That assumes they actually care if the kids are healthy and survive to adulthood. If they just want women preggers or at home and out of the workforce so men don't have any competition, then it makes sense to push them into being brood mares, homeschooling, and avoiding vaccines so the kids don't live long enough to get old and sick and cost money for medical care. They can work for a few years until the effects of multiple infections finally kick in and then they leave the workforce and keel over in a hurry.
Also I suspect they don't worry too much about women trying to get abortions, because if they are caught they can be convicted felons and lose their voting rights which is fantastic to a party that wants fewer voters.
In my school days, if a kid had a problem in class, the biggest fear was the kid having to face the parents when you got home from school. Now the biggest fear is the TEACHER having to face the parents...
my dad taught for over 30 years, and my mom trained to teach but changed her mind after student teaching. my brother teaches, and i'd have taught except that when i realized i might be interested, the amount of $$ i'd make was so little it'd have been a huge hit and would produce an inability to pay my bills. which is a shame, it shouldn't be that way. I'd also have to go back and do more undergrad work and then eventually grad degree. the system is broken.
My wife used to teach public school for about 5 years when we lived in Bethlehem, PA, then stepped down to raise our kids, who are now in 6th and 8th grades, at a private school, so she took a job teaching there to help offset the cost. It doesn't pay much - like, she could make more literally almost anywhere - but she gets to be where the kids are and it gives us about a 50% discount on tuition, which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Anyway, she immediately noticed the difference in the kids. They don't know how to sit still in class, don't show respect for the teacher by default like they used to even just 10-15 years ago. They spend their early years being babysat by YouTube and Netflix and don't know what it is to deal with an authority figure. My wife as it happens is excellent at classroom management, so she got them to toe the line rather quickly. Her two teaching partners in 1st grade...not so much. :-/
In this particular case, she also noted a huge difference in the parents, namely, that they actually give a shit. They're paying for their kids to go here, so they care what happens to them. In public school she would regularly have parents fail to show at teacher conferences, or show up high, or simply reject/ignore her assessment of why their kid was struggling and how to help him.
To be sure, some parents will do the latter anyway (one of her partners got emailed by an irate parent who told her not to raise her voice to her son. "We don't yell at him at home and we will not have you yelling at him there." or some such. Umm, maybe if you'd put him in his place once in a while at home he wouldn't be such a royal pain in the ass at school, eh?
I've had people tell me that I might be a good teacher because I've tutored before and enjoyed it. But I'd make less than I do now, have more stress and definitely worse hours, and my chances of getting shot would be higher (a hydrology professor in Arizona was killed by a student yesterday so that's on my mind). On the other hand, since I'd be teaching evolution as the foundation of biology I'd be fired within days. 😄
I also HATE HATE HATE that they continue to include the World Series with the playoffs to make a "Post Season". The World Series is older than the Super Bowl, older than the NBA and whatever they call their championship. Heck, the World Series is almost older than basketball itself! The Stanley Cup is older by a few years than the World Series - but it wasn't part of the NHL until that league brought it over when they began in 1917; so you can have a really good argument as to whether or not the NHL championship predates the World Series.
For over 65 years, there were no playoffs - just the World Series. For about 25 years after the expansion produced divisional play, there was only one round of playoff games. MLB is allowing all these extra rounds of playoffs to diminish the special nature of the World Series. The least they can do is stop lumping it in as another set of "post season" games.
Counterpoint: Drama is great, but the season is too long and these guys are so taxed. Would I have liked to see that 163rd game? Sure. But they've both made the playoffs and it was just for positioning. It might be different if there was a team fighting to get in. The playoffs are way too stretched out as it is, there are going to be a bucketful of games to take us into November and I would rather see games than injuries.
Given who is running for office as a Trumpist, being qualified for a job is clearly not important. Though it's interesting how few veterans are running (veterans of wars, I mean, not veterans of the NFL).
Tomorrow we can fret about facing Yu Darvish. Today, I am going to celebrate the Mets' third 100 win season, celebrate Jeff McNeil's batting title, celebrate a season where the good far outweighed the bad. And I will not read one more "how a 101 win team sucks because it didn't win 102 games" article. Let's Go Mets!
Thinking about the teams that didn't make the playoffs. Of them, you can clearly say the O's had a good year, and the D-Backs and maybe the Cubs didn't have good years but had the sort of years you can build on. And some of the lesser teams had things to make them think things could get better - the Marlins seem to have a pretty good rotation, the Pirates might have a future star (till they trade him). But man, a lot of teams were just awful, weren't they? And a lot of teams enter the offseason having gone the wrong direction. It was, to a large degree, a rough regular season for a lot of fans. But isn't it always?
