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TheLeviathan

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Everything posted by TheLeviathan

  1. TheLeviathan
    Unions come with a whole host of their own problems. See: police accountability. Or, hell, the financial state of the city of Chicago. There was a time where supporting a union made sense. Now that they've become corrupt little corporate-lite entities of their own that sway the political system with massive amounts of money....yeah, not so much.
  2. TheLeviathan
    I guess if I believed Avery was innocent and wanted to be taken seriously the LAST thing I'd do is use less than 30 minutes of a biased documentary to establish a timeline of events and guilt. I mean, at that point you should apply for the Manitowoc sheriff's department. You seem like you'd fit in.
  3. TheLeviathan
    If this pushback on Cruz sustains.,...maybe there is hope for a rebirth of the Republican Party towards sanity. Not holding my breath, but everyone should be rooting for it.
  4. TheLeviathan
    When baseball tonight fell off in quality that was the end of my watching ESPN. I only watch it now if there is a rare game i want to see. I want Comcast to suffer because, for many of us, we don't have an alternative for cable or internet and those *@$%&@ sure make us pay for that.
  5. TheLeviathan
    ESPN is second on my list for places I want to suffer - a distant second behind Comcast. I hope those *@%@#$ get really screwed.
  6. TheLeviathan
    What would make it obscure isn't the detail, it's the fact that it's different. The people Trump is pulling in are still voting on Republican platform (anti-immigration primarily), so any distinction about them being registered as Democrats is pretty meaningless. And even if you want to still be in denial about that, the truth is that all the other candidates (your chosen one included) are trying to match the very same rhetoric Trump is using to gain those people for themselves. So like it or not, these people are Republicans that the Republican candidates are courting for votes. I guess your party has just shifted to absorb them out of desperation.
  7. TheLeviathan
    I hope it's Buxton, but I'm 50/50 he comes north.
  8. TheLeviathan
    If you have to dig that deep, perhaps the explanation is that poll is obscure. Non-political people does not equal "democrat". And what support I do see that it is "democrats" is in poor Appalachian people who identify as having Republican stances but are still registered democrats. So, basically, democrats in name only.
  9. TheLeviathan
    My own research? I've tried multiple different searches and nothing of the sort pops up. What polls "break it down in a real way"? If this is a real claim and not just some junk you made up to back up your opinion, it shouldn't be so hard to find. So where should I be looking? Look, I don't think you're a liar....but you're delusional about who is supporting Trump. But by all means, point me to the polls I should be looking at.
  10. TheLeviathan
    I only watched a part of the game from the 1st and into the 2nd quarter, but it seemed like the second unit was out there way longer than they should have been. That also seems to be a reoccurring thing to my very untrained eye. Am I wrong on that? It seems like the Wolves stick with the hockey line change, second unit for way too long.
  11. TheLeviathan
    Im not sure guys pitch the same way every time in the same sense of pinch hitting for pitchers. My time watching the Cubs and Brewers regularly didnt leave me feeling like any kind of radical strategy was happening. Felt like getting a lefty to face a lefty sort of routine.
  12. TheLeviathan
    I firmly believe we'll see Sano-Rosario-Arcia in the OF if the Sano to the OF talk is legit.
  13. TheLeviathan
    Look, where the viewpoint is valid comes down to years of viewing it that way and personal preference. If the end of your argument was "I just like it like that". Well, then, to each their own. I prefer hockey to basketball but that doesn't make it so. If, however, I dabble into justifying my belief beyond that I'm subjecting it to critical examination. Most of the time how managers respond to pitchers batting stays pretty universal. Just like many things in sports people tend to copy the status quo. So it's not like we see a lot of innovative approaches to it. So I don't really buy there is a lot of actual strategy going on. As for the 9 DHs...you're probably right. That would be a logical continuation of my point. If it came down to offensive specialists vs. defensive specialists I wouldn't be opposed to it at all. Give teams the option to field whomever they want for both, mix and match your expanded roster however you want, have guys play both ways - that'd all be fine with me. As long as the goal is to have the sport played at an elite level.
  14. TheLeviathan
    I prefer the DH model as optimal. It's the most realistic about athleticism and how to have the best play possible of the game. Having pitchers hit is deliberately creating mismatches in which someone competent gets to face someone woefully overmatched and incompetent several times a game. And, again, any extra "strategy" is largely overblown. It's a robotic response to the same situations that happen every game.
  15. TheLeviathan
    As bad as Mastro and Butera are they are still twice as good as your average pitcher, I think that fact is getting lost in this comparison as it was when Ben was making it. For me I like the DH because it doesn't pretend pitchers are anything other than incompetent hitters. It recognizes that making them bat is forcing them into a situation in which they are thoroughly overmatched. And pitchers have been badly overmatched for over 50 years. This isn't some new thing brought about by sports specialization. It's just common sense: it's a rare enough gift to throw 95 much less be able to hit 95 with any consistency. It's not ever going to happen enough to mark pitchers a competent group as a whole. It just won't. No sane advocate for pitchers batting has ever advocated hitters pitching for a reason: they know they are so incapable that it would hurt the game. Yet the same problem exists for pitchers in this case, we've just grown so accustomed to this arrangement we seem to miss this fact.
