My family went through Breezewood from NoVA at least twice a year growing up on our way to my grandparents’ place in Massillon, Ohio… with a gazillion fast food places, I thought it was the greatest place I’d ever seen as a kid. (The magic faded considerably as I got older and had to drive through myself.)
Re: Mike Marshall - when JIM BOUTON thinks you’re too full of yourself, it’s time to check up. (At least his elevated sense of self worth was well justified.)
The Nats absolutely STOLE last night’s game. Brad Hand got a questionable 9th inning 3-0 strike call on Acuna Jr. that kept him from bringing Freddie Freeman to the plate as the tying run. Not sorry, though.
Us accountants have a word for when a client doesn't have support for their twelve $6 "cups of coffee" for the year.
"Immaterial."
Don't write off newsletter subscriptions on your taxes, but also, accountants tend to be baseball fans.
Accountants also tend to be middle-aged white guys, so that probably has something to do with it, and the stereotype will be less true as the (mostly female, still very white) younger generation moves up, but even if the profession eventually turns against the sport, you'll have a hell of a time finding someone zealous enough to run down $65 of expenses in the middle of busy season
Ah, Breezewood, where I-70 merges with I-76 (the PA Turnpike) to become one and the same for a while, before splitting into two again near New Stanton, east of Pittsburgh.
You may look at that photo and think, "Well of course a junction of two Interstates would mean that all kinds of commercial outlets would spring up, but I'd just drive on by." And you'd be correct if you were already on the Turnpike. However, if you were on I-70, you'd have no other choice but to try to navigate Hell's Half Mile, because I-70 physically ends at that road there (US 30) before picking up again at that overpass.
“MLB would like to commemorate the passing of Mike Marshall with an NFT of his record-breaking 106th appearance in 1974. After all, what better person to symbolize durability and long-term success than Mike Marshall.”
Everyone keeps mocking the price of food and alcohol on that Vegas receipt, but I’m more struck by the “Venue Fee” of $800.45. Not the $800 part, but the 45 cents part. Everything else is a nice round number, and somehow the table/room fee has an extra 45 cents tacked on. Is there like an hourly price, where they actually break it down to the minute?
Is that how those charges are normally done? Surprised it doesn’t specify that on the bill then, like they do with the gratuity. (And speaking of, can’t give the staff an auto 20%? Geez....)
Can't say on how things are normally done in Vegas. I've only been there once, and unlike Craig, I didn't partake of bottle service. I just split kings once at the blackjack table because I was feeling lucky. Turned out I wasn't lucky, and won one of the two hands while losing the other.
I guess I am the only Vegas resident, so I'll have to step in. The venue fee is a new fee that clubs are charging because someone in hotel revenue management took look at resort fees and thought, we could put an random fee on the clubs just like the rooms. So like the resort fee, they take the view of, if someone asks we can explain it, but do everything possible to make sure no one asks. It what antitrust lawyers call abuse of monopoly power and antitrust defense lawyers like myself call a steady paycheck. Between industry consolidation and price fixing, Vegas is a surprisingly good antitrust town. And locals generally get a steep discount.
I love Las Vegas. One reason is things like this. I would imagine with a casino card you could likely get more comps from someone after a bill like that.
Craig, I've been covering the Nationals minors since 2009. Can confirm that treatment like this is SSDY, but only made worse by the banning of host families.
Correct. COVID-19 protocols. But the real hurt is the food. Most host families feed the players as if they were their sons, so they only have to deal with crappy food on the road.
The point is that it’s absurd players have to rely on host families at all, when parent clubs could easily set up a dorm-style setup for players, which wouldn’t even cost too much
Free? It’s even worse than that. Those families are usually season ticket holders, so they’re actually paying to have the right to house & feed players. God forbid the teams at least compensate the host families with a food stipend or something...
The lack of screwball pitchers has been attributed to that pitch being considered hard on the arm, but Mike Marshall seems to be an argument against that theory. Though Marshall could do other things no one else has been able to do too, so maybe he's just an outlier at everything.
I'm actually surprised Trump's blog was a failure, with the considerable percentage of the population who, inexplicably, think he is great and the huge number of Twitter followers he had. Sure, I'd expect it to go down now that he's no longer president. But if even 1/4 of those Twitter followers had stayed with him, it still would have been a big number.