Congratulations to McNeil. I did not realize the Mets had only one other batting title in their entire history. Jose Reyes in 2011 and that's it. apparently.
I guess it's a little skewed since Colorado came into the league in 1993 and won 11 of them in the span of about 25 years, though they have not won one in 5 years, which ties their longest stretch. That probably speaks more to the lousy job that Rockies' management is doing of putting a team on the field than it does to anything else. But anyway, good for the Mets!
Why is nobody talking about Alonso's MLB leading 131 RBI, a number he tied with Aaron Judge? The only other Met to lead the NL was Howard Johnson with 117.
And Alonso did it with fewer home runs! (It is of course a reflection on the rest of the team and not Judge. Not his fault no one was on base so often, and that he was the best choice to be leadoff hitter. Which is nuts to me, since I still remember the age of Rickey.)
This is why Judge is the MVP of that team. The next best OPS on the Yankees is almost 300 points less (1.111 to Anthony Rizzo's 0.817), which is astounding.
As a Red Sox fan, it would be worth paying 38-year old Judge $40 million to hit .255 with 18 homers just to see the apoplexy emanating from New York the day the contract is announced.
He was really on a torrid pace there for a while, with 62 RBI in his first 57 games, but then he had "only" 64 more in the last 100 games he played. Still good, but also a good object lesson for why projecting a team's or players stats out for the season based on two-months work is a fool's errand.
How about that Wil Myers moment yesterday? I think Mud spoke for all of us Padres fans when he said “man, I love that kid!” Definitely some crying in baseball yesterday.
I'm in the middle of a huge deadline at work, and so I was catching up last night on all of that. I was already in a fragile mental state from a ragged day, so when I hit play on a clip of the crowd going wild for him, I absolutely lost it.
Thanks for another season of ATH. The tone is just about pitch perfect for me: quick recap that takes neither the game nor itself too seriously.
I am a fan of the long season. The ebbs and flows of 162. The new faces trying to break through, the grizzled vets hanging on for one more year in the sun, the brilliant stars doing the impossible. A beer in the bleachers and chatting with your neighbor. An evening with the game playing in the background as I wash dishes.
I understand why we want more focus on the post season. But for me, baseball is not supposed to be life and death with every pitch imbued with urgency.
So I’ll cheer on “my” team next week. But I’m also already looking forward to next spring when ATH returns.
Yes, I love the regular season so much and put a lot of stock into five straight division titles (not to mention 14). My wife and I initially connected on Twitter because of Braves fandom and now we watch close to 162 games/year together. It’s now usually on mute with music playing because we both cannot stand MLB broadcasting pretty much across the board, but we watch. Craig, does that count as rethinking fandom?
Given the systematic defunding of public education since the late 1970s -- much of which explains voting patterns since 1980 or so -- the idea of putting untrained people in front of a classroom is a natural progression.
I agree with everything Craig said but feel the 'absurd' comparison he offered misses the point: They would remove professional credentials from all of the things listed as well, given the chance. Republicans like Rand Paul (and his father) have been fighting to remove requirements for accreditation across a broad swath of professions for decades, and in some states they have succeeded.
This is a war against consumer protection and expertise, teachers are one of the primary targets, but so are doctors, scientists, electricians, plumbers and virtually every other skilled trade or practice.
Also any environmental or consumer protection regulations. Their idea of "freedom" is a few rich dudes who can afford to have personal air filters and water treatment systems have safe air and water and food and do whatever they want, while everyone else takes our chances and suffers. 😠
Agreed on pretty much everything you said about the GOP and public education, with one exception. They do care very much that the person at the front of the classroom isn’t LGBTQ+ or accepting of LGBTQ+ students, a real scientist who will talk about evolution or the Big Bang or the value of vaccinations as accepted facts, or anyone who they think comes off as too liberal. Part of the reason they chose veterans and not, say, retired scientists, was because they perceive veterans (especially those who would go along with this cockamamie scheme) as aligned with them ideologically.
I agree 100% with your unpopular take. I think the veil has been lifted on any "public safety" justification for using excessive force on folks who charge the field. It's simple American bloodlust - we love to see people get decked, especially people who interrupt our entertainment. It's sad.
On regular vs. postseason ball - "both/and." Everything you say about regular season baseball is true. But postseason ball is super fun also! I'm interested to see if the new reliever rules can speed things up a bit. Probably not, because pitchers will still take like 2 min in between throws to execute their stuff correctly. But as long as you know it'll be a bit long, it's great.
I lost the screenshot to the sands of time, but I was looking for Nuggets on Amazon probably 15 years ago, searched 'Nuggets' and got the album but also a 'were you searching for [n-words]' suggestion. I sent it as a screenshot to Amazon but it actually stayed that way for a few years.
