What was my comment weeks ago?
That Koufax threw with his back, that he flexed it more than just about anyone else ever in the game’s history…. And that Kershaw throws exactly like Koufax did.
Kershaw’s got a disc that’s barking at him.
Clayton Kershaw will go on the disabled list with a back injury
Explicitly exempting minor league ballplayers from minimum wage and timecard rules is not harmonious with being a Democrat.
I don’t know how it is a Democrat gets (initially) tripped up over this and takes the side of management over labor.
…were Democrats not bestowed with this presumption of good intentions that rationalizes their corruption.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/bill-clinton-loretta-lynch-224972
Understand… WJC and Lynch may very well have talked nothing but grandchildren…. But WJC has no interest in Lynch beyond the email investigation, right, as she’s ostensibly not sleeping with him or making 6 figure donations to the Clinton foundation. So WJC has no reason to meet her besides the email investigation. Such that he does, yeah sure, they can talk cordially about grandchildren, but its still really all about WJC demonstrating his omnipresence to Lynch.
Professional judgment would dictate not taking the meeting. And ya know, they probably did talk about the investigation, let’s not be childish / obtuse here.
This is a legit complaint for Republicans, a proper outcