't care about the aesthetics qua aesthetics; just how it affects the financial bottom line.
You and I can speculate all we want. But Manfred has actual data and absolutely cares about that revenue source. Facts - which you and I lack - are always preferable to informed guesses.
The regional contracts get negotiated for a team or two every year. Do you think that the owners, or their representative, the Commissioner don't care about local television?
And your speculation about when and why people turn off the tv is just that - speculation. The stations have minute by minute tracking. If a game goes long vs. a game that is short. Extra innings now with the MM and extra innings two years ago without. Data vs. guesses with literally billions of dollars on the line ... well, I'm siding with data.
re: dumping facebook, I got rid of mine I think three or four years ago after having been on it since it launched when I was in college. As you note, it's a cesspool of internet-illiterate old people posting unhinged Dan Bongino articles and digital chain letters, plus a dash of Let's Remember Some Guys You Went To High School With. I realised there was nothing on there for me and paired with Facebook's myriad scummy business practices, it was an easy call to click the delete button. I don't miss it a lick and don't feel like I'm any less connected to any of my friends or family with whom I actually want to have a connection.
Dubya is right that leaving Afghanistan will have bad consequences, but what's the alternative? Stay there forever? The consequences are going to be bad whenever the U.S. leaves, be that now, 10 years from now, or if we left 10 years ago.
Except for China of course, they enslave their people, amongst other awful things, but America continues sending tons of dough over there for their crap
We actually were very justified in going into Afghanistan (at the time, the Taliban was harboring Osama bin Laden, who, as you well know, had just attacked us). We even had international support! Problem 1 was that we went in without having a clear idea of what we were supposed to actually DO there; Problem 2 was that the Bush Administration (Darth Rove and Emperor Cheney, specifically) decided that it was more important to depose Sadaam Hussein than complete our mission in Afghanistan.
With regards to your "post-WWII" comment, I can refer you to "The Savage Wars of Peace" by Max Boot. It's a look at all the little wars and military actions the US has done on foreign soil from the 1800s up to WWII. Boot maintains that these little wars are actually the norm; the big wars with massive troop movements are the exception. Unfortunately, after we had learned how to do the little wars, along came WWII - the biggest of the BIG WARS. All that we had learned got thrown out and forgotten. I'd add that after the Soviet Union collapsed, we came to believe that as the only remaining superpower, we could do no wrong - so we stopped even *trying* to learn how to do an intervention or peacekeeping mission. Now our willful ignorance has come back to bite us. Haiti has turned on the bat signal and wants - *needs* - our help - but we're too afraid to respond.
Right. Going into Afghanistan to get OBL needed to happen. But it's like killing a hitman hired by a criminal gang - you need to take down the gang itself, too, or else there will just be more hitmen hired.
I can't endorse deactivating Facebook more highly. As a self-employed journalist myself, I found that any negligible benefit I was getting – either personal or professional – was far outweighed by the soul-crushing feeling of supporting one of the evilest entities ever and the constant exposure to how horrible and moronic the miasma of our species is. I get that for some organizations, it's where their customer base lives. However, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you ever get an urge to enjoy some good old-fashioned self-flagellation, you can still find harrowing examples of terrible things on Twitter. Also, the kids these days aren't using it. Like Manfred, if your only interest is in turning the product into an embodiment of Steve Buscemi carrying a skateboard on his shoulder because you're convinced you have to work fervently to make sure Gen Z thinks it's rad, then there's no reason to waste time on the platform.
This one right here.
My scenario is a bit different than Craig's in that I am a single person with no kids to take care of. The responsibilities simply aren't the same for me. But from a pure business standpoint of "I make money online but don't actually sell a physical product" - which I do think is very important here (if you are selling t-shirts or artwork or something, canning facebook could actually really hurt your bottom line) - I just don't think there's much benefit in having facebook.
Cutting off Facebook didn't hurt traffic for me on two different sites I've been running forever that get millions of views a year. Even when an article would "catch on", it's just baseball stuff and we're talking a few thousand hits a day. That's what, $20 if ad rates are great that day? As a private newsletter, that thousands of clicks is never going to happen. Even on a free Thursday, what are the odds that something's going to catch fire often enough to make it worth it? How many subs do you need to deal with all of the absolute garbage that brings facebook into your life?
I don't know your financial situation, Craig. But I do know that you've shared that things have gone better than your "goal". If that's the case, delete it all and let it burn.
The cruise lines just need to be better than Florida on the transmission of communicable diseases for them taking a role to be an improvement, and that's not a high bar. And in their defense, at this point is clearly in their own self-interest to minimize Covid cases as much as possible. Enhancing the notion that cruises are a Covid petri dish or having more shutdowns isn't something they can really afford.