I love the weird and random ways songs like that spread. When I was a kid, our local classic rock station ("The X") ran a live broadcast of a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show, which my brothers and I dutifully taped and played a million times. They did "Psychotic Reaction" (w/ drummer Stan Lynch on the vocals), and it was fantastic. I've never heard the original until now.
That live version of "Psychotic Reaction" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sung by Stan was a b-side from one of their singles in the 80s. I can never remember which one. It was also included in the Playback box set that Petty/Heartbreakers put out some 20+ years ago, which is one of my favorite things I own. Along with the Nuggets box set; both of the Nuggets box sets actually.
I wholeheartedly agree with your 'unpopular' opinion, and suspect that it is not quite as unpopular on a whole as internet commenters would like to think.
Also, thank you for your kind and rational words regarding teachers. It's been a particularly rough few years for us.
i, for one, welcome our slam-to-the-ground overlords. if you run out there, you are going to get slammed to the ground, because you are a potential terrorist. that's the safe move.
I'm going to go with a bit of Hanlon's Razor here, as opposed to your take that there are nefarious reasons behind it, and say that a lot of the reason they're pushing for people who aren't really qualified to become teachers is that most people don't realize how difficult it is to teach.
The material you're teaching may not be that difficult to comprehend or even to explain, but most people have no idea how much work goes into developing lesson plans, planning out your year, managing students' and parents expectations, doing classroom management. That last bit is really the foundation upon which everything else has to stand, or else your classroom simply won't work. and the kids won't learn anything.
Unless you've been a teacher, or have been married to a teacher, or know a bunch of teachers who complain about this stuff all the time, you most likely don't have the slightest idea about all of that. And so it might not be unreasonable to assume that a pretty smart person who just spent 6 years in the military and knows how to do algebra or calculus or knows history or whatever can become a high school teacher or even an elementary teacher. Hell, all of us got through elementary school. right? You must be able to teach that!
Hence the various takedown stories I've read over the years about Teach for America and other similar programs that put Ivy League graduates in classrooms in poor communities after only a few months of training (on top of their Ivy League degrees, of course). Turns out smarts and idealism *aren't* enough to deal with the challenges of dealing with the social and educational problems they encounter.
It’s bad enough that we have no baseball today; what is worse is this new shotgun start on the last day of the season… After six months of meandering slowly through a buffet of daily baseball - some of it good, some of it absolutely terrible - MLB brings the entire meal all at once on the last day, leaves the check and makes a big deal of cleaning up and staring at you so you feel like you have to hurry up and finish. I’m going to miss all of this, including the crappy stuff - just let me savor it.
PS Speaking of crappy stuff, Jesse Dougherty of the WaPo had a year-end wrapup on the Nats’ disastrous 55–107 season. The story ends with this quote from Davey Martinez - as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up:
“The [perception] is it’s always the coaches’ fault,” Martinez said. “That’s not necessarily true.”
I won’t miss that part of the buffet.
PPS I half-agree with your take on sports trespassers… The hit that Wagner put on the trespasser would have gotten him ejected in the game, and establishing a rule that players are not to interact with interlopers unless they directly threaten them is a good one. That said, I think given the large number of people at risk in a stadium of that size, it is appropriate to treat a pitch invasion more like a home invasion than other forms of trespassing. I’m not justifying deadly force, but I do think you have to treat it like a potential mass casualty attack - until you have the person in custody. YMMV.
Well, thanks to a 2 hour rain delay, the Mets-Nats game was actually played at more-or-less the right time (i.e., the time most other not-TV-driven games start these days). So there's that.
Ray Wylie Hubbard, who once sang the line "I didn't use the cocaine to get high, I just liked the way it smelled", told me that no band was cooler than the 13th Floor Elevators, and that's good enough for me.
Regarding celebrating team regular season accomplishments ... the unbalanced schedules of the past 28 years has, like so many monetarily-motivated decisions MLB has made, opened the door to subjectivity to color regular season records ... and, often, the subjectivity has been applied, especially on social media, but, also via traditional media, with all the nuance of a bored 4 year old scribbling in a coloring book. “The Mets choked,” fits an established narrative (and, allow me to note, I’m a Red Sox fan with no horse in that race), so, that narrative will rule the day unless the Mets can change the narrative with a deep run in the postseason tournament. At least the Mets and Atlanta played the same unbalanced schedule. How many teams, often in the Central, but, occasionally the West, get written off because “all they did was feast on a weak division where all the other teams were lousy.” I mean, c’mon, is that kind of criticism telling us that the prior 162 games didn’t matter? Or, probably worse, were somehow cheaper? The teams play the schedule they’re given. At least starting next season, we’ll have something closer to a balanced schedule, and maybe ... just maybe ... certain scribblers will lose that element of criticism. So, if you’ve made it this far (sorry) ... yay more balanced schedules!
