Little known fact: Quinquennium was to be the name of The Who's ultimately shelved follow-up album to Quadrophenia. Also, great band name. Hope we can look forward to seeing Quinquennium on the bill with Aortic Aneurysm at a future Wembley show.
Side note: as far as I know, the fact there is a war going on, that the US is deeply involved in as much as possible without sending troops, was not anything anyone was even discussing. But it's been a long time since foreign policy moved any needles.
It was Jackie Robinson. The went all the way back 70 years to the OG. The thing I hate the ,most about this whole issue, is that is never gets down to the issues. 1. MLB doesn't invest anything (spend money) in youth baseball. 2. Baseball culture - Unwritten rules - doing things the right way.
The demographics of various sports are also related to their ability to lift people out of poverty. MLB does well in Latin America because their camps and international free agency lift teenagers out of poverty. In the US, athletes generally have a much quicker path to wealth if they aim for the NBA or NFL, especially if they are more mid-tier talents. Add in your aforementioned barriers to entry (traveling youth baseball is expensive, baseball scholarships are scarcer in college than for other sports), and it's no wonder that domestic players come from largely white and middle-class (or higher) backgrounds.
Welcome back to Gwinnett Kolby Allard! The Bojangles by the park still has the best fast food chicken around but the area has grown. There is even a Top Golf just up the road.
The trade of Odorizzi has a similar note to the Paxton entry: the former just informed ATL that he was accepting his player option for $12m and change. The buyout was about $6 so his bet was that he would not get $7 on the open market. ATL is sending TEX about $10 for them to take Jake off the team’s roster.
Happy birthday to Jack Clark; please don’t buy yourself any more cars. Happy birthday to the late Norm Cash; in his honor I will cork my keyboard to improve my posting. Happy birthday to Keith Lockhart; he probably still has The Pictures! And happy birthday to me!
I want to say Paxton accepting his player option to stay in Boston was because he owed it to the team to pitch in 2023, but it’s probably as you say, he doesn’t think he’s healthy enough to get more than that from another team.
I have always been an optimist that these things just happen because a player wants to keep living there. Maybe optimist is the wrong word...perhaps living in a fantasy world?
Thank you, millennials and Gen Zers, thank you! Can we lower the voting age to 16? Though it would have been if more of you lived on Long Island, where two Democratic seats flipped red. Not terribly shocking since Lawn Guyland goes back and forth between conservative Dems and GOPers. But I miss the brief period when there wasn't a single Republican elected at the federal level in pretty much the whole tri-state area.
Is it obnoxious to say that God's victory gift to DeSantis is another hurricane? I mean, it's affecting millions of people, none of whom deserve to have their homes destroyed by a pernicious god. But the timing is interesting, if you believe in such things.
MLB doesn't have a diversity problem. It's only a problem if you care about such things.
Everyone knows Ohio's mortal enemy is Michigan. Seriously, I am used to Dems running weak campaigns by tacking to the right but this is a new one for me.
ETA: One item of note I saw. John Henry might be interested in buying the Washington Commanders. Maybe that is why he wants to sell Liverpool.
Man, did New York Dems really hash things up or what? I don’t want to take credit away from the illegal gerrymanders done by Ohio and Florida, but the run of incompetence from Andrew Cuomo to Kathy Hochul to Eric Adams to Sean Patrick Maloney will likely be decisive if the GOP takes the House. One estimate I saw had that group costing Dems 6 House seats. Current projections seem to have them in the 210-215 range.
I found an article on Politico - which I think is not a friend of the Dems - that said we did badly due to a combination of a really badly done gerrymandering scheme that backfired entirely because of how obvious it was and a failure to address The Crime. Though last I checked, Congress doesn't deal with crime. But Hochul etc never decided whether to be as loud about crime as Zeldin or to pivot away from crime towards things like abortion, and got sucked into debating whether crime is really that bad. And as much as I think it really isn't, it's not ever going to get you votes to tell people they are worried over nothing.
But all that said, NY State isn't that blue. Much of NYC is very blue and papers over how purple the rest of the state is. Upstate is white and conservative. Large chunks of Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island are white and conservative. And I think that the young progressives are running away from their racist parents into the city (or our of the state altogether), and skewing things. (Also, and to my chagrin, the growing Orthodox Jewish populations in the area have abandoned the Dems in favor of a Christian Nationalist party. The swathes of Brooklyn that are voting for the GOP reflect that.)