One thing I've learned in all my years as an Internet person is that even the slightest barriers to interaction become game-changers. If you redesign a website even slightly, there is disruption as people won't want to bother with it. If you add in an extra step such as one more click, registration, or -- especially -- a paywall, the falloff in traffic is shockingly big. That's one thing NBC did not understand, despite me pleading with them to understand it, when they embarked on various redesigns.
If you can just click an app and, magically, St. Trump's words appear before you, you may very well be willing to engage. If you have to navigate to a website to see it, a ton of people won't bother. And that's before one appreciates how much clunkier it is to navigate to websites, as opposed to using an app, on a cell phone.
The passion for Trump is big in that world he inhabits. But like anything else that is mostly an online phenomenon, it doesn't run deep. At least not as deep as people assume. And not deep enough to overcome the worst thing in so many white, conservative people's lives: mild inconvenience.
What's interesting though, is why no one on the right has been able to fill the Trump vacuum. They're all anti-anti-racist, happy to do the same culture war stuff, but the base doesn't care. No other elected politician, not even pundits like Ann Coulter or Tucker Carlson, who are far more overtly racist than Trump ever was.
He's a loser though. Even his craziest racists have to see Biden is President. It's always been the question, why not have a racist authoritarian strongman, but smart and disciplined? Why is Trump so special to these guys? There are dozens of racists and dozens of crazy people, so why Trump? Why not a smart, disciplined, fascist bigot?
Same reason why all of those people who hate New Yorkers jumped to support the most New Yorker of them all. Why all of those people who have strong religious views jumped to support a twice-divorced known adulterer who pretty much uses the list of deadly sins as a guidebook.
He didn't just tell them what they wanted to hear; he said, "TELL me what you want to hear and I'll say it back," and since they wanted someone--anyone--to listen to them they sold their souls.
My father has been a Republican for as long as I can remember. He's over 65 and has zero online presence. Nothing that happens Online is of any concern to him. He's not a raving "Stop the Steal" lunatic and has no interest in guns. He was a Trump voter, however, mostly because of the R next to his name on the ballot. But he was never going to engage with Trump content beyond official releases / whatever is parroted on Fox News. I suspect that a good number of Trump voters are of a similar mindset.
I completely agree. You just described my Mom who couldn't speak to any policy issue but loved her Fox News and anyone with an (R) in their title. Had a crush on Bush and kept a photo of him stuck on the fridge (it was a photo of George and Laura, but she folded it to hide Laura).
Part of it is the online echo chamber that we build for ourselves. You follow Trump's tweets, so to all the other right wingers, you egg each other on, you feed off each other's energy and gain status by being the most devoted, the most extreme, the first to do something big.
When you don't have that community, it's just you in a room reading a screen, you lose that.
Like Craig said, there's a barrier to effort. Besides, part of what drove Trump's initial rise was the haters as well as the fans could engage. We'd all just share it because it was so outrageous.
It's not just an online phenomenon ... I ran my college's newspaper. You could say anything you wanted about the most controversial topic. You'd get to a 3 on the outrage meter.
I work in social media and one of the big things that is hammered over and over again is people don't leave the platform. If you have good content, they'll engage by replying or sharing or whatever, but they're not clicking that link, which is how it became so easy for disinformation campaigns to spread. Additionally, part of what made his engagement so high on Twitter and Facebook is people could engage with his content while also liking photos of their grandniece's junior high graduation. It was one-stop shopping.
Regarding reining in pitchers, Baseball Prospectus published something yesterday at Defector that called for limiting the active roster to no more than 12 pitchers. The theory is that fewer pitchers means fewer opportunities for relievers to take a day off meaning less recovery time meaning that they'd have to not go max effort on every pitch:
"Inevitably, injuries will happen and they will be blamed on adjusted workloads and roster caps. This of course ignores that injuries are occurring at a record pace right now, with no caps, large staffs, and consistent off days for relievers. This is not an indifference to those who are injured, but an acceptance of the risks of pitching, seemingly regardless of the frequency, and the hope that with pitchers throwing at less than 100% effort on each offering, more good health is in store."
Speaking of commie credentials being imperfect, couldn't finishing a newsletter and then immediately publishing it be considered "just-in-time" manufacturing?
I bought a couple from a food truck at a brewpub Sunday for $5. Tried to chat w/the guy in my fractured schoolboy Spanish about if street tacos should come w/lime slices and radishes or not (he was very patient). When I opened the little box later, saw he had thrown in a third one, no cost.