The Mets and Braves had one difference. The Mets played the Yankees four times, the Braves the Red Sox. The Mets and Yankees split, the Braves took three of four from Boston. So there is the exact reason the Mets didn't win the division, clearly. (Obviously, I am not serious, but there have been years where it's like "why do the Mets have to play the Yankees so much every year?" And even with the new schedule, they still play the same four "rivalry games.")
The Mets didn’t do themselves any favors by getting swept at home by the Cubs. Win just one of those games and we’d be having a totally different discussion today.
I am certainly not a Mets fan, but the Mets playing a wild card round with 101 wins is just ...
Oh, and all the casual fans (as Craig has pointed out) other than those of the WC teams can now completely disconnect from the sport as your team is either out or off for about a week.
I have been looking at the unbalanced schedules a lot, what with the Yankees in a division with only one team with a losing record, and even that team was pretty decent until the All- Star break or so. The Yankees played 93 games against teams with winning records. Among playoff teams, only the Rays played more, and it was just one more. The Astros played just 69 of them. The Mets, 82, same as the Padres. The Cards played just 72 against teams .500 or over.
Not sure what any of it means, but I'll be looking forward to the more balanced schedule.
I'm sure I'm not saying anything that Nats fans aren't already painfully aware of, but their last 2 games were an exaggerated microcosm of their pitching woes throughout the season. In both games the starter got absolutely lit up (Espino 7 runs in 0.1 inning and Fedde 9 runs in 2.1 innings), then the bullpen came in and pitched great (1 ER in 13.1 innings combined).
Their bullpen ERA is a solid, middle of the pack, 3.84. While their starters ERA was over 3 runs higher at league worst 5.97. A full run worse than any team not playing in Colorado. It's hard to survive that.
Maybe they need to have more bullpen games. The Espino start almost was a bullpen game, since he only got 1 out.. The bullpen couldn't have gotten 1 more out and avoided Espino altogether? The bullpen was the bright spot on the team (along with Meneses), that's for sure.
Those numbers will just make Rizzo double down on his mantra - "With starting pitching, anything is possible; without starting pitching, nothing is possible."
Nats spent a lot of money on three guys - Scherzer, Strasburg, and Corbin, and only Scherzer lived up to the contract he got. Strasburg's only pitched 33 innings since 2019, and Corbin, while answering the bell, has maybe only pitched 33 effective innings since 2019.
Gonna have to take our lumps with Cavalli, Gore, and Gray and hope they turn into the next Big Three.
Though Scherzer's contract worked out so well it largely made up for the other two. And Strasburg was there in spades when you needed him most, even if the rest of his career has been star crossed.
That assumes they actually care if the kids are healthy and survive to adulthood. If they just want women preggers or at home and out of the workforce so men don't have any competition, then it makes sense to push them into being brood mares, homeschooling, and avoiding vaccines so the kids don't live long enough to get old and sick and cost money for medical care. They can work for a few years until the effects of multiple infections finally kick in and then they leave the workforce and keel over in a hurry.
Also I suspect they don't worry too much about women trying to get abortions, because if they are caught they can be convicted felons and lose their voting rights which is fantastic to a party that wants fewer voters.
In my school days, if a kid had a problem in class, the biggest fear was the kid having to face the parents when you got home from school. Now the biggest fear is the TEACHER having to face the parents...
And relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh3Yz3PiXZw
My parents were both teachers in the inner city Bronx. Parents with an active involvement in their child's education produced more engaged children.
my dad taught for over 30 years, and my mom trained to teach but changed her mind after student teaching. my brother teaches, and i'd have taught except that when i realized i might be interested, the amount of $$ i'd make was so little it'd have been a huge hit and would produce an inability to pay my bills. which is a shame, it shouldn't be that way. I'd also have to go back and do more undergrad work and then eventually grad degree. the system is broken.
My wife used to teach public school for about 5 years when we lived in Bethlehem, PA, then stepped down to raise our kids, who are now in 6th and 8th grades, at a private school, so she took a job teaching there to help offset the cost. It doesn't pay much - like, she could make more literally almost anywhere - but she gets to be where the kids are and it gives us about a 50% discount on tuition, which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Anyway, she immediately noticed the difference in the kids. They don't know how to sit still in class, don't show respect for the teacher by default like they used to even just 10-15 years ago. They spend their early years being babysat by YouTube and Netflix and don't know what it is to deal with an authority figure. My wife as it happens is excellent at classroom management, so she got them to toe the line rather quickly. Her two teaching partners in 1st grade...not so much. :-/
In this particular case, she also noted a huge difference in the parents, namely, that they actually give a shit. They're paying for their kids to go here, so they care what happens to them. In public school she would regularly have parents fail to show at teacher conferences, or show up high, or simply reject/ignore her assessment of why their kid was struggling and how to help him.