Also, Cuomo was not incompetent. He was a turd and deserved his fate, but he would have run a much better and much nastier campaign, and would have totally gone all in on Tough on Crime. The rest though? Yeah, no. (I wanted Tish James.)
Cuomo wasn’t necessarily incompetent, but he’s the one who propped up the IDC for years and put conservatives on the Court of Appeals. His personal incentives were not aligned with maximizing Democratic power in NYS.
His personal incentives were entirely about himself. The fact that for four months he was actually doing the scientifically best thing to address COVID seems to have been an accident.
YES. And it's his people that scrapped the NYC congressional map which would have put at least 2 or 3 more Dems in the US House. So if the GOP takes the house 219 to 216 or so... blame Cuomo.
Over the years, I have found it to be unfriendly to Dems a lot of the time beyond the content of the story. I lost trust in it during the Mueller Email Follies, when it treated every little thing like it was proof of something. I don't think it was intentionally bias, but it was definitely not good reporting.
Thanks for sharing. It was a good read. As someone who leans middle right on most things, I welcome any outlet that strives to be nonpartisan. After all, we certainly don't need another run of the mill, fully partisan "news" outlet that seems to exist solely as a means of controlling a narrative to fit their agenda. This of course is based upon Dopfner living up to his statements. That in and of itself seems virtually impossible for people to do in today's world.
I think the logic behind the physical ballot is that you're more likely to vote for you who intend to if you fill in the box yourself. It's maybe more reassuring to voters when they physically mark the ballot. People also might not always carefully look over their printed ballot.
It’s a supremely unnecessary process. In Georgia, we use touchscreen voting. It then prints out the physical ballot, which allows us to review our choices prior to feeding into the secure bin. The process described above violates the secrecy of the voter’s ballot if there’s any issue manually filling in the markings.
Your colleagues need to work on their wording. The first question can be interpreted two ways: did you vote in the election on Nov 8? Going further, it becomes clear they mean did you vote, not did you vote Tuesday. But it can be read the other way and you don’t see that until you get to another page.
Fair point; that's a common challenge in the field as voting moves away from Election Day - the "election" was still held on 11/8 because that's when the ballots were (started to be) counted. [And before you check me again, "pre-processing", which happens in lots of states, isn't counting ballots, it's just getting them ready to count on Election Day or after.] What they said is technically correct but collides with the popular notion of when the "election" happens.
I know. Checked the turnout numbers in my city and it was 59% which on one hand is impressive for a midterm election but on the other hand, considering what was at stake, is pathetic. It frustrates my mom to no end because she votes in every election so the ghost of a relative who grew up in Poland (Russian occupation) won't haunt her for not doing so.
Thanks for sharing the link. I was happy to take part. The short of it? In Indiana (at least where I live just south of Indy), the process was incredibly easy. No wait. Voted at a church just across the highway from work. In and out in 5 minutes.
I'm just puzzled why the photo is from that angle. I have a few friends on Facebook who have not learned to hold the camera just a smidge higher so I don't see up their nostrils, but this is presumably an official photo??
While the rest of the country may have beaten back the Red Wave, my rural county in Maryland got flooded by it. In a county that still has a slight Dem registration advantage, most GOP candidates won by 15%+. We have a County Executive-elect and several new Board of Ed members who posed for photos with a neo-Confederate white nationalist after he hosted a seminar locally last year, they didn't deny it, and 60%+ of my county's voters decided, "Yup, that's who I'm voting for!"
The Board of Ed people have sworn to eliminate any diversity or equity efforts to help students, and have labeled equity as "Marxism". Their phrase "unearned equity" in regard to students is 1) incredibly dumb and 2) heart-breaking to read. They think 6-year-olds have to earn the right to be treated fairly.
They're gonna do dumb things that will lead to the state of MD to withhold 25% of of state education funding. They're gonna make it impossible to simply exist as a gay or trans student in this county. And they're gonna dismantle the few resources we have in place to help those students who need it most.
So if the forces of good won where you are, celebrate and do not take it for granted. Because for many of us, the future just got even more bleak Tuesday night.
Actually, I was diagnosed with one last year. It's a birth defect in my case, so I've had it 54 years and they found it doing a cholesterol study of my heart last year. I aced the cholesterol study. No symptoms, and as long as it doesn't get any larger, no impact at all on my life.
