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I’m not going to try to argue that Avila’s signings have been good. But to be fair he really only had two offseasons where free agent signings would have made sense, and the second one they were already over the tax line. But yes, pelfrey and lowe and zimmermann and Upton didn’t work out. But at least he got out of the upton deal thanks to the angels incompetence. But AA did successfully sign and flip Martin and Fiers during the tear down years. Did DD have good FA signings? Pudge and Maggs worked out. Victor’s first contract worked. His second was awful. Joe Nathan was bad. Jose valverde was bad. Prince was a very bad contract but he got out of it (after eating money to do so but whatever). Johnny Damon? Sean Casey for a second year? I’m sure I’m forgetting someone obvious. He did a lot of extending. Not sure if that counts in this discussion or not. But extension contracts to Robertson and Willis were nonsensical and Cabrera’s might be one of the worst in MLB history. I know it’s only natural to compare past and current GMs, and I know the present state of the team makes it easy to blame Avila (and the past state makes it easy to praise DD). I just don’t think it’s as good/bad as it is being made out to be.

You see the wrong answer here because you are working from the wrong premise. The issue is never risk in a vacuum, it is always risk vs need. Students need to be in school a lot more than people need to be in theatres. The key is get R1 down to less than one *overall*. You don't need to stop everything, but you need to choose which things are more needful to do while keeping overall spread at controllable rate. You can argue about the particular wisdom of opening schools, but not because there is any meaningful comparison to movie theatres.

“You won’t find me unless you have a Russian passport “

He’d just choke. 🙄

Yes I do. And Yes there are still problems but not as bad as they are here. New Zealand had zero cases for the fourth day in a row. In Canada it's going very well. It's absolutely mind boggling to think that somehow this was inevitible. It wasn't. He ****** it all up and the people who voted and support him are partially to blame. "Hey, let's get a businessman in there... it'll be great". You get what you pay for. I remember him tweeting out a picture of the stock market one Friday afternoon after the markets closed.... as if anyone gave a flying **** about that when they were sent home from home, kids from school, meat not on the shelves, and no TP to be found.... "Hey the market went up again. Woo Hoo." Not all outbreaks are created equal. And this is also a case where the US could have actually led the charge and perhaps discovered something that could have helped other countries and be a leader like we were until we elected Don Trump President. No, it wouldn't be perfect or normal with another president but there wouldn't be 200K dead and a thousand more by the day either. He still doesn't get it. He only cares about it now because of the election. If this were 2019 or a year into a new term it would be a lot worse.

It will not be Lloyd McClendon...You cannot sell that to this fanbase in year 5 of the rebuild.

Practical use of money for election

What's disingenuous is your strained analogy. Iran immediately started making fissile materials the day the US pulled out of the deal in order to put pressure on the Europeans to give them more money. The Iranians had been violating the spirit of that deal from day one: testing missile delivery systems, accumulating nuclear materials, not allowing inspectors into certain sites. And yet when the US pulls out of the deal it is the US that somehow scrapped it as opposed to the Iranians who kept pushing the boundaries of the deal and then holding their hands up and saying "who? us?". Look, if you want to let the Iranians play you for fools on the premise that they get a bomb in 10 years instead of 5, that's fine. But don't operate under some illusion that they actually stopped developing their nuclear program. They most certainly did not. The larger question is what are we actually going to do about it? Are we going to go to war? Are we going to continue our cold war spy tactics to disrupt their activities (that was occurring under Obama before Trump)? What are we really prepared to do to prevent them from developing a bomb? My response to that is that we are not prepared to go to war to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear device. And once they get one, the Saudis will get one soon after and Turkey will likely have one soon after that.

Get off the cross. I need the wood for a project.

meh. this site is 95% anti-trump all the time, no matter what happens. youre at least willing - when directly asked - to say not everything the administration has done has been the worst thing ever. however, most of the posters here would not go that far. and 99% of everything posted here is about bow trump sucks and everyone who supports him is an idiot. if you disagree with that you get ostracized and jumped on immediately. i mean, thats fine and all, this is a message board and people can say what they want. and trump does suck ***, but lets not pretend that recognizing that means melody is mocking you or anyone else.

I'm pleased to know I have communicated at least clearly enough over the last 3 1/2 yrs for that to be true.

seriously. Virtually none. He has been wrong on the economy, wrong on US job recreation, wrong on immigration, wrong a thousand ways in terms of destroying good government. So he here and there he has signed a bill and that is supposed to make all the rest not matter? He has been a disaster for Truth, polity, policy, civility, accountability, the environment, international relations. None of that goes away because a bill here and there that wasn't in line with the rest of the travesty that is his Admin. Seriously, it's like asking if we shouldn't have given Hitler credit for being a dog lover. Even if you do it doesn't change the balance enough to bother with the premise.

I don't think smaller markets have anything to do with it. It has more to do with playoff revenue. Even so, I don't see the need to copy what other leagues are doing just because that's what they are doing.

They should hire Lloyd permanently so I can watch this site explode.

Convenient that you think it principled that maintaining your standard now is more important than righting a wrong regarding the very same standard.

If the Tigers win today and the Jays lose, the Tigers will be 3.5 games out of a playoff spot going in to the next to last Sunday of the season. Just like 1987.

Convenient

This. The quote from the Woodward book where he says he “didn’t want to cause a panic”. He was not talking about causing a panic among PEOPLE, he was talking about causing a panic on the stock market. The STOCK MARKET. The investors, the brokers, his billionaire friends. Isn’t that obvious to everyone? He does not care about people.