To be sure, some parents will do the latter anyway (one of her partners got emailed by an irate parent who told her not to raise her voice to her son. "We don't yell at him at home and we will not have you yelling at him there." or some such. Umm, maybe if you'd put him in his place once in a while at home he wouldn't be such a royal pain in the ass at school, eh?
I've had people tell me that I might be a good teacher because I've tutored before and enjoyed it. But I'd make less than I do now, have more stress and definitely worse hours, and my chances of getting shot would be higher (a hydrology professor in Arizona was killed by a student yesterday so that's on my mind). On the other hand, since I'd be teaching evolution as the foundation of biology I'd be fired within days. 😄
The Mets and Braves played an elimination game on Sunday.
I guess they did, but 101 WINS and a WC round ... that does not track!
I also HATE HATE HATE that they continue to include the World Series with the playoffs to make a "Post Season". The World Series is older than the Super Bowl, older than the NBA and whatever they call their championship. Heck, the World Series is almost older than basketball itself! The Stanley Cup is older by a few years than the World Series - but it wasn't part of the NHL until that league brought it over when they began in 1917; so you can have a really good argument as to whether or not the NHL championship predates the World Series.
For over 65 years, there were no playoffs - just the World Series. For about 25 years after the expansion produced divisional play, there was only one round of playoff games. MLB is allowing all these extra rounds of playoffs to diminish the special nature of the World Series. The least they can do is stop lumping it in as another set of "post season" games.
But, by definition, the "regular season" is over so everything after is "post season" though, right?
Counterpoint: Drama is great, but the season is too long and these guys are so taxed. Would I have liked to see that 163rd game? Sure. But they've both made the playoffs and it was just for positioning. It might be different if there was a team fighting to get in. The playoffs are way too stretched out as it is, there are going to be a bucketful of games to take us into November and I would rather see games than injuries.
Given who is running for office as a Trumpist, being qualified for a job is clearly not important. Though it's interesting how few veterans are running (veterans of wars, I mean, not veterans of the NFL).
Tomorrow we can fret about facing Yu Darvish. Today, I am going to celebrate the Mets' third 100 win season, celebrate Jeff McNeil's batting title, celebrate a season where the good far outweighed the bad. And I will not read one more "how a 101 win team sucks because it didn't win 102 games" article. Let's Go Mets!
Thinking about the teams that didn't make the playoffs. Of them, you can clearly say the O's had a good year, and the D-Backs and maybe the Cubs didn't have good years but had the sort of years you can build on. And some of the lesser teams had things to make them think things could get better - the Marlins seem to have a pretty good rotation, the Pirates might have a future star (till they trade him). But man, a lot of teams were just awful, weren't they? And a lot of teams enter the offseason having gone the wrong direction. It was, to a large degree, a rough regular season for a lot of fans. But isn't it always?
Congratulations to McNeil. I did not realize the Mets had only one other batting title in their entire history. Jose Reyes in 2011 and that's it. apparently.
I guess it's a little skewed since Colorado came into the league in 1993 and won 11 of them in the span of about 25 years, though they have not won one in 5 years, which ties their longest stretch. That probably speaks more to the lousy job that Rockies' management is doing of putting a team on the field than it does to anything else. But anyway, good for the Mets!
Why is nobody talking about Alonso's MLB leading 131 RBI, a number he tied with Aaron Judge? The only other Met to lead the NL was Howard Johnson with 117.
And Alonso did it with fewer home runs! (It is of course a reflection on the rest of the team and not Judge. Not his fault no one was on base so often, and that he was the best choice to be leadoff hitter. Which is nuts to me, since I still remember the age of Rickey.)
This is why Judge is the MVP of that team. The next best OPS on the Yankees is almost 300 points less (1.111 to Anthony Rizzo's 0.817), which is astounding.
The dumptrucks of money being driven to Judge's door are gonna be huge. And as much as you can wonder how long he'll be good, he has earned it.
Yep. How often do players' gambling on themselves to have a career year pay off so spectacularly?
As a Red Sox fan, it would be worth paying 38-year old Judge $40 million to hit .255 with 18 homers just to see the apoplexy emanating from New York the day the contract is announced.