Re: political thoughts four and five, what was that song lyric Trump liked to quote during his rallies? "You damn well knew I was a snake before you brought me in," right? Seems apt.
Craig, there’s a little bridge between your Fourth and Fifth Thoughts. DeSantis might show a move away from Trump the person. But a move to him is most definitely not a move from Trump’s poison. DeSantis sees that his opening is with white Christian nationalists, and there’s no sign that any successor is moving away from that.
At some point Democrats are going to learn that the "I'm a less crazy Republican" campaign doesn't work. Democratic voters are turned off by it. Current Republicans view crazy as a feature, not a bug. Nobody wins.
Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022Liked by Craig Calcaterra
Re: aortic aneurysms I will say only that this is the condition Jefferson Hope has in 'A Study in Scarlet' so as a person who is already planning on spending a significant amount of time in England, I hope that this is not part of a revenge plot against some wealthy Mormons.
EDIT: (had my Holmesian heart conditions mixed up in the first version of this, apologies)
Little known fact: Quinquennium was to be the name of The Who's ultimately shelved follow-up album to Quadrophenia. Also, great band name. Hope we can look forward to seeing Quinquennium on the bill with Aortic Aneurysm at a future Wembley show.
Rule 1 of being a Fox News Boomer is you'd rather screw yourself over than see the "Other" get any kind of benefit.
Side note: as far as I know, the fact there is a war going on, that the US is deeply involved in as much as possible without sending troops, was not anything anyone was even discussing. But it's been a long time since foreign policy moved any needles.
Hell, it's exactly the kind of thing to <i>provoke</i> an aortic aneurysm.
"Wait until you read who the New York Daily News gave column inches to in order to deny that Major League Baseball has a diversity problem."
Here in UK, the NYDN say "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country." Or fortunately, as the case may be.
I guessed Pete Rose, but it seems to be Alan Dershowitz. Presumably Ghislaine was unavailable for comment.
Long ago, I used to like Dershowitz. Or maybe I just liked Ron Silver.
It was Jackie Robinson. The went all the way back 70 years to the OG. The thing I hate the ,most about this whole issue, is that is never gets down to the issues. 1. MLB doesn't invest anything (spend money) in youth baseball. 2. Baseball culture - Unwritten rules - doing things the right way.
The demographics of various sports are also related to their ability to lift people out of poverty. MLB does well in Latin America because their camps and international free agency lift teenagers out of poverty. In the US, athletes generally have a much quicker path to wealth if they aim for the NBA or NFL, especially if they are more mid-tier talents. Add in your aforementioned barriers to entry (traveling youth baseball is expensive, baseball scholarships are scarcer in college than for other sports), and it's no wonder that domestic players come from largely white and middle-class (or higher) backgrounds.
Welcome back to Gwinnett Kolby Allard! The Bojangles by the park still has the best fast food chicken around but the area has grown. There is even a Top Golf just up the road.
The trade of Odorizzi has a similar note to the Paxton entry: the former just informed ATL that he was accepting his player option for $12m and change. The buyout was about $6 so his bet was that he would not get $7 on the open market. ATL is sending TEX about $10 for them to take Jake off the team’s roster.
Happy birthday to Jack Clark; please don’t buy yourself any more cars. Happy birthday to the late Norm Cash; in his honor I will cork my keyboard to improve my posting. Happy birthday to Keith Lockhart; he probably still has The Pictures! And happy birthday to me!
You buried the lede! Happy Birthday!
The Cup of Coffee Comment Crew wishes you a happy birthday, and presents you with this e-coupon for 10 percent off your next purchase of an EPL team!
Happy Birthday dlf. I hope you have a great day!
Happy Birthday, dlf! It's my wife's too!
I want to say Paxton accepting his player option to stay in Boston was because he owed it to the team to pitch in 2023, but it’s probably as you say, he doesn’t think he’s healthy enough to get more than that from another team.
I have always been an optimist that these things just happen because a player wants to keep living there. Maybe optimist is the wrong word...perhaps living in a fantasy world?
Thank you, millennials and Gen Zers, thank you! Can we lower the voting age to 16? Though it would have been if more of you lived on Long Island, where two Democratic seats flipped red. Not terribly shocking since Lawn Guyland goes back and forth between conservative Dems and GOPers. But I miss the brief period when there wasn't a single Republican elected at the federal level in pretty much the whole tri-state area.