He memorized that line.

Pudge won't sign unless they sign Vina first.

Depends on how many mushrooms you ingested.

Overly attached boyfriend meme, pt. II: This on contains the greatest post in the history of this board:

Overly attached boyfriend meme:

May have something to do with the platform I shared from. I use Google Drive and Google photos so if you have that platform it probably comes through, but if you are on Apple or something it may not. I notice videos my wife sends me VIA text from her iphone ALWAYS show up like thumb nails barely able to see with all the distortion of the compression or something.

My first response was to a reporter tweeting what Stephanopoulus saying something like 'You're trying to strike down pre-existing conditions'. My argument is that by itself is misleading. Trump is trying to strike down ACA which does have pre-existing conditions included in it, but has stated if he succeeds in getting rid of ACA, he'll then follow up with a bill to take care of pre-existing conditions. I initially stated that such a process of doing something that you know isn't perfect now with the idea of going back and fixing errors you see in it later is not new precedent (as seen by the original passage of ACA). Guess I can relate it to defense bills. Anytime i've seen Democrats push back on defense bills the Republican response is to point to something that all sides can agree on that have public support. Republicans point out how injured military folks won't get the funds they need via the VA. If the Dems hold out on the bill, that is exactly what will happen, but the Dems simply are trying to see if there is a better way to spend money overall and of course they are going to make sure the VA folks get theirs.

54

Apologies if someone already put this here once, but this is pretty cool.

Because there is a big difference between real Democratic proposals on paper in black and white that have either died in the Senate or never gotten a hearing from a GOP House, and GOP vaporware. Or worse, the kind of pull up the ladder and flood the lower decks bills that the likes of Paul Ryan would regularly put in black and white. Of course since Trump the GOP doesn't even bothers to try and write legislation since Donnie and Mitch can't seem to figure out their 'process'.

Because they are better than the alternative?

In what universe? Surely not any one in which they had 12 years to formulate one and completely failed.

In Trump's defense, he's used the same argument that the dems did in passing it in repealing it (Have to just do it and figure out how to fix it after). Plus he has consistently said he'd protect pre-existing conditions. Of course that means you have to actually trust Trump to keep his word, so yeah....

More like t**d mentality

I find the sense of privilege among the coaching and athletic management establishment sort of disgusting. The conferences appear to be buying up diagnostic services that by any public interest measure would be better be deployed elsewhere. It's fair enough for private parties to conduct themselves in that fashion, but hardly appropriate at a public service institution like a State University. How many of these schools run Hospitals where those capabilities could clearly be put to more practical public health impact? Wouldn't you think that with all the honor and character sports is supposed to be teaching these young athletes they should even be refusing to be put at the front of the line for such services?

Sometimes I feel the same way. I'm a prototypical Trumper, a 60 year old white man. I don’t wear a red hat though and before Trump came along I barely cared about politics. It's just Trump (and his followers) are such cold hearted and horrible people. I like to laugh, smile and have a good time. The only thing I hear out of them is hatred and disgust for every fellow human who doesn't feel the same as they do. Donald wants to divide us so we fight each other while him and his cronies rob the country blind. And he has millions of cult followers.

Buddha, don't fall for this. Anything you say will be discredited or you'll be informed Obama should get the credit for setting it up. At the very least, make sure you start out your post declaring that anything you say does not mean Trump is a good president, he sucks, you won't vote for him, he's going to ****, he's dumb....etc.

Thank you angry Bernie voters for sitting out 2016. Assholes.

Joe is very emotive. Almost cathartic to see him rise to this moment.

Can’t the same argument be made for returning to campus for classes? And with regard to football, I think it’s clear that if you have 100 kids visiting the football building every day and interacting to practice and all that, you are increasing the amount of close contact relative to no football. However, with them being tested daily, you are also identifying very early individuals that have the virus. So that particular kid isn’t going to go out and unknowingly spread it. So, I guess I don’t know that it follows that playing football actually increases the risk of spread or increases the risk of spread outward from football and into the community. The program being undertaken by football, to me, is improving the detection and isolation of the virus. These kids don’t live in a bubble, so it seems far more likely to me that if they catch it they are going to catch it from doing something outside of football. And that would happen regardless of whether games or practices are occurring. The football testing program is a positive that realistically doesn’t exist absent the return to play program.

ooh, nice pic, @John_Brian_K! (FWIW, I had the problems on my chromebook, and I'm all-in on the google ecosystem, for better or for worse.)

Nice

This looks like a good starting point https://thebulwark.com/what-a-post-trump-conservative-coalition-could-look-like/

I don't think baseball is being done in because of playoff formats or even because the game has gotten slower than it used to be. I think it is dying because not enough young people play it for fun anymore. And I don't know if there is any solution for that in a nation where housing density only goes down and families are down to 2.7 per household. You need a lot of kids in a close age group in close neighborhood proximity for baseball to be any kind of option for kids to play for fun and in most of suburban America you don't have that anymore - even if you could get the kids away from the electronic toys. I don't believe baseball will never compete with a moving spectacle sport like football or even basketball among people who have never played it. Baseball belongs to an era where there were 5 brothers at every farm house in the country and 8 houses with 4 kids each to each acre in the city and those cities had the money to maintain ballfields every half mile in every direction. None of that is coming back. Demographics is destiny and the demographics for baseball in 21st century U.S. suck.

He's right. The MLB season was your favorite independent neighborhood restaurant. It wasn't fancy, but you felt comfortable there and the food was great. Then they became a chain and they made more money but quality suffered. finally, they decided to turn it into McDonalds.