  16. TheLeviathan
    What's the meaningful distinction if I just say this: everyone with a glove should hit and pitch. The only reasonable answer is that not everyone with a glove can pitch well enough, that's why they play elsewhere. I'd simply suggest the same logic works to your argument: not everyone with a glove hits well enough to bat, that's why they're a pitcher.
  17. TheLeviathan
    So that's what we'd gain back? Slightly less incompetence? If the argument is that we need to return to the glory days, this evidence doesn't help that cause.
  18. TheLeviathan
    I don't dispute that baseball pitchers are focusing less on hitters at a younger age - I dispute that it makes a difference. If you think focusing on both is going to give us a future baseball athlete elite at both pitching and hitting I'd call that notion a pipedream at best. Focusing on both might make them slightly better hitters at the expense of being better pitchers. I don't know, but I don't think Ervin Santana is suddenly going to OPS .600 because he picks up a bat more often. You still haven't addressed why you aren't marching Freddie Freeman out to pitch the fourth if it's so important for guys to do both.
  19. TheLeviathan
    No, I didn't change the target - my automatic out comment was in regards to them walking to the plate. At a .317 OPS - they are basically outs the second they step into the batter's box. Many of those are by strikeouts or sacrifices. The point was that they are incompetent hitters. The rest of what you are talking about are exceptions that prove the rule. For every one player you point out that could reasonable do both there are, what? 10 that can't? Maybe more? I don't know what to say to the idea that you can turn 600+ athletes in the country into multi-dimensional baseball athletes at an elite level. It's just not realistic in any sport, why we pretend it can be in baseball is beyond me. I don't want to see pitchers hit any more than I want to see hitters pitch. And I definitely don't understand why we insist on doing one and not the other.
  20. TheLeviathan
    You should not do that, trust me.
  21. TheLeviathan
    I'm not using any heavy bias - the average OPS of pitchers in the NL in 2015 was .317. That's almost exactly half what Pedro Florimon's OPS was with the Twins a few years back. I don't care what kind of lipstick you want to put on that pig - .317 OPS is incompetent. As for your second point, I'd argue the reason pitchers can't hit is the same reason why Teddy Bridgewater can't play linebacker. Or Zach Parise would make a lousy goaltender. Those players have shifted away from those positions because their athletic skill set dictates that they can't play those positions at an elite level. If they're going to perform in an elite league, they should do what got them there. Not pretend they can do both. Yes, would they be slightly less incompetent if they had worked on it their entire lives? Probably. But you're not going to magically transform every elite pitcher into a competent batter. Some guys were just born pitchers. Just like some guys were born hitters. You can't shove a square peg in a round hole. Worse yet, if you were to take this logic to it's fullest - if we're going to force all 9 guys on the field to hit, why aren't we forcing all 9 to pitch too? Wouldn't that make just as much sense?
  22. TheLeviathan
    I wonder how much of that is perception. Certainly more NL pitchers get hit, that's sort of a given. Most of the time the star player eats the pitch, not the pitcher. And even if your perception is true, it's not doing anything to stop the practice.
  23. TheLeviathan
    NL fans are of course going to side with pitchers hitting and AL fans against it - largely because all of us debating the issue only know the kind of baseball we've seen played. To change it one way or the other is a fundamental altering of what we know of as "baseball". So I don't begrudge anyone that wants to keep it their way, my hope would be to get them to look at it as objectively as possible. What does having pitchers hit add to the game? They are incompetent hitters who aren't meant to hit - their athletic skill set has made them pitchers over many years. The strategy around teams removing them from games (to remove their incompetence mind you) is robotic. The way teams attack 8/9 hitters is robotic as a result. Multiple times a game an almost automatic out walks to the plate to get struck out. They jog the bases in goofy jackets, teams tell them that all they want out of their at-bat is to see at least three pitches, and they're routinely called on to bunt themselves out on the off-chance of increasing run scoring. There doesn't seem much more than tradition behind this and people being accustomed to it. I think it's as good for the league to get rid of it as I think it's good that the Vikings avoid playing Linval Joseph at split end or Teddy Bridgewater at linebacker. It's time to just say good-bye to it.
  24. TheLeviathan
    Except pitchers don't hit each other. If that was happening maybe it would stem some of this nonsense (huge maybe)...but that's not what they do. They hit McCutcheon. Or whomever else is the "star player". There are far better ways to change this issue - like hitting their pocket books harder or suspending them for more than one game. The idea that this helps police nonsense just isn't backed up by reality.
  25. TheLeviathan
    Man, you are in a serious state of denial. Still waiting on the source of those polls too.
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