ashbury

Not sure what this number corresponds to, but Time Magazine put together a list with at least ten instances that were longer. http://time.com/4224348/scalia-vacancy-supreme-court/

Moderator's note: the trolling and personal accusations have gotten out of hand. Political threads in the Sports Bar receive a little more leeway than most, but please keep the discussion an actual discussion, and stop escalating. Everyone.

They look happy.

Punto getting reps at SS is a totally different matter. Second base is the booby prize for starting middle infield prospects. UT is nearly always a Plan B option for a legitimate SS prospect; not nearly always when it's 2B. If SS was spoken for at Rochester, there still was third base. Beresford saw three games there in Rochester in 2014 and none in 2015. Preference was given to the illustrious likes of Deibinson Robinson and Doug Bernier and Jose Martinez. If Beresford was in the big club's plans as a UT, don't you think word would have come down to Gene Glynn, give this guy a few games at third? If Rochester "needed" him at second base, it was to serve as a constant competent backdrop by which to judge the genuine SS prospects. Winning games, even in AAA, takes a backseat to prospect development.

Beresford has played 2B and essentially nothing else since 2013. His minor league managers do not seem to embrace your opinion on this, since surely Utility would be a better ticket to the majors for him than pure Second Baseman.

I don't value 10 minutes in space. I value 10 minutes on the freaking MOON.

The moon. Easy choice. 10 minutes isn't how trips to the moon work, so I am assuming that laws of physics are being similarly suspended to my benefit. As a side note, I am fully capable of wasting a year in Europe but I do have enough self-discipline to make my 10 minutes on the moon memorable even in my declining years.

Trust me, I'll look after you in case any of these three jokers tries anything. I'm with the majority here who seems to trust none of these actors. I'm willing to chat with any of them on superficial matters but I'm shutting down if conversation turns toward information that could be used against me or my family, and I'm not following any of them out the door to this party that they swear will be the highlight of my trip. Which of the three will be the one to cross the line, in this made up scenario, I don't know and I don't especially care.

That seems like SUCH a long time ago. So far far away.

"Farmer". That's probably meant to evoke an image of several dozen acres being worked under wholesome good-ol'-fashioned family values. I'm pretty sure that's not how modern agribusiness operates anymore, or at least the families that do fit your profile are nearly irrelevant to feeding this nation. Unless maybe dad being a farmer and getting up at 4 means he's working for a conglomerate. The world of Adam Smith and Wealth of Nations in the 1700s was relatively little removed from biblical times of extreme scarcity, where it was necessary for almost the entire population to work extremely long hours just to survive. Free market philosophy today, at least as usually discussed, has progressed very little from images of gruff but kindly shopkeepers, burly blacksmiths, and lots and lots of farmers struggling just to make ends meet. The industrial revolution brought about at least two big changes, economies of scale, and logistics. The reach of a creative person was no longer limited to what he could build himself, or to the geography he happened to be born in. Marx and others attempted to put this new development into the previous context but they had no way of anticipating how rapidly things were still going to change further. As scarcity began to be less of an overriding concern, we had the luxury to relieve certain groups of people from labor. The idea of the elderly "retiring" became a concept beyond one's family simply looking after you. Child labor was now viewed as repugnant. Leisure time for everyone became a norm when the 40-hour workweek was embraced. We're now at the cusp of something more profound. Today, we are not yet at a mythical day when one person can provide the needs of all of humanity at the touch of a button. That person would simply own everything and the rest of us would survive at his discretion, at least under free-enterprise. But, it is true that, at least in the US and similar countries, we have moved in that direction, as our well-being no longer depends on every able-bodied adult working. A vast variety of middle class jobs have gone the way of the dodo bird - for example management roles are much fewer in the presence of enterprises like Walmart and Amazon.com which leverage the management they have much better - or in the financial world the same capitalist activities go on but are conducted by fewer and fewer people. It's almost surely better for society as a whole - it frees large numbers of people to do something better, although we have some trouble in saying exactly what. But it also results in "your services are no longer required" as well as a greater and greater concentration of wealth. Yet the system still makes it a moral imperative, "work, or you don't eat" - or at least, pure free marketers wish to make you feel guilty about accepting government assistance. None of the economic theories being discussed in this election cycle really tackle how a moral society handles the concept of plenty, as opposed to scarcity. It's still too new to us as a species. Ultra-large corporations scare me just as much as Big Gubmint, and in this world everything of economic importance has become big. Meanwhile the dominant view of capitalism* in the US works basically only for the special case of a quaint Amish community (that's meant jokingly since the Amish have collectivist tendencies). Arguments about minimum wage levels are unsolvable in this environment; I don't claim to have an answer. I'm convinced that pure market forces are not the answer. They can't be ignored either. * For a good reminder of the difference between capitalism and free-enterprise, just watch a rerun of Shark Tank sometime.

