igor67

For some level of quantification a 20 point difference in OBP leads to a similar change in PAs. Which is to say a .350 OBP in the leadoff spot would create 16 fewer outs over the course of a season. This would mostly translate into extra appearances for the batting spot right afterwards, though you would also see a modest bump 2 batters down.

One of the great things about baseball is that since batters fail more than half the time you can make just about any claim you want about offense and approach and find plenty of observations that support it. I for one suggest removing leg kicks, surgically if need be.

There was a lot posted earlier on the potential impact of Miller Park on his offense, but if players are slow to change their approach in the face of a deader ball, OF defense is going to potentially be more valuable then others might be banking on. Better defense also helps your starters get deeper into games. I don't forsee getting work horse type innings out of anybody, but making 5 or 6 highly likely makes it easier to keep mixing and matching bullpen guys for the last few innings instead of having to really push it with extending guys long.

Can Taylor be good enough to (along with Suter) make the 2012 draft respectable? That would be quite the feat.

Can Taylor be good enough to (along with Suter) make the 2012 draft respectable? That would be quite the feat.

Got my first dose over the weekend. Definitely J&J coming online is going to be the answer of some of the questions on how to get the more difficult to vaccinate people done. I kind of wonder though based on it's profile if it wouldn't make sense (and it's possible it doesn't matter that much) to prioritize that shot toward younger frontline workers. MN is supposed to be getting 45,000 doses this week and just getting that many people 1 and done who are more likely to catch and spread might be better while preserving Moderna and Pfizer for older patients.

Unemployment can be a powerful motivator though.

It is also the time of year that they start switching over to summer blends which creates a repeatable shortage of sorts in supplies before normal spring/ summer demand usually drives the prices back up somewhat.

I got bumped back a week for my first shot because of the storm delays this week.

I'll shamelessly promote The North End and Como neighborhoods in St. Paul. When I moved in 20 years ago about the only thing I could say was that they were safer than North Minneapolis, but they got dramatically better in the early 2000's. Given the access with the light rail coming and the price dip during the housing crisis my area could have easily gentrified and become trendy, but it hasn't yet though there have been nice newer amenities. You won't get suburban size lots of course, but we eventually leveraged the housing savings into a great rural property while enjoying being close to everything.

If you have to wait a month or two for all the paper work and send someone else money first that is not really liquid. While it isn't as crazy as how quick in the last housing run-up people were to not pay attention to how much money they spent on realty fees while rapidly turning over houses, paying closing costs again just 2 years into a loan eats into that appreciation. And the amount of closing costs does different rather noticeably based on location. They are definitely higher in MN than WI for example. To say nothing of the dangers of increasing ones own personal leverage especially if you are thinking you 'need' the liquidity your payments are going to go up, assuming you can invest that added liquid income to make-up the difference... Well that works great when your incorporated and can walk away when the bankruptcy happens. For a house of course there are other risks like the danger of ending upside down when you want or need to change jobs and move.

One of my child's teammates is unfortunately in the long hauler category. They are still feeling weak and haven't successfully tested negative since late November. They have an offer out to play D3 athletics, so hopefully it *eventually mitigates.

Plus side T-mobile just confirmed that they are including free MLB.tv subscription with there service again.

I haven't looked up and down the roster, but I have the sense that the Dodgers are starting to get on the old side. Turner is quite old for example since he was a super late bloomer, Kershaw is definitely getting up there. They are not ancient but that would be one angle on how they might under perform.

I probably will stop watching, I missed almost the entire first half. So I've basically watched a total of 3.5 games that have been complete brick fests like the Dick Bennet days without the ridiculously good defense.

I have seen almost all of the losses this year and only 1 win.

I had forgotten there was a time when Braun, Fielder etc. overlapped in the minors with Cain and Brantley. There's all kinds of what if games one can play, but I'd be curious to see how that top 20 list stacks up historically in terms of total career value.

Jim Rushford

My recollection was that Doug Mientkiewicz was a very good defender at first based much more on range then scooping, he also wasn't terribly tall either. I wouldn't expect it especially the first year, but I also wouldn't be surprised if Hiura ended up close to average at first, which ultimately would be upgrading 2 infield spots pretty significantly on defense.