Good news in MetsLand: Francisco Lindor has been hitting!
Tried to watch the Mets game on YouTube, since lacking cable I never get to see Mets games. Dear lord, those announcers! How can I be expected to go from Gary, Ron, and the 'Stache to that?
There's still hockey on, so I've mostly skipped Sunday Night Baseball. But, somehow (I blame the interface for my Roku), I somehow happened on the Statcast version of the broadcast. I don't know if they do it every Sunday. But it was done by broadcasters who seemed to actually like each other.
You know, you’re pretty safe when you post about it this late - almost no one will see your confession 🙂
"Cub's reliever George Frazier" ... Yankees fans triggered. #1981
My family went through Breezewood from NoVA at least twice a year growing up on our way to my grandparents’ place in Massillon, Ohio… with a gazillion fast food places, I thought it was the greatest place I’d ever seen as a kid. (The magic faded considerably as I got older and had to drive through myself.)
Re: Mike Marshall - when JIM BOUTON thinks you’re too full of yourself, it’s time to check up. (At least his elevated sense of self worth was well justified.)
The Nats absolutely STOLE last night’s game. Brad Hand got a questionable 9th inning 3-0 strike call on Acuna Jr. that kept him from bringing Freddie Freeman to the plate as the tying run. Not sorry, though.
I'm OK with the Nats stealing a win in this case. Just don't make a habit of it.
- A Mets fan
If you watched the Nats as often as I do, you'd know they won't make it a habit. Sometimes bumpy roads lead to complete breakdowns.
Us accountants have a word for when a client doesn't have support for their twelve $6 "cups of coffee" for the year.
"Immaterial."
Don't write off newsletter subscriptions on your taxes, but also, accountants tend to be baseball fans.
Accountants also tend to be middle-aged white guys, so that probably has something to do with it, and the stereotype will be less true as the (mostly female, still very white) younger generation moves up, but even if the profession eventually turns against the sport, you'll have a hell of a time finding someone zealous enough to run down $65 of expenses in the middle of busy season
Also, speaking of baseball, I used to work with someone who pitched for one of those 1800s baseball leagues. That was pretty cool
Ah, Breezewood, where I-70 merges with I-76 (the PA Turnpike) to become one and the same for a while, before splitting into two again near New Stanton, east of Pittsburgh.
You may look at that photo and think, "Well of course a junction of two Interstates would mean that all kinds of commercial outlets would spring up, but I'd just drive on by." And you'd be correct if you were already on the Turnpike. However, if you were on I-70, you'd have no other choice but to try to navigate Hell's Half Mile, because I-70 physically ends at that road there (US 30) before picking up again at that overpass.
A true marvel of modern American design, that...
"Merges" is doing multiple semis' worth of heavy lifting there.
From the Desk of Rob Manfred:
“MLB would like to commemorate the passing of Mike Marshall with an NFT of his record-breaking 106th appearance in 1974. After all, what better person to symbolize durability and long-term success than Mike Marshall.”
Everyone keeps mocking the price of food and alcohol on that Vegas receipt, but I’m more struck by the “Venue Fee” of $800.45. Not the $800 part, but the 45 cents part. Everything else is a nice round number, and somehow the table/room fee has an extra 45 cents tacked on. Is there like an hourly price, where they actually break it down to the minute?
It appears to be 12.75% of the $6278 total before tax and tip
Is that how those charges are normally done? Surprised it doesn’t specify that on the bill then, like they do with the gratuity. (And speaking of, can’t give the staff an auto 20%? Geez....)
Can't say on how things are normally done in Vegas. I've only been there once, and unlike Craig, I didn't partake of bottle service. I just split kings once at the blackjack table because I was feeling lucky. Turned out I wasn't lucky, and won one of the two hands while losing the other.
And the guy next to you who would've gotten your cards probably wanted to murder you for, in the parlance of blackjack players, "fucking the deck."
That is pretty much what happened, although I was sitting in last position at the table, so wasn't too bad.
Dealer did call out "Splitting Kings" to the pit boss, though.
whoa whoa whoa. sounds like someone enjoys a bit of the ol' lucky time. A man who likes to hazard a wager. A gambling fanatic!
