ashbury

OK, fair enough. The concerns you raised are more complicated than the simple view I was offering. Please allow the mod team to confer a bit about this. We're geographically diverse, plus it's the weekend, and in sum we haven't all seen this discussion yet.

Someone (spycake I believe) the other day kindly pointed out Adam Rosales became the subject of a turf war between Oakland and Texas a few years back: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/r/rosalad01.shtml August 2, 2013: Selected off waivers by the Texas Rangers from the Oakland Athletics. August 8, 2013: Selected off waivers by the Oakland Athletics from the Texas Rangers. August 12, 2013: Selected off waivers by the Texas Rangers from the Oakland Athletics. Ell Oh Ell. So let's go for the record, shall we?

Unless a team runs perpetually under the 40-man limit, Vargas's potential financial loss is merely some other player's gain. It's not much of an argument in favor of the present system.

But Vargas got to benefit from an additional week or more of that sweet, sweet major league per diem and insurance and whatever other perks come with being on 40-man.

You're making vast assumptions about the nature of the edits. For example, taking a swipe at a fellow poster, in the course of making a point, is against site rules. So I've occasionally removed an introductory sentence, or a closing salvo, where its removal leaves the message about the subject matter unchanged, and PMed the poster to tell him why. There's usually no reason, and even less value, to hold a person as an example in public, which would be the effect of what you propose. We also don't publicize when someone earns a warning point for a post, for example. The proposal you offer would do more harm than good.

The purpose of moderation here is to improve the discussion. Drawing attention to a moderation action, as you suggest, risks detracting from that purpose*. It also exposes the poster to a degree of public singling-out that often isn't called for. By the same logic as you suggest regarding edits, we would also announce a deletion of a post, since that's an edit-with-extreme-prejudice. I don't see us adopting that policy. Editing is rare. My own policy is to inform the poster via PM that it was done, and the reason why. Including the likely back-and-forth it creates, that can be time consuming. In a fast-moving thread like the one we're discussing, such communication might not be a reasonable option. As for the insinuation of personal bias because of who made the accusation against Sano, moderation in this thread was performed by people who do not know the woman personally. The mod team looks over each others' shoulders - no system is perfect but we do have a system of checks and balances here which we take seriously. Finally, moderators at TD are just regular members too. We post on subject matter with regard to our own convictions, and keep that separate from moderation actions. Please try to keep that separate in how you read threads where we participate, as well. / edit - I was composing my post at the same time Carole was, so please don't infer one thing or another from the ordering of the posts * For that reason, in-thread warnings are not necessarily the first choice I personally go for.

In a fast-moving thread like yesterday's Sano announcement thread, the moderators don't have the luxury of time to enter into a discussion with each poster as to how they would prefer to be moderated - particularly when you consider that not every moderator is even "on duty" 24/7 and so the onus falls on one or two of them at most. Editing a post is intended to be less drastic than simply removing the entire post; the words removed don't generally affect the direction of the post very much. The thread in question has actually received much greater latitude than the typical one - perhaps that decision will have to be revisited, as the thread descends into a free-for-all with multiple side topics introduced that aren't particularly relevant to the news that Sano will not be suspended.

Try this: https://twitter.com/michaelholmdahl/status/946620730371985408

While Spring stats should be taken with multiple huge grains of salt, it seems to me that this view takes it a little too far. Management wants to see how players operate under all different kinds of pressure, given that the ultimate goal is to win the WS where the pressure is at its highest. Telling all the players that their job may ride on how they perform in Spring, and backing that up with the occasional reward/demotion for others to see, is part of that. If a guy stinks in Spring, with an excuse of just getting warmed up for the season, I see nothing wrong with sending him to AAA and being told to show he's ready there, if management chooses that route, taking his entire body of work into account of course. As with most things in management, it's a balancing act, dependent in some part on the personality of the individual player, and in some part on the group. You don't want management to be tyrants, you don't want them to run a country club.

That is a good observation. However when it's stated in the article that racism is the cause, I've been assuming that present-day racism is meant. Slavery is sometimes referred to as America's Original Sin, but to really think that it's something uncorrectable through future actions is pretty pessimistic.

BTW, this article from the STrib in 2011 mentions that Scott Diamond cleared waivers before the Billy Bullock trade could be made: http://www.startribune.com/twins-deal-prospect-to-keep-diamond/118817039/ "Diamond was selected by the Twins in the Rule 5 draft and had to remain with the major league club or be offered back to Atlanta for half the $50,000 fee. If a team wants to keep a Rule 5 pick and send him to the minors, that player must clear waivers and then the team has to work a trade with the club that previously had him."