Not strictly clinical data, but in some ways better since it is real world data https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-rapid-rollout-provides-the-first-realworld-proof-that-covid-vaccination-works-as-well-as-promised-152103525.html My biggest takeaways in a sample roughly 4 times bigger than the original clinical trials Pfizer is still 92% effective at preventing clinically noticeable symptoms, but 100% against hospitalization and death in a group that heavily skews towards the highest risk. And it still seems to be working as well against the UK variant. I would encourage everyone to talk this up, frustration with the speed of availability is the problem of the moment but the problem of the future is going to be pushing the vaccination level worldwide high enough to put Covid close to eradication. That is almost exclusively a problem of hesitancy, and it is as simple as every infection is a lottery ticket that might hit on the winning combination that can evade the vaccine and start the madness all over again. I'm asking everyone to help on this because frankly the literature out there on these types of science communication issues is utterly depressing and positive messages from friends and family is way more likely to convinced people than any advertising, public service announcements, an army of Neil deGrasse Tysons, Faucci's, or anyone else you can think of.

In general all vaccines work by getting you to have a 'memory' of how to make the antibodies against a particular disease. When exposed to the disease again your body then quickly responds by cranking out a lot of antibodies, which greatly help other parts of the immune system defeat the infection. So you can absolutely be exposed again, from my understanding of how the Moderna and Pfizer trials were conducted though people only rarely showed signs of having the infection at all. For most vaccines the response you get to the new pathogen is so much faster and effective you never know you had an exposure. Specifically in the Moderna and Pfizer trials they were waiting for patients to show signs of Covid-19, then testing to confirm they had it and 95% of those who had the disease were given the placebo vaccine. Typically the rapid response of a vaccinated individual drastically reduces or eliminates their ability to pass it on to others as well, though this remains less well understood in Covid. Given that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines tend to provoke stronger immune responses in the second shot (most of our feeling sick symptoms come from the immune system not the pathogen) it's not surprising Zad Fnark that your friend experienced a strong reaction after getting vaccinated.

My experience would suggest the answer can't possibly be that simple, but perhaps an easy place to start on the regulatory side is preventing anyone/thing from betting more shares than what actually exist.

I would love to see some modeling on how best to incorporate that into the vaccination plans. The article does a nice job of highlighting that it appears slightly less effective, but the clinical data was collected in a few places with the newer variants raging and they counted effectiveness in a slightly different way, so just comparing the 85% to the 95% for Moderna and Pfizer isn't completely apples to apples. The shelf stability and only 1 shot needed are pretty big pluses. It also looks like they didn't see any even potential anaphylactic reactions so it might be a good option for that small number of people who had a flare up after their first dose of Pfizer or Moderna.

I'm not sure how long the price needs to stay inflated to cost the hedge fund folks their money, but at some point the price will come down and some fraction of these retail investors are going to lose some serious money as well.

There is one very important reason for caution, evolution. For months the variations in the viral population seemed relatively harmless, but that appears to have changed now. We know that every infection regardless of source is another chance for new mutations to crop-up, and even more sneakily every defense measure we take is creating a selective advantage for mutations that can evade those strategies. History is unfortunately replete with examples of policy makers ignoring evolutionary thinking in policy design. Schools opening or not is only 1 part of that overall mitigation. So having an accurate estimate of how much additional infection is created by having students in person vs. not is rather critical. Mental health and social development I would agree are pretty well established. What we don't know at all though is how important the learning gaps are. Any education measurement out there is based on standardizing the numbers relative to other students with everyone proceeding through a normal school year. There is not any relevant data that indicates what happens if most students just don't do school for a year. It is so far outside of a normal situation that I have a hesitancy to just extrapolate and treat a lower standardized test score this year as telling me the same things about what a student needs as I would have 2 years ago. If it helps understand why I'm not as doomy and gloomy on the education front as others the last generation of Americans to experience anything remotely similar as a disruption still managed to produce enough talent to build the atom bomb. I also would argue it would be more than justified in many cases to let large numbers of students just repeat this year, and it is a completely different question socially of how repeating a grade works if a bunch of your friends are doing it than in a normal environment.