Mario Mendoza, too.

You are correct IMO about young pitchers not stepping up particularly well. Stauffer on the other hand was visibly a poor choice as anything other than an innings eater, prior to the Twins ever signing him; you want a reliever who is a threat to have an ERA in the 2's, not someone you hope will keep it under 4. He had a below average ERA as an NL pitcher dating back through 2011, even before taking into account that relievers as a group achieve better ERA than starters do (he did start in 2011). As for signing contracts afterward, the Mets took him because they only had to pay league minimum since the Twins were on the hook for the rest of his salary; and the Diamondbacks signed him to a minor league deal this offseason. Stauffer's days as a major leaguer are through unless he steps up his game this spring. Signing Stauffer at any price was a flub, from the git-go.

Art Mahaffey got saddled with a reputation for pitch tipping. It probably irked him - "it was one game in Spring Training!" he surely would tell anyone who would listen, but I'm just guessing about that. Source below. Since it was early 1960s, maybe not totally relevant to this discussion. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19630313&id=85BPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KVIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7272,1076885&hl=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwyLOkbO5nw

Econ 101 explains why an unfettered free-enterprise system results in Dickensian wages for a vast underclass. It does not say that a moral society must embrace this result.

Throws that drop six inches just in front of the cutoff man are not an asset.

I think the head moderator is way down at the bottom of any list of issues.

The first Twins game in ST is March 2. Do the minor league games on the back fields start around that day, too?

I often bring up the Task Manager on my Windows device, and check to see whether there is an Adobe Flash process running. If so, I kill it, unless I am running something where I know I need it (which is usually never). Often that clears up the slowness instantly. Though, I don't recall it ever being as slow as you're describing it.

The Pennsylvania Ballet would go 0-16 if they played in the NFL. Book it.

Fair point, but there do exist leagues where the game is not totally incidental to the beer. Full disclosure: I can not guess from personal experience what that would be like.

If it had been Beer League ball I'd have been especially impressed.

If Saul Pohlad of Tarsus*, accompanying the team on a road trip to Damascus, had a vision and suddenly realized, "my God, I've been pricing ordinary families out of going to ballgames," and cut ticket prices by 90%, guess what would happen? Scalpers would find ways to scoop up every ticket, and you'd pay essentially the same prices as before, only on StubHub Ticket King. The money is there, richer fans than you and me are the ones bidding up the prices, and the only question is whether you want that revenue going to the players, to the team owners, or to sketchy guys doing arbitrage on the street and slightly more reputable ones via automated websites. * Or Twins president Dave St Paul, if you prefer

If it's ever viewed as a real problem, it should be possible to modify the rules to fix it. The reliever's been throwing for 5 minutes in the bullpen, yet gets 5 (or whatever) pitches when he arrives at the mound. Cut that out, and a pitching change isn't that painful. Such a change also adds a slight bit of strategy - if those extra warmup pitches really are useful to the pitcher, then the manager has a dilemma whether to bring in that guy for just one lefty-lefty matchup.

Mind. And. CPU. Blown. Just one knob needling another.