The official rules are on-line, for anyone who doesn't want to accept someone else's summary. https://registration.mlbpa.org/pdf/MajorLeagueRules.pdf If you go down to Rule 6, which logically enough follows Rule 5, the procedure for removing the player from the major league roster is detailed. There is no mention there of trading. Presumably what teams do, when a trade is desired, is to go through the entire process (mainly the Waiver process), and then the player is returned to the original team in exchange for half the draft price. At that point, the two teams can proceed with a trade (perhaps with the half-price money going back where it came from). As has been said in multiple ways, above, this is somewhat fanciful - a player that no other team wants via waivers probably isn't worth trading for anyway. But it could happen. Oh, and the Cub Reporter site seems to have given a good summary. No quarrel there. It's just, the actual rules aren't really that opaque.

I'm at a loss for words to express my pleasure at this news Guess I need an editor to assist me.

Is that slo-mo of Barnes, or regular speed of Mike Pelfrey?

Glutton for punishment that I am, I'll take another crack at what I was trying to get at. While the methods used were perhaps a bit more sly, Chinese laborers (and smatterings of other Asians) were certainly brought over on boats under false pretenses, and once the laborers were here they had little choice but to do what they were told, or die. The law as enforced in California gave them no protection, and the difference to being a slave was pretty much nil. Labor camps involved forced marches that, while purposely not fatal, served to keep weary malcontents in line. There's a fun hiking trail near where I used to live at Tahoe, called the Chinese Downhill*, which is a good workout for someone like me who gets to take a nap after doing it. But was a 1000 foot elevation gain for those laborers to go home each night to sleep after their hard day of work building flumes for the nearby silver mines, since they weren't permitted to camp anywhere near the white population - in addition to the effort, weather conditions get rapidly worse every 1000 feet up. I'm not Chinese, but I speculate your "only one race" paragraph might grate, if read by an activist person of Chinese descent. The article links I previously provided were to offer evidence that those in power weren't just kidding around, if those Asian immigrants started getting too noisy about asserting their theoretical rights. No, this wasn't literal slavery enshrined in a Constitution, nor a Trail of Tears for a conquered indigenous population - different era for one thing. But I think you are falling into a converse trap of looking at the current status of Asians here and believing there is nothing to learn from, nor to compare/contrast. Chinese men wound up dead under suspicious circumstances on the West Coast much as black men in the South did at about the same time. Fires broke out as manifest warnings to local populaces, in both locales. These things stopped happening after a while for Asians, and (as we know) continue today for Blacks. I can think of a few reasons why the enmity toward Asians mostly faded in ways that haven't happened for African-Americans and Native Americans, but I think it's a mistake to simply dismiss the difference out of hand. * The spoilsport USFS gave the trail a more PC name of Tyrolean Downhill, in honor of the destination neighborhood, when the trail was adopted for official maintenance, thereby obscuring what I think is an historically important story.

Tacoma riot of 1885 Chinese massacre of 1871 The Trout Creek Outrage of 1876 Things were pretty ugly for Asian people in our Old West. Not equivalent to slavery in the South, perhaps, but cut from the same post-Civil War cloth as Jim Crow. And then there were the camps in California during WWII...

While he does have his minor league options remaining, he also has enough service time that he can refuse a minor league demotion if he wants to. The player and the team would have to be on the same page with this. I'm thinking he wouldn't go for it, as he wants to start showcasing himself right away for his next contract. But who knows?

I dunno. When I'm curious what the Republican party's headquarters is thinking on an issue, I tune into Fox News. If I want the Democrats' take, I try NPR or MSNBC. Congressional members just magically manage to find time in their busy schedules to be booked on their respective networks. There are two or three interviewers on Fox who don't lob softball questions every time, likewise NPR plays devil's advocate now and then.

That's crazy talk!

Takes one to know one, bub.

Now, what's your opinion on Vitamin B-12 supplements and/or injections?

I would have expected a warning ticket, and not immediate revocation of their license to drive.

Usually I hit the Quote button, but for some reason in this case I didn't. I think I had Doc Bauer's post in mind when I wrote my post: "The solution is pretty simple to me: treat milb ballplayers as salaried employees with a fair earning compensation!" And my wording probably came across like I thought I was at odds with that, whereas I was mainly clarifying what "fair earning compensation" probably needs to mean in terms of the various laws affecting employees. It's not enough to call the paycheck a salary, it really needs to comply. The fact MLB is applying for an exemption is all the evidence I need to believe they know for themselves that they are out of compliance.

I don't know. I'm just glad to see a national writer giving our prospect at least that much recognition, compared to some of the forecasts it seems like are out there.