Also, he just might put all debate to rest by hitting 74 home runs next year if he plays 81 games in Fenway.
Hey let's give credit to Jose Ramirez with 126 RBI for the Guardians - a team that scored 74 fewer runs than the Mets and 109 fewer than the Yankees
He was really on a torrid pace there for a while, with 62 RBI in his first 57 games, but then he had "only" 64 more in the last 100 games he played. Still good, but also a good object lesson for why projecting a team's or players stats out for the season based on two-months work is a fool's errand.
I am nervous about the Mets! I think it will take the Padres clicking on all cylinders to make it past them, and well, we'll just see how that goes.
How about that Wil Myers moment yesterday? I think Mud spoke for all of us Padres fans when he said “man, I love that kid!” Definitely some crying in baseball yesterday.
I'm in the middle of a huge deadline at work, and so I was catching up last night on all of that. I was already in a fragile mental state from a ragged day, so when I hit play on a clip of the crowd going wild for him, I absolutely lost it.
Thanks for another season of ATH. The tone is just about pitch perfect for me: quick recap that takes neither the game nor itself too seriously.
I am a fan of the long season. The ebbs and flows of 162. The new faces trying to break through, the grizzled vets hanging on for one more year in the sun, the brilliant stars doing the impossible. A beer in the bleachers and chatting with your neighbor. An evening with the game playing in the background as I wash dishes.
I understand why we want more focus on the post season. But for me, baseball is not supposed to be life and death with every pitch imbued with urgency.
So I’ll cheer on “my” team next week. But I’m also already looking forward to next spring when ATH returns.
Yes, I love the regular season so much and put a lot of stock into five straight division titles (not to mention 14). My wife and I initially connected on Twitter because of Braves fandom and now we watch close to 162 games/year together. It’s now usually on mute with music playing because we both cannot stand MLB broadcasting pretty much across the board, but we watch. Craig, does that count as rethinking fandom?
Given the systematic defunding of public education since the late 1970s -- much of which explains voting patterns since 1980 or so -- the idea of putting untrained people in front of a classroom is a natural progression.
I agree with everything Craig said but feel the 'absurd' comparison he offered misses the point: They would remove professional credentials from all of the things listed as well, given the chance. Republicans like Rand Paul (and his father) have been fighting to remove requirements for accreditation across a broad swath of professions for decades, and in some states they have succeeded.
This is a war against consumer protection and expertise, teachers are one of the primary targets, but so are doctors, scientists, electricians, plumbers and virtually every other skilled trade or practice.
Also any environmental or consumer protection regulations. Their idea of "freedom" is a few rich dudes who can afford to have personal air filters and water treatment systems have safe air and water and food and do whatever they want, while everyone else takes our chances and suffers. 😠
Agreed on pretty much everything you said about the GOP and public education, with one exception. They do care very much that the person at the front of the classroom isn’t LGBTQ+ or accepting of LGBTQ+ students, a real scientist who will talk about evolution or the Big Bang or the value of vaccinations as accepted facts, or anyone who they think comes off as too liberal. Part of the reason they chose veterans and not, say, retired scientists, was because they perceive veterans (especially those who would go along with this cockamamie scheme) as aligned with them ideologically.
I agree 100% with your unpopular take. I think the veil has been lifted on any "public safety" justification for using excessive force on folks who charge the field. It's simple American bloodlust - we love to see people get decked, especially people who interrupt our entertainment. It's sad.
On regular vs. postseason ball - "both/and." Everything you say about regular season baseball is true. But postseason ball is super fun also! I'm interested to see if the new reliever rules can speed things up a bit. Probably not, because pitchers will still take like 2 min in between throws to execute their stuff correctly. But as long as you know it'll be a bit long, it's great.
I lost the screenshot to the sands of time, but I was looking for Nuggets on Amazon probably 15 years ago, searched 'Nuggets' and got the album but also a 'were you searching for [n-words]' suggestion. I sent it as a screenshot to Amazon but it actually stayed that way for a few years.
NUGGETS!!!!
What a great album. I had the vinyl (apparently lost in one of a dozen moves during grad school).
Psychotic reaction was my fave !
I love the weird and random ways songs like that spread. When I was a kid, our local classic rock station ("The X") ran a live broadcast of a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show, which my brothers and I dutifully taped and played a million times. They did "Psychotic Reaction" (w/ drummer Stan Lynch on the vocals), and it was fantastic. I've never heard the original until now.
That live version of "Psychotic Reaction" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sung by Stan was a b-side from one of their singles in the 80s. I can never remember which one. It was also included in the Playback box set that Petty/Heartbreakers put out some 20+ years ago, which is one of my favorite things I own. Along with the Nuggets box set; both of the Nuggets box sets actually.
