ashbury

Dow futures are apparently down another 1000 at the moment. The cat could still bounce, but right now it's just lying there. This still isn't into 10% "correction" territory yet, I should add. The numbers are just so huge anymore.

It wasn't that long ago when I detailed my attempt to market-time the dotcom bubble ca 2000. So I'm not going there again - I'm just offering a cautious counterpoint - all that glisters is not gold, and not all that bounces is still alive. There is, however, a lot of money to be made in volatility. I'm just not expert enough to do it.

Those with cash might make some money on a dead-cat bounce, at least as long as they are nimble and can get back out fast

Now we learn the Lord doesn't answer every prayer:

When the O-line is successful, guys eventually get open. Were there any holding calls at all? That's fine, as long as it's being called the same for both teams, but it makes for a very different game.

I'm going to have to ask you to take this explosive topic to the Sports Bar forum area - although, we usually discuss only tamer issues like presidential politics and Middle East peace plans there, so The Chicago Manual of Style and its ilk may be a bit too much to handle, and Warning Points could well be inevitable. (j/k, for those of a mind to take this literally)

But the big teams already subsidize the small teams in various ways. The draft, the years of team control over a player at minimal salary, the new luxury tax - these are a way of roping off some of the talent, and letting the bidding happen only for a subset of worthwhile players, and making it punitive to really go overboard. Artificially making a small team's dollars go farther is a form of sharing. The big teams understand the dilemma - they develop the big markets and should reap a lot of the reward for doing that, but it would be for naught if there are not enough opponents to play against to make it interesting. Of course there has to be incentive for the small teams to develop their own markets to their fullest too. It is all a matter of scale, but sharing has already been decided long ago. We're now just debating a further tweak to the process. A syndicate of unequal partners probably can never remain static.

Sorry I didn't get to this thread until now, but I'll stick my moderator's neck out and say that it probably goes beyond fair-use of someone else's intellectual property. IANAL, and it's probably a gray area, even for one. I appreciate that you were sensitive to the matter. You could ask Keith what he thinks of the idea, of course.

It may have seemed like I was diminishing the constructive change he made, but I wasn't. I don't deny that he is doing something materially different. But baseball's a game of adjustment, and adjustment to adjustment. There needs to be some time for the "book" to get updated for a player, before you know whether an improvement in results will be lasting. That's where it's really unsafe for someone at home like me to scout by the numbers. And I'll note that when he got scored on heavily in his last three starts, he was still putting up gaudy K/9 numbers. Anyway, we've all been tantalized by Gibby before, so I fall back on the old saying, fool me 47 times, shame on Kyle, fool me 48 times, shame on me.

Pitchers make changes all the time. I am not sold on Gibson having turned any corner; he's turned corners before, only to disappoint us, and somehow the corner got un-turned in his final three starts in 2017. I'm rooting for Kyle, just not counting on him.

Do Cobb, Lynn and Arrieta get to play this first-half/second-half game? Because, just eyeballing br-com's splits for them quickly, all three of these gentlemen had better second halves too.

But you did invoke "feels vs reals", which is inherently derogatory - such a phrase reserves for the speaker the clear-eyed view of reality. It's not a great deal better than certain terms you object to elsewhere. Let's keep it civil, even in the presence of perceived incivility by someone else.

It sounds like you were wanting to bring in a wide range of issues to discuss all at once. I don't see a purpose to a thread-jack like that. The Cleveland logo topic seems complicated enough by itself. I'm asking, with this specific issue, if are you saying that a decision to remove a logo, that has been the subject of discussion and debate since the early 70s, is really an example of "racing"? And that after all these decades, someone coming to a conclusion that a change is desirable is "reaching to find offense"?

Sorry, Mike. Sometimes my deadpan humor burns me.

Racing? This "please remove Chief Wahoo" movement has been simmering since, what, like, 1970? It seems to me that in many cases protest is acceptable only so long as it is both invisible and ineffective. Once some kind of result is achieved, we're "racing".

I can. I knew Appel would be a bum from the beginning.

Reading from a teleprompter is the exact opposite of every use of "from the heart" I ever heard of. Nothing wrong with preparing your SOTU beforehand of course, just as they all are; it contains what you believe in, and then gets polished and triangulated to within an inch of its life.

It just occurs to me, that the mistaken notion by some 15th and 16th century voyagers that they had reached India when instead it was a western hemisphere landmass... is based on using a word "India" that probably wasn't in heavy use by the local residents of that Asian subcontinent. The word seems to have roots in what Persia called the area around one of the rivers, back in the day. Europeans wound up adopting the identifier India, but the locals seem to use variations on Bharat. Or at least, that's what a few minutes of googling tells me - I am not a linguist and I am confident that there are subtleties within subtleties in what I have just stated, not to mention outright mistakes. The point is, it's extremely complex and the misappropriation of names goes layers deep. But the common thread between this, and the Cleveland team's nickname, and Chief Wahoo, is a heavy vein of eurocentrism. That by itself makes me wary, when it's applied to someone other than the European migrants themselves. Oh, and back to this: Teams are named for a variety of reasons, often to notarize local distinctiveness (Expos, Astros, Rangers, Senators, Brewers, Dodgers, Rockies), or even simply their laundry (Reds, Browns, Red Sox, White Sox). One different kind of reason is to imply toughness. Are the Detroit Tigers named to "honor" tigers? No, it's to try and suggest bloodthirsty fierceness. Giants are formidable foes that you'd best run away from. Even Blue Jays are pesky critters when riled. Wild Indians were, well, wild and they put up a tough fight, for a while there at least, dontcha know. Naming a team after a militarily defeated people may be aiming for an aura of toughness, but is at best a left-handed compliment, meaning no honor at all.

In addition, I expect that the recent brief federal shutdown will wind up leaving most middle of the road voters seeing it as an example of fecklessness by the Democrats (even if that's not the word they come up with).

If you don't believe MLB will understand the message if it contains a typo, I fail to see how a second typo will improve matters.

Basically.

If robots have aspirations, they probably share that.

I get the romance of the game. Not of the wrong calls by someone not vying to win. Overcoming adversity is a mainstay of the human condition. I just got done reviewing Kirk Gibson's home run video. You know the one. A lot of baseball packed into that one at-bat. (A good case study for the pace-of-game discussion of another thread - I don't mind an eight-minute plate appearance with the batter fiddling around a lot, in the right situation.) The plate umpire didn't figure into that bit of heroic narrative at all. Indeed I'm trying to remember any of Baseball's big moments where overcoming a questionable umpiring call figures into it. All I can come up with is Don Denkinger, or Galarraga's almost-perfect game, and nobody overcame those - quite the reverse, actually. While those aren't balls-and-strikes as discussed here, I wouldn't want to see a perfect game marred by a terrible ball-four call (or even ball-one, followed by three wide ones) either. Is there a good instance of a big moment to tell our grandchildren about, set up for instance by a terrible called strike that put the batter in an 0-2 hole which he overcame?

I guess I'm too much an engineer by nature. I'll never see the romance in getting a call wrong.

I already looked for it in my library's online catalog, but it's not available anywhere in the Boston Westmetro network. (BTW the first name is Derrick.)