I guess I am the only Vegas resident, so I'll have to step in. The venue fee is a new fee that clubs are charging because someone in hotel revenue management took look at resort fees and thought, we could put an random fee on the clubs just like the rooms. So like the resort fee, they take the view of, if someone asks we can explain it, but do everything possible to make sure no one asks. It what antitrust lawyers call abuse of monopoly power and antitrust defense lawyers like myself call a steady paycheck. Between industry consolidation and price fixing, Vegas is a surprisingly good antitrust town. And locals generally get a steep discount.
I love Las Vegas. One reason is things like this. I would imagine with a casino card you could likely get more comps from someone after a bill like that.
Craig, I've been covering the Nationals minors since 2009. Can confirm that treatment like this is SSDY, but only made worse by the banning of host families.
Banning host families? As in players aren't allowed to stay with people for free? That's awful.
Correct. COVID-19 protocols. But the real hurt is the food. Most host families feed the players as if they were their sons, so they only have to deal with crappy food on the road.
The point is that it’s absurd players have to rely on host families at all, when parent clubs could easily set up a dorm-style setup for players, which wouldn’t even cost too much
But that would defeat Herr Manfred's mission/vision of foisting as much of the developmental costs onto the affiliates and taxpayers as possible!
Free? It’s even worse than that. Those families are usually season ticket holders, so they’re actually paying to have the right to house & feed players. God forbid the teams at least compensate the host families with a food stipend or something...
The lack of screwball pitchers has been attributed to that pitch being considered hard on the arm, but Mike Marshall seems to be an argument against that theory. Though Marshall could do other things no one else has been able to do too, so maybe he's just an outlier at everything.
I'm actually surprised Trump's blog was a failure, with the considerable percentage of the population who, inexplicably, think he is great and the huge number of Twitter followers he had. Sure, I'd expect it to go down now that he's no longer president. But if even 1/4 of those Twitter followers had stayed with him, it still would have been a big number.
One thing I've learned in all my years as an Internet person is that even the slightest barriers to interaction become game-changers. If you redesign a website even slightly, there is disruption as people won't want to bother with it. If you add in an extra step such as one more click, registration, or -- especially -- a paywall, the falloff in traffic is shockingly big. That's one thing NBC did not understand, despite me pleading with them to understand it, when they embarked on various redesigns.
If you can just click an app and, magically, St. Trump's words appear before you, you may very well be willing to engage. If you have to navigate to a website to see it, a ton of people won't bother. And that's before one appreciates how much clunkier it is to navigate to websites, as opposed to using an app, on a cell phone.
The passion for Trump is big in that world he inhabits. But like anything else that is mostly an online phenomenon, it doesn't run deep. At least not as deep as people assume. And not deep enough to overcome the worst thing in so many white, conservative people's lives: mild inconvenience.
What's interesting though, is why no one on the right has been able to fill the Trump vacuum. They're all anti-anti-racist, happy to do the same culture war stuff, but the base doesn't care. No other elected politician, not even pundits like Ann Coulter or Tucker Carlson, who are far more overtly racist than Trump ever was.
He's a loser though. Even his craziest racists have to see Biden is President. It's always been the question, why not have a racist authoritarian strongman, but smart and disciplined? Why is Trump so special to these guys? There are dozens of racists and dozens of crazy people, so why Trump? Why not a smart, disciplined, fascist bigot?
Same reason why all of those people who hate New Yorkers jumped to support the most New Yorker of them all. Why all of those people who have strong religious views jumped to support a twice-divorced known adulterer who pretty much uses the list of deadly sins as a guidebook.
He didn't just tell them what they wanted to hear; he said, "TELL me what you want to hear and I'll say it back," and since they wanted someone--anyone--to listen to them they sold their souls.
I don't know that the passion for Trump doesn't run deep considering how many of them were willing to travel to DC and storm the Capitol on his word.
My father has been a Republican for as long as I can remember. He's over 65 and has zero online presence. Nothing that happens Online is of any concern to him. He's not a raving "Stop the Steal" lunatic and has no interest in guns. He was a Trump voter, however, mostly because of the R next to his name on the ballot. But he was never going to engage with Trump content beyond official releases / whatever is parroted on Fox News. I suspect that a good number of Trump voters are of a similar mindset.
I completely agree. You just described my Mom who couldn't speak to any policy issue but loved her Fox News and anyone with an (R) in their title. Had a crush on Bush and kept a photo of him stuck on the fridge (it was a photo of George and Laura, but she folded it to hide Laura).