I don't think COVID is going anywhere, and Florida vs the cruise carriers is going to be a very tough fight as one can't lose the other. I've enjoyed cruises but am not clamoring to (a) get back on one or (b) go to Florida so there's a bit of an element of Schadenfreude for this with me.
I was NEVER on Facebook; never had an account, never will. I never even had an urge to monitor it. Therefore, I never had the problem that friends did have trying to unsubscribe. A few years ago, I was told that it was very hard and frustrating to quit. Good luck.
Bold move by the Angels to Suttonly fire their other broadcaster after they already cast Vasgersians on their fans’ asparagus. Let’s see how it works out for them.
I might... might? pay for an additional subscription if you broke down a past season in a parallel And That Happened in a separate mailing.
Nancy was a much better editor than whoever you’re paying now. The lack of typos in today’s blast-from-the-past was a little disorienting. (Or would it be orienting?)
The secret: you can start recapping "last night's" games at 4pm the day before when they're throwback games, allowing more time. When you're recapping stuff that actually happened the night before you're either doing it after you've been awake for 17 or 18 hours or else you're doing it at 5:30AM, and that's WAY more fertile typo territory.
Sutton wasn’t very good, no. Seems nice enough but went on strange tangents and made the kind of goofball-sequel Mark Gubizca eeem like the adult in the room. Just a lot of weird energy. I would often turn the sound off, myself. Some commenters at the Athletic also noted he seemed to refer to his faith a lot, too, which seems odd for a baseball broadcast.
Keeping a national voice like Vasgersian on while filling in the gaps with someone else seems like the Platonic ideal of Moreno’s style, though. Find something shiny that doesn’t work all that great instead of the real best answer.
I’m in Chicago so I have absolutely zero dogs in this fight, but an announcer referring to his faith would be a huge nope for me.
I pride myself and think of myself as a man of faith, as there’s a drive into deep left field by Castellanos and that’ll be a home run. And so that’ll make it a 4-0 ballgame.
I can't say that I listened to more than a handful of Darron Sutton called games over the years and have no real memory of those calls. I did, however, listen to probably a couple of thousand games that Don Sutton called for Atlanta. He was fun, funny, self deprecating, but had a good understanding of the game. He did occasionally get on a riff about pitch counts and harkened back to his v-e-r-y long career with a ton of IPs. He seemingly forgot just how short the careers of some of his great teammates like Koufax or Drysdale were or how fast others like Fernando went from outstanding to eh through overuse. And the statement "not every hit is on a bad pitch, not every out is on a good one" was used over and over and over again. But overall, Dad Don was a good color man.
Please pardon the many typos, that was all on a phone. As it goes.
Goodnight Miss Wilderotter, wherever you are.
I deleted my Facebook account last year and really haven’t missed it. I have a little less ambient awareness of what some casual acquaintances are up to but honestly that’s fine. I really hope Facebook has some meaningful regulation in their future.
I have Facebook for keeping up with a tiny number of friends and interest groups. I never post. And I still get annoyed with it. (There is at least one person who friended me who links to some awful right wing nonsense on occasion.) But my wife doesn’t use it at all and I often have to fill her in on stuff she needs to know. So I keep going.
This is my strategy, too. A smallish number of friends and relatives and I removed the people who annoyed me. Nice to keep up with stuff that's happening with kids and grandkids and pets.
Same. I use it for friends, family, and a very few organizations (local animal shelter, my public library, and a local nature center so I can get notifications of their events). Mostly so I can see pictures and video of various kids and pets that I'd miss otherwise.
Anything that annoyed me I got rid of. I have to admit it is fun to block a random commenter in a conversation on a friend's post and see all their comments go POOF! If only real life worked like that!
Two semi-related comments. Facebook is garbage, and I know I should delete my account but I mainly use it to monitor my boomer parents to make sure they're not getting radicalized any more than the standard "angry fox news viewing" boomer. My mother especially has never been good about determining what's real and what's fake news online. And I have a few other family members who, while they did not go whole hog on qanon, I suspect they are at least q-curious.
A couple weeks ago I was talking to my mother and she started telling me about this great book she had read called "Hillbilly Elegy" and it was just such a great book and the author was so interesting and he had such a great story and it was so informative and on and on and on. Thought my eyes were going to roll out of my head.
My wife is part of a "movie club" and one of the ladies recently picked HE. When the time came for their Zoom discussion, MrsCj (who had skipped the movie) waited until almost the end and said "Hey Doug - come in here and tell them what YOU think of JD Vance."
Friends - find yourself somebody who lets you lay waste to a fascist wannabe to her friends; it was glorious. Love that woman.