98 Comments

I guess the Roger case went up in smoke.

I'll show myself out.

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Booo

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I know.

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...urns! BOO-urns!

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No, no, that's the door to the broom closet.

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Which sentence of yours do you think stimulated more "Like"s?

Sorry, I will butt out.

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Does it matter? Any publicity is better.....

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Jul 7, 2022·edited Jul 7, 2022

This sounds like it could be the right book, but it says it was published in 2007:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16638475-out-of-time

This one was published in the right time, but doesn't sound quite right:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237213.If_I_Never_Get_Back

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"If I Never Get Back" is a fun read, but I agree with you that it's not the book that Saadaab was looking for.

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I'm thinking it might be the Time Warp Trio Books, which I enjoyed in the 90s, namely the one where they went to 2095: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/858726.2095

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A Nats win where Josiah Gray, Keibert Ruiz, Luis Garcia - and some guy named Soto - led the way; if you squint REALLY HARD you can almost see the future in DC.

PS Sports stadia as polling places? Hell yes - and should have happened a long time ago. (Nice to see my old friend Tova Wang hasn’t lost her fastball.)

PPS I remember being surprised when I did my short stint in a big firm that sometimes the goal wasn’t to win but just buy time - and how much clients would pay simply to delay the inevitable. Never got a lighter, though.

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No objection to the sport polling question. I’d say, though that it is far more than once every 2-4 years. Primary, runoff, non federal off year elections, etc. And we shouldn’t say go to 123 Main St for this vote and 321 1st St for that one.

Not really on point but one of the oft sited reasons for (faux) concerns about the GA 2020 election was a broken pipe spewing water at the basketball arena which caused some minor delays.

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Gifts received when I was practicing included a couple of nice things. I got seats in the player family & friends section when we represented a former All Star in some appellate work arising out of his divorce. A different client bought me a bottle of Louis XIII cognac. But mostly it was somewhere between disposable pens and branded coffee mugs. Should I count an autograph in The Baseball Encyclopedia? Alan Koch pitched briefly for Washington and Detroit in the 1960s, then went back to school, became a lawyer, was in-house at a client of ours, and one day at our office talking during a break (mostly about what a nut Don Zimmer was) signed my book.

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Yeah, antitrust is almost always about the delays with a side of full employment for former associates. I like to refer to it as Dave Mason law.

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I am old enough to get that reference. Nice.

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My only supposition was that it had something to do with "There ain't no good guy. There ain't no bad guy. There's only you and me and we just disagree."

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I'm partial to Ben Stiller's line in "Zero Effect."

"there aren't EVIL guys, and INNOCENT guys. It's just - it's just... It's just a bunch of guys."

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Those jerseys are incredible. I agree with Craig, definitely whatever size donation they want, the Blue Jays should figure out a way to wear them for a game.

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Make them the "City Connect" uniforms.

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founding

Have you seen how lazy the nike designers are? no way they agree to be upstaged like that

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My assumption is the Jays CC unis will have a big picture of Drake on the front of a Jays home white.

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No way the CC uni doesn't have at least two references to maple syrup. Probably poutine too, even though it comes from an entirely different province.

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They should make it a hockey sweater.

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Will it have a beaver or a moose as well? Or maybe a Zamboni!

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Saadaab might be talking about Dan Gutman’s book series. Which would be ironic because I literally looked this up last week when I remembered the books existed but for the life of me couldn’t remember what they were called. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_Card_Adventures

It’s been a bit since I’ve had some random Yankees thoughts. Here we go!

The Carlos Beltran broadcast experiment needs to end ASAP. More than anything, it’s sad. Great baseball mind but I don’t think he’s going to work as a color guy. He and Ryan Ruocco had less than zero chemistry this week.

Speaking of Ruocco, I miss his hair.

Last night was the first time I really felt like the IKF experiment might need to end after this year. I really like IKF but I need more from him with RISP.

I keep seeing media members suggest Brandon Drury as a trade candidate for the Yankees. Somehow I doubt that’ll happen. Sounded like he was very frustrated with the FO when he was here in 2018. http://riveraveblues.com/2018/06/brandon-drury-doesnt-belong-triple-yankees-dont-anywhere-else-put-172807/

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The Yankees should re-think their entire broadcasting program. Its really stale, the graphics and music are old, and the announcers are terrible.

