owbc

Teams with shaky pitching tend to implode later in the season. Others like Seattle who have good pitching are surging.

Give Santana some time. He’s not washed up. He’ll come up with several key hits before the season is through.

As it probably should...Flexen is likely the worst SP they will face all year.

I guess I don’t see the big deal? From the kid’s perspective, they probably weren’t originally recruited by a big school but they worked hard and got better and earned themselves a ticket to a big program. The mid-major coaches almost always bail after a Cinderella run, why shouldn’t the players have the same opportunity? Travel is a whole different issue but I bet we’ll see the B1G teams play all of the west coast schools in a single road trip over the course of a week. The non-revenue sports can also have expanded nonconference schedules. There are plenty of ways to mitigate it, even if it sucks as a whole. They certainly have the money to pay for it now.

Agree on Grifol. Boone's fate likely depends on Cashman. Nevin is on a one-year deal so they don't even have to fire him. Although given the stupidity of the Angels they might bring him back anyway, I thought for sure he was going to get let go at the end of 2022. Marmol will likely take the fall for the Cards being terrible. The Padres might dump Melvin for underachieving. And of course Counsell might retire.

"Hiura has a .984 OPS for [insert his new team's AAA club here]"

Sounds like they are considering going with a 10-game conference schedule. I assume the main reason for doing so is to try and convince USC, Michigan, MSU, etc. to stop scheduling Notre Dame.

The score doesn't matter -- tied or ahead by 1-2 runs should have the same strategy. In close games, you want your best reliever against the middle of the opposing lineup. The Pirates had 6-7-8 due up in the 9th so I agree with the decision to go with Payamps there. Then 1-2-3 were due up in the 10th so you go with Williams in that scenario. I think it was the right move. If 1-2-3 was due up in the 9th, then Williams should have gone in the 9th.

I don't really see the difference between mining for renewable energy components vs. drilling for oil. Both are terrible for the environment, both cause geopolitical problems, both are expensive. If we're going to keep drilling for oil, we're going to eventually have to drill some of the spots that have been off-limits such as in Alaska wildlife refuges. And the Canadian tar sands will have to massively expand. It would obviously be better if we built denser cities, had better public transportation, and had a significant reduction in the number of miles that people drive in personal vehicles. But that clearly isn't going to happen fast enough to be much help. Hence the massive need for battery-powered cars. I agree that it sucks and it's not ideal but the cost of not decarbonizing is so high that we have no choice. Maybe we'll figure out fusion power and maybe we'll come up with a way to make hydrogen-powered vehicles cheaper than battery-powered ones. I don't know. The ongoing massive expansion of the supply chain for battery-powered vehicles is a pretty clear indicator of where we are headed in the next 10+ years.

What an awesome weekend for the Mariners. Hopefully the Angels blow it up so that Trout can get out of there as well.

It’s incredibly dumb but it will be nice to see the Badgers play in Seattle.

The Rangers and Astros are in an expensive arms race right now. The Astros are taking on ~$50 million of salary and gave up two decent prospects to do this. It's a big risk. It does get Cohen an extra $50M to offer to Ohtani this winter.

Agreed, and I'm excited to see what Stearns can do in New York. The Brewers are in good hands.

Soccer is like many sports where it is beautiful at the highest levels but pretty meh at the lower levels. Unfortunately, most of what is available on this continent falls into the latter category. I've tried to get into the MLS in Seattle but haven't been able to. The quality of play in MLS is generally poor which is disappointing because Seattle has great fans. I bet it would be better in a smaller soccer-specific stadium. The MLS also takes itself too seriously and the continuous game with no breaks means that the games are not very friendly to casual fans in my opinion. No music, no promotions, no fans on the scoreboard, etc. However, I did see a men's international game a few years ago (USA vs Equador) and that was fantastic. I was up in the nosebleeds but the precision of their positioning, passing, and ball movement was readily apparent. In a good soccer game there isn't much noodling around in the middle of the field, the elite teams can quickly generate chances. As madbad noted, offsides is actually a really cool rule. Most of my issue with the rules in soccer revolves around flopping, but VAR has helped with that, at least for high leverage calls that could be a penalty. The current iteration of USWNT falls into the "hard to watch" category for sure. Assuming they don't overcome their shortcomings, I think it will be good for everyone for them to eat some humble pie (and fire their coach). As a baseball fan, I crave more cricket in the US and I enjoyed following the inaugural season of MLC this summer. Many consider Twenty20 cricket to be more exciting than baseball and it certainly is at least as interesting to watch as a baseball game. In many ways it's the opposite of a baseball game -- an out in cricket is of similar difficulty to a hit in baseball.

Last year the Brewers' decision at the deadline was between trading Hader and demoting him out of an 8th or 9th inning role. He wasn't helping us and the results show that he wouldn't have helped us after August 1.

Exactly, the Brewers were firm buyers and they made massive upgrades to their greatest weaknesses. I'm not sure what else they could have reasonably done. By the way, the Mariners just did the exact same thing as the Brewers did last year -- traded away their closer for major league talent in a 'retooling' trade to fill other gaps.

I mean this genuinely -- if you're expecting something different you should probably pick a different MLB team to follow. The Brewers are not going to be taking a different approach anytime soon.

Canha has better career numbers than Candelaro.

I wonder if Canha will get the Kolten Wong treatment in the offseason or if his option is too expensive to get a return.

I'm sure this will go over well...

I like this better than some of the other options like Candelario and Teoscar Hernandez. I assume the Mets are picking up some salary. Canha+Santana is a nice combination and of course the Brewers love positional flexibility.

Details TBD. Edit: sounds like Justin Jarvis may be the return.

Not a buy move that I would have expected from the Rays, but I can see why they wanted to solidify their playoff position after scuffling since their hot start. Similar to the Luis Castillo trade last year -- steep price to pay but they will reap the reward of adding a TOR stater.

Solar and wind are both cheaper than fossil fuels when you account for oil/gas being heavily subsidized by tax incentives as well. Solar is now the cheapest energy in history. The issue has always been storage but that has been pretty much figured out as well. There is an environmental cost for everything -- at this point it's clear that the #1 priority is to get net CO2 emissions close to zero by the middle of the century so if there are other externalities from mining, manufacturing, etc we'll just have to deal with that. We're never going to see the average person fueling their car with hydrogen (who would want to do that when home charging is so easy), but hydrogen produced by nuclear to power heavy machinery has potential. The main issue with nuclear continues to be the cost relative to other green energy sources. I know much of that cost is caused by people being irrationally scared of nuclear, but that's a real problem that has to be solved to scale it.

The good news is that all of these issues seem solvable. Prior to the pitch clock implementation there were a million questions about how it could possibly work. Same for limiting the number of disengagements. It took a few years of tinkering but they managed to roll out a system that has worked almost flawlessly since day 1. Theo Epstein is doing excellent work so I trust his approach on the automated strike zone and I'm sure he's the one making the call that it isn't ready for primetime yet. If they implement a challenge system, it could be implemented with a "grey area" at the edge of the zone where the call on the field stands. As a frequent viewer of Umpire Scorecards, it looks like the average number of badly missed calls is no more than ~3-5 per game unless it's one of the notoriously bad umpires. If a challenge system can clean up that handful of really bad calls, then we'll be fine. I do think they will eventually figure it out though and have an exact zone figured out.