Part of it is the online echo chamber that we build for ourselves. You follow Trump's tweets, so to all the other right wingers, you egg each other on, you feed off each other's energy and gain status by being the most devoted, the most extreme, the first to do something big.
When you don't have that community, it's just you in a room reading a screen, you lose that.
Let's be honest, he never had any desire to engage with his voters.
Like Craig said, there's a barrier to effort. Besides, part of what drove Trump's initial rise was the haters as well as the fans could engage. We'd all just share it because it was so outrageous.
I saw someone say that it only offered "like" heart similar to the ones here. Cannot confirm, because I never went there myself.
It's not just an online phenomenon ... I ran my college's newspaper. You could say anything you wanted about the most controversial topic. You'd get to a 3 on the outrage meter.
But you move the crossword? Shit went bonkers.
What school!? I "ran" the Brooklyn College Kingsman! lol
Little school back in Austin. You've probably never heard of it. University of Texas.
we need to "talk" lol
Of course. What else are students supposed to do while they are in class?
I work in social media and one of the big things that is hammered over and over again is people don't leave the platform. If you have good content, they'll engage by replying or sharing or whatever, but they're not clicking that link, which is how it became so easy for disinformation campaigns to spread. Additionally, part of what made his engagement so high on Twitter and Facebook is people could engage with his content while also liking photos of their grandniece's junior high graduation. It was one-stop shopping.
Regarding reining in pitchers, Baseball Prospectus published something yesterday at Defector that called for limiting the active roster to no more than 12 pitchers. The theory is that fewer pitchers means fewer opportunities for relievers to take a day off meaning less recovery time meaning that they'd have to not go max effort on every pitch:
https://defector.com/we-need-a-restrictor-plate-for-pitchers/
Worth a read, if it's not behind a paywall for you. It's also published at BBPro, I believe.
Only results in higher pitcher injury rate and more up and down of minor leaguers into mlb. No way they will not pitch at max effort 😣
The article addresses this:
"Inevitably, injuries will happen and they will be blamed on adjusted workloads and roster caps. This of course ignores that injuries are occurring at a record pace right now, with no caps, large staffs, and consistent off days for relievers. This is not an indifference to those who are injured, but an acceptance of the risks of pitching, seemingly regardless of the frequency, and the hope that with pitchers throwing at less than 100% effort on each offering, more good health is in store."
Of course, hope is not a strategy, so...
Speaking of commie credentials being imperfect, couldn't finishing a newsletter and then immediately publishing it be considered "just-in-time" manufacturing?
I wrote like 75% of it yesterday, though, and kept it in a warehouse. And I pay my employee a living wage and only rarely outsource.
I'm a great corporate citizen!
$60 "street" tacos! Let me dig out my wallet and pay the street vendor..
I bought a couple from a food truck at a brewpub Sunday for $5. Tried to chat w/the guy in my fractured schoolboy Spanish about if street tacos should come w/lime slices and radishes or not (he was very patient). When I opened the little box later, saw he had thrown in a third one, no cost.
Our planet is also low on sand to create concrete and glass. There are mafia-types around the world which are making huge profits.
Are you saying the Ndranghetti have ties to rural Western Wisconsin, where so many sand mines have flourished in the past couple decades? Madonn'!!
Link of the day: The relationship between the Nats and MASN is awful, which is why FP Santagelo hasn't been fired yet.
https://awfulannouncing.com/mlb/fp-santangelo-future-booth-nationals-masn-sexual-misconduct-allegations.html
Good news in MetsLand: Francisco Lindor has been hitting!
Tried to watch the Mets game on YouTube, since lacking cable I never get to see Mets games. Dear lord, those announcers! How can I be expected to go from Gary, Ron, and the 'Stache to that?
Eh, ESPN Sunday Night Baseball announcing has lowered the bar so much that anything else seems acceptable. The YouTube guys didn't overly bother me.
There's still hockey on, so I've mostly skipped Sunday Night Baseball. But, somehow (I blame the interface for my Roku), I somehow happened on the Statcast version of the broadcast. I don't know if they do it every Sunday. But it was done by broadcasters who seemed to actually like each other.
I saw my commie credentials open for Industrial Shithouse at Wembley.
Loud and occasionally annoying but entertaining nonetheless.