Oh good, now when someone posts [n-words] they can just say "I meant NUGGETS! Damn autocorrect!"
I wholeheartedly agree with your 'unpopular' opinion, and suspect that it is not quite as unpopular on a whole as internet commenters would like to think.
Also, thank you for your kind and rational words regarding teachers. It's been a particularly rough few years for us.
i, for one, welcome our slam-to-the-ground overlords. if you run out there, you are going to get slammed to the ground, because you are a potential terrorist. that's the safe move.
To Craig’s point, check out this video of Jays’ security spear tackling what appears to be a 12 year old from earlier this year.
https://twitter.com/wxgta/status/1520218142873694213?s=46&t=PN6Z4VrGW6hOXqyVbOzd_g
All the players on the field are clearly taken aback.
I'm going to go with a bit of Hanlon's Razor here, as opposed to your take that there are nefarious reasons behind it, and say that a lot of the reason they're pushing for people who aren't really qualified to become teachers is that most people don't realize how difficult it is to teach.
The material you're teaching may not be that difficult to comprehend or even to explain, but most people have no idea how much work goes into developing lesson plans, planning out your year, managing students' and parents expectations, doing classroom management. That last bit is really the foundation upon which everything else has to stand, or else your classroom simply won't work. and the kids won't learn anything.
Unless you've been a teacher, or have been married to a teacher, or know a bunch of teachers who complain about this stuff all the time, you most likely don't have the slightest idea about all of that. And so it might not be unreasonable to assume that a pretty smart person who just spent 6 years in the military and knows how to do algebra or calculus or knows history or whatever can become a high school teacher or even an elementary teacher. Hell, all of us got through elementary school. right? You must be able to teach that!
Hence the various takedown stories I've read over the years about Teach for America and other similar programs that put Ivy League graduates in classrooms in poor communities after only a few months of training (on top of their Ivy League degrees, of course). Turns out smarts and idealism *aren't* enough to deal with the challenges of dealing with the social and educational problems they encounter.
GOP hates "elites" in every field ... except in the military, where they LOVE elites.
Or, ya know, pretend to love them, as long as they don't have to pay for their long-term health care.
It’s bad enough that we have no baseball today; what is worse is this new shotgun start on the last day of the season… After six months of meandering slowly through a buffet of daily baseball - some of it good, some of it absolutely terrible - MLB brings the entire meal all at once on the last day, leaves the check and makes a big deal of cleaning up and staring at you so you feel like you have to hurry up and finish. I’m going to miss all of this, including the crappy stuff - just let me savor it.
PS Speaking of crappy stuff, Jesse Dougherty of the WaPo had a year-end wrapup on the Nats’ disastrous 55–107 season. The story ends with this quote from Davey Martinez - as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up:
“The [perception] is it’s always the coaches’ fault,” Martinez said. “That’s not necessarily true.”
I won’t miss that part of the buffet.
PPS I half-agree with your take on sports trespassers… The hit that Wagner put on the trespasser would have gotten him ejected in the game, and establishing a rule that players are not to interact with interlopers unless they directly threaten them is a good one. That said, I think given the large number of people at risk in a stadium of that size, it is appropriate to treat a pitch invasion more like a home invasion than other forms of trespassing. I’m not justifying deadly force, but I do think you have to treat it like a potential mass casualty attack - until you have the person in custody. YMMV.
My bad - it looked to me like he hit him in the face with the crown of his helmet. Upon further review, I am still dumb. First down.
Well, thanks to a 2 hour rain delay, the Mets-Nats game was actually played at more-or-less the right time (i.e., the time most other not-TV-driven games start these days). So there's that.
Yes ... nothing like savoring a beer that was skunked months ago. [I still watched ;)]
Ray Wylie Hubbard, who once sang the line "I didn't use the cocaine to get high, I just liked the way it smelled", told me that no band was cooler than the 13th Floor Elevators, and that's good enough for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y5uAjWWQRg
His song “Mother Hubbard’s Blues” is awesome. Heard it on a podcast, but I can’t remember which one.
100% agree on the excessive use of force point. My first thought after seeing that clip was “that player is gonna get sued”.
It was a stupid thing to do considering the trespasser has no protective padding / helmet or... y’know wasn’t a 200 pound super athlete.
Let the security do their job. And if there is no sign of ill intent, do it without hurting the guy seems like general human decency.
Anyway thanks for a great season Craig!