Is it obnoxious to say that God's victory gift to DeSantis is another hurricane? I mean, it's affecting millions of people, none of whom deserve to have their homes destroyed by a pernicious god. But the timing is interesting, if you believe in such things.
MLB doesn't have a diversity problem. It's only a problem if you care about such things.
Everyone knows Ohio's mortal enemy is Michigan. Seriously, I am used to Dems running weak campaigns by tacking to the right but this is a new one for me.
ETA: One item of note I saw. John Henry might be interested in buying the Washington Commanders. Maybe that is why he wants to sell Liverpool.
Man, did New York Dems really hash things up or what? I don’t want to take credit away from the illegal gerrymanders done by Ohio and Florida, but the run of incompetence from Andrew Cuomo to Kathy Hochul to Eric Adams to Sean Patrick Maloney will likely be decisive if the GOP takes the House. One estimate I saw had that group costing Dems 6 House seats. Current projections seem to have them in the 210-215 range.
I found an article on Politico - which I think is not a friend of the Dems - that said we did badly due to a combination of a really badly done gerrymandering scheme that backfired entirely because of how obvious it was and a failure to address The Crime. Though last I checked, Congress doesn't deal with crime. But Hochul etc never decided whether to be as loud about crime as Zeldin or to pivot away from crime towards things like abortion, and got sucked into debating whether crime is really that bad. And as much as I think it really isn't, it's not ever going to get you votes to tell people they are worried over nothing.
But all that said, NY State isn't that blue. Much of NYC is very blue and papers over how purple the rest of the state is. Upstate is white and conservative. Large chunks of Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island are white and conservative. And I think that the young progressives are running away from their racist parents into the city (or our of the state altogether), and skewing things. (Also, and to my chagrin, the growing Orthodox Jewish populations in the area have abandoned the Dems in favor of a Christian Nationalist party. The swathes of Brooklyn that are voting for the GOP reflect that.)
Also, Cuomo was not incompetent. He was a turd and deserved his fate, but he would have run a much better and much nastier campaign, and would have totally gone all in on Tough on Crime. The rest though? Yeah, no. (I wanted Tish James.)
Cuomo wasn’t necessarily incompetent, but he’s the one who propped up the IDC for years and put conservatives on the Court of Appeals. His personal incentives were not aligned with maximizing Democratic power in NYS.
His personal incentives were entirely about himself. The fact that for four months he was actually doing the scientifically best thing to address COVID seems to have been an accident.
YES. And it's his people that scrapped the NYC congressional map which would have put at least 2 or 3 more Dems in the US House. So if the GOP takes the house 219 to 216 or so... blame Cuomo.
Politico leans left. https://www.thefactual.com/blog/is-politico-liberal/
But its new owner might not: https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2022/washington-post-profile-axel-springer-politico-mathias-dopfner/
Over the years, I have found it to be unfriendly to Dems a lot of the time beyond the content of the story. I lost trust in it during the Mueller Email Follies, when it treated every little thing like it was proof of something. I don't think it was intentionally bias, but it was definitely not good reporting.
Thanks for sharing. It was a good read. As someone who leans middle right on most things, I welcome any outlet that strives to be nonpartisan. After all, we certainly don't need another run of the mill, fully partisan "news" outlet that seems to exist solely as a means of controlling a narrative to fit their agenda. This of course is based upon Dopfner living up to his statements. That in and of itself seems virtually impossible for people to do in today's world.
Now I want Aortic Aneurysm merch in the CoC shop. I’d wear the hell out of that T-shirt.
PS Speaking of voting, my colleagues at the US Vote Foundation are fielding a short survey about peoples’ voting experience in 2022.
EDIT - LINK UPDATED - You can find it here: https://www.usvotefoundation.org/2022-Election-Survey
It's because a lot of people don't trust the machines -- they want a physical record of the votes for a possible recount and verification.
Making it taking longer to vote can be viewed as voter suppression. But it can also be viewed as being diligent, thorough and accurate.
Democracy is hard.
I think the logic behind the physical ballot is that you're more likely to vote for you who intend to if you fill in the box yourself. It's maybe more reassuring to voters when they physically mark the ballot. People also might not always carefully look over their printed ballot.
It’s a supremely unnecessary process. In Georgia, we use touchscreen voting. It then prints out the physical ballot, which allows us to review our choices prior to feeding into the secure bin. The process described above violates the secrecy of the voter’s ballot if there’s any issue manually filling in the markings.