I've been saying for years, why don't they have alternate broadcasters. ESPN is playing around with this with the Kay-Rod thing and the Manning bros. If you want to listen to John/Suzyn or Kay and co., great, but if you want to listen to Ruocco and CC or some younger fantasy-stats oriented announcers, you have that option. Obviously that would mean there would be a gambling sound stream, too, but I wouldn't have to listen to it.

I think this is the future of sports broadcasting, and nobody needs to re-think their broadccasts as badly as the Yankees do.

Honestly the Yankees are really bad at this and have been for decaces and should farm it out ot someone else.

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I love the music so disagree there. But starting to agree on announcers. I get the feeling Kay will really start reducing his games within the next couple years since he has young kids. Just checked and I think his YES contract is up either after next season or ‘24.

I think Maybin has high potential, although he’s doing studio work with Fox (?) so not sure if he’d prefer that over traveling for game duties. Cone and O’Neill are getting older, but O’Neill works fully remotely now because he’s unvaxxed. I’ve never been a huge Meredith “Balloons” Marokovits* fan.

I have no idea if he’d do it but I’d pursue Curtis Granderson. Very smart and well-spoken player and analyst.

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The balloons joke: https://youtu.be/RowrwbkZD3U

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You mean the sexual harassment?

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That’s nothing new for Carton. I stopped listening to Carton when he traded any semblance of meaningful sports talk for “WAG (Wife and Girlfriend) Wednesday.” It got ratings but seems like it lost the longtime FAN listeners who just want to hear actual analysis and random angry New Yorkers proposing terrible trades.

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Speaking of a lack of broadcasting chemistry I can't tell you the number of times I heard Ruocco throw a line out to O'Neill only to get the reply of "mhm" this past weekend. Also I thought it was pretty sad when, on Tuesday in Pittsburgh, they mentioned Oneil Cruz asking if Paul was working the series because he'd like to meet him. When they told him he was off he said, "I hope he's working the series when we come to New York." Ruocco quickly mentioned that they should organize a FaceTime call for them and moved on.

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I agree that the Gutman series is most likely the one--there are several that feature key Yankees.

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I know.

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Nice to see the Yankees and Pirates really leaning in to the whole 1960 World Series nostalgia thing with that 16-0 score.

(Yes, the Pirates won that series, but they were outscored 55-27 and their three losses were by the scores of 16-3, 10-0, and 12-0).

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#toosoon

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The note about it generally being a good sign when adversarial parties don’t get along has a hidden assumption: that they are playing a zero sum game fighting over the division of a fixed size pie. Sometimes true, but far less so than believed.

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Jul 7, 2022·edited Jul 7, 2022

Labor seems pretty eager to cut orf the Tories' Johnson. Nice marmot you got there, Stormer. Ah well. I guess the parade of scandals at Ten Downing had become boring, but I want to reassure all my British relatives on me wife's side you still got backandforthandbackandforthandbackandforthball to help you get a good night's sleep. We can only hope Craigster, who will doubtless attend a game or two when he gets over there in search of a recent Omicron variant to bring home, won't compromise his insomnia which makes our little community possible.

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There's a lot to enjoy in the Sale video, but low key, on the Twitter timeline of the reporter who posted is a chef's kiss Mark Gooden post. We've mentioned him before here, so IYKYK.

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Jul 7, 2022Liked by Craig Calcaterra

BTW, Craig, up by Bloomsbury, the Seven Stars is a historic pub worth a visit. Many of the London pubs now contract out their food choices giving it a generic feel, but Seven Stars still has a daily board of specials and the place is a great stop. The owner is a pip, known to be cantankerous, but we hit it off and got her meatball recipe!

Bonus: It's across from the courts so you might get to chat w a barrister and compare notes!

(Cross Keys another pub we've enjoyed, but closer to the shopping by Charing Cross Road.)