Regarding celebrating team regular season accomplishments ... the unbalanced schedules of the past 28 years has, like so many monetarily-motivated decisions MLB has made, opened the door to subjectivity to color regular season records ... and, often, the subjectivity has been applied, especially on social media, but, also via traditional media, with all the nuance of a bored 4 year old scribbling in a coloring book. “The Mets choked,” fits an established narrative (and, allow me to note, I’m a Red Sox fan with no horse in that race), so, that narrative will rule the day unless the Mets can change the narrative with a deep run in the postseason tournament. At least the Mets and Atlanta played the same unbalanced schedule. How many teams, often in the Central, but, occasionally the West, get written off because “all they did was feast on a weak division where all the other teams were lousy.” I mean, c’mon, is that kind of criticism telling us that the prior 162 games didn’t matter? Or, probably worse, were somehow cheaper? The teams play the schedule they’re given. At least starting next season, we’ll have something closer to a balanced schedule, and maybe ... just maybe ... certain scribblers will lose that element of criticism. So, if you’ve made it this far (sorry) ... yay more balanced schedules!
The Mets and Braves had one difference. The Mets played the Yankees four times, the Braves the Red Sox. The Mets and Yankees split, the Braves took three of four from Boston. So there is the exact reason the Mets didn't win the division, clearly. (Obviously, I am not serious, but there have been years where it's like "why do the Mets have to play the Yankees so much every year?" And even with the new schedule, they still play the same four "rivalry games.")
The Mets didn’t do themselves any favors by getting swept at home by the Cubs. Win just one of those games and we’d be having a totally different discussion today.
Ginny Searle at Baseball Prospectus had an article showing just how bad the Central Divisions have been ( https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/77755/between-the-lines-the-central-divisions-are-the-argument-for-realignment/ )
I am certainly not a Mets fan, but the Mets playing a wild card round with 101 wins is just ...
Oh, and all the casual fans (as Craig has pointed out) other than those of the WC teams can now completely disconnect from the sport as your team is either out or off for about a week.
A 101 win team playing a wild card round beats a 103 win team staying home because there was no wild card in those days (1993 San Francisco Giants)
12 year old me (1978 Red Sox) heartily agrees!
I have a couple of stubs to an Oct 2, 1978, game that says the Sox got a play-in ...
(#toosoon, I know, as '04 is for me)
Ha! I #toosoon every post I see on Facebook that pictures Bucky F. Dent doing that ... thing. ;)
I have been looking at the unbalanced schedules a lot, what with the Yankees in a division with only one team with a losing record, and even that team was pretty decent until the All- Star break or so. The Yankees played 93 games against teams with winning records. Among playoff teams, only the Rays played more, and it was just one more. The Astros played just 69 of them. The Mets, 82, same as the Padres. The Cards played just 72 against teams .500 or over.
Not sure what any of it means, but I'll be looking forward to the more balanced schedule.
I'm sure I'm not saying anything that Nats fans aren't already painfully aware of, but their last 2 games were an exaggerated microcosm of their pitching woes throughout the season. In both games the starter got absolutely lit up (Espino 7 runs in 0.1 inning and Fedde 9 runs in 2.1 innings), then the bullpen came in and pitched great (1 ER in 13.1 innings combined).
Their bullpen ERA is a solid, middle of the pack, 3.84. While their starters ERA was over 3 runs higher at league worst 5.97. A full run worse than any team not playing in Colorado. It's hard to survive that.
Maybe they need to have more bullpen games. The Espino start almost was a bullpen game, since he only got 1 out.. The bullpen couldn't have gotten 1 more out and avoided Espino altogether? The bullpen was the bright spot on the team (along with Meneses), that's for sure.
Those numbers will just make Rizzo double down on his mantra - "With starting pitching, anything is possible; without starting pitching, nothing is possible."
Nats spent a lot of money on three guys - Scherzer, Strasburg, and Corbin, and only Scherzer lived up to the contract he got. Strasburg's only pitched 33 innings since 2019, and Corbin, while answering the bell, has maybe only pitched 33 effective innings since 2019.
Gonna have to take our lumps with Cavalli, Gore, and Gray and hope they turn into the next Big Three.
Except that Rizzo will be told not to spend anything till the team is sold. Nats fans are in a pretty rotten limbo now.
More like ugly rotten limbo - but yeah.
Though Scherzer's contract worked out so well it largely made up for the other two. And Strasburg was there in spades when you needed him most, even if the rest of his career has been star crossed.
Strasburg and Scherzer earned all their money in 2019.
Stras was great before his current contract, no question.
He opted out of his previous deal after 2019 and signed the seven year albatross that the Nats are tied to now.
Let’s be fair about this. If he was healthy he’d have pitched well enough that he’d be worth the money.
Or so I believe.
I don't disagree, and Flags Fly Forever, but his current contract is the equivalent of the Nats just lighting that money on fire.