Your colleagues need to work on their wording. The first question can be interpreted two ways: did you vote in the election on Nov 8? Going further, it becomes clear they mean did you vote, not did you vote Tuesday. But it can be read the other way and you don’t see that until you get to another page.
Fair point; that's a common challenge in the field as voting moves away from Election Day - the "election" was still held on 11/8 because that's when the ballots were (started to be) counted. [And before you check me again, "pre-processing", which happens in lots of states, isn't counting ballots, it's just getting them ready to count on Election Day or after.] What they said is technically correct but collides with the popular notion of when the "election" happens.
Well now you did it. Posting that link on here sent Craig's millions of subscribers there and broke the site.
If I had millions of subscribers I'd be writing this newsletter from Bali.
Monkey Forest Road, Bali
I had posted the link from Twitter which probably freaked someone out. It's fixed now.
I want to see a survey of people who DIDN'T vote.
*What the heck were you thinking????*
I know. Checked the turnout numbers in my city and it was 59% which on one hand is impressive for a midterm election but on the other hand, considering what was at stake, is pathetic. It frustrates my mom to no end because she votes in every election so the ghost of a relative who grew up in Poland (Russian occupation) won't haunt her for not doing so.
I saw Aortic Aneurysm open for Industrial Shithouse at Wembley.
It's been awhile, eh?
Thanks for sharing the link. I was happy to take part. The short of it? In Indiana (at least where I live just south of Indy), the process was incredibly easy. No wait. Voted at a church just across the highway from work. In and out in 5 minutes.
That Vance photo was a tad too harsh for my eyes this early in the day.
I'm just puzzled why the photo is from that angle. I have a few friends on Facebook who have not learned to hold the camera just a smidge higher so I don't see up their nostrils, but this is presumably an official photo??
Thinking of Lauren Boebert reading that tweet...as The Baseball Project so eloquently put it, you gotta fly high to fall this far.
While the rest of the country may have beaten back the Red Wave, my rural county in Maryland got flooded by it. In a county that still has a slight Dem registration advantage, most GOP candidates won by 15%+. We have a County Executive-elect and several new Board of Ed members who posed for photos with a neo-Confederate white nationalist after he hosted a seminar locally last year, they didn't deny it, and 60%+ of my county's voters decided, "Yup, that's who I'm voting for!"
The Board of Ed people have sworn to eliminate any diversity or equity efforts to help students, and have labeled equity as "Marxism". Their phrase "unearned equity" in regard to students is 1) incredibly dumb and 2) heart-breaking to read. They think 6-year-olds have to earn the right to be treated fairly.
They're gonna do dumb things that will lead to the state of MD to withhold 25% of of state education funding. They're gonna make it impossible to simply exist as a gay or trans student in this county. And they're gonna dismantle the few resources we have in place to help those students who need it most.
So if the forces of good won where you are, celebrate and do not take it for granted. Because for many of us, the future just got even more bleak Tuesday night.
Is this the Eastern Shore, or deep southern pro-secession Maryland that JW Booth tried to escape to?
Aortic Aneurysm is the name of my next band.
Actually, I was diagnosed with one last year. It's a birth defect in my case, so I've had it 54 years and they found it doing a cholesterol study of my heart last year. I aced the cholesterol study. No symptoms, and as long as it doesn't get any larger, no impact at all on my life.
Re: political thoughts four and five, what was that song lyric Trump liked to quote during his rallies? "You damn well knew I was a snake before you brought me in," right? Seems apt.
Craig, there’s a little bridge between your Fourth and Fifth Thoughts. DeSantis might show a move away from Trump the person. But a move to him is most definitely not a move from Trump’s poison. DeSantis sees that his opening is with white Christian nationalists, and there’s no sign that any successor is moving away from that.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ron-desantis-new-ad-ridiculous-dangerous-rcna55773
At some point Democrats are going to learn that the "I'm a less crazy Republican" campaign doesn't work. Democratic voters are turned off by it. Current Republicans view crazy as a feature, not a bug. Nobody wins.
"At some point Democrats are going to learn..."
[citation needed]
Re: aortic aneurysms I will say only that this is the condition Jefferson Hope has in 'A Study in Scarlet' so as a person who is already planning on spending a significant amount of time in England, I hope that this is not part of a revenge plot against some wealthy Mormons.
EDIT: (had my Holmesian heart conditions mixed up in the first version of this, apologies)