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Jul 7, 2022·edited Jul 7, 2022

I will note that at least where I am, politicians are held to some account for some things. Or else I couldn't count two former governors and one former congressman driven from offices over various forms of sexual misconduct. Though I am not entirely sure why this scandal and not all the others is possibly ending Johnson's run. It doesn't really make a lot of sense to me other than maybe "he looked the other way on teh gay, oh no!" At least I can tell you what Andy Cuomo did with total clarity.

Has anyone called this the Borexit yet? If not, I claim the copyright.

The Mets win another series, and now it's off to Miami. Again. They were just there the last weekend of June. And this will be the third series in four weekends. Such a weird scheduled this season.

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You must know that from 1981 to 2004, a married couple from near Pittsburgh, Holly and Henry Stephenson, did the whole thing more or less by hand. And I think they did a better job than MLB's Commodore 64 has been.

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I feel like there are extremely long stretches without an off day. Houston kicks off the back half of the season with a midweek double header that begins a run of 19 games without an off day.

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We put ex-governors in jail in Illinois. Most of our local guys are pretty good, even the GOP guys—-although that’s changing.

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Ugh, that comment from the GOP candidate for governor on Monday was miserable.

I think there is probably a wing of the state pen set up entirely for corrupt politicians, though given what happened to such people in the heyday of bootlegging, it must have a revolving door. (Reading a book about Capone, Ness, and Chicago. What a time it was.)

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Bailey is a terrible candidate. Downstate Illinois south of I-70 is as Red as can be.

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My mom (grew up in Chicago suburbs) always said people have no idea how long Illinois is north to south, and that southern Illinois had plantations like the typical slave states people think of.

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No plantations remotely, it’s too forested and filled with lakes/ponds. Sparsely populated.

I’m in central illinois. Flat as hell, but I like it.

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Must be just across the border. Right latitude though.

The last glaciation squished Illinois but good. Kansas gets all the flat earth attention but that entire region has no topography to speak of.

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The question isn't how Miguel Cabrera compares to other AL DH's to get an All-star spot, it's how he compares to his teammates, since some Tiger has to make the team.

At a glance, it doesn't appear that he fares too well in that competition either, with Eric Haase or Austin Meadows having stronger cases.

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Just looked at their team WAR. Gross! Skubal gets it by F-WAR, Fulmer by BR-WAR. Doing a quick glance at bottom dwellers, and I think the Tigers will easily have the worst All Star representative. Makes me wonder who the worst of all time is.

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Deleted b/c I couldn’t find it quickly. Was I thinking Mark Redman? He had a >5 era but at least was a SP.

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I wonder if that's because bad pitchers can easily be hidden and not actually get in the game, because it doesn't fit with their normal pitching routine or "we're saving them for possible late innings." It might be just an exhibition game but I'm sure everyone wants the best players to get more attention than guys who are bad but have a spot because someone needed to take it.

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I think it's a matter of pitchers having the most roster slots. Do you swap out the 3rd-best SS having a strong season, or the 16th pitcher?

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However as long as Chris is making money he doesn't care. There are some young guys developing and so on and so forth so he's fine with it.

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Was just going to say they will surely turn things around by taking high school pitchers early in the 1st round.

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They had one draft that was basically nothing but relief pitchers.

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Heh, that was a paraphrase of one of his quotes and one of my friends responded to it "tell fans you only showed up to Comerica when Cabrera was being recognized without telling fans you only showed up to Comerica when Cabrera was being recognized."

It seems so obvious that he couldn't recognize any of the "developing" guys without a stack of index cards as cheat sheets. 🙄

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I don't know if it has changed but as of a couple of seasons ago the Tigers still didn't have an analytics department. Like not even one intern who'd taken Stats 102.

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Does Skubal have a skruball? Asking for a friend.

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That SCOTUS thing from the RS is un fucking believable! How would the lower courts have felt about this at the time if they (theoretically) had to rule on it's legality?

The SCOTUS has no rules whatsoever! Thomas ruling to keep secret information detrimental to his wife should have gotten him kicked off the court. Alito & Thomas should have been forced to recuse themselves from any church/state cases and lacking that should be impeached.

How are arbiters of all laws not subject to any laws?

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"A government is a body of people usually notably ungoverned." - Shepherd Book, "Firefly"

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That Hallzapoppin clip was wild. I had thought dances with flips and throws were a modern development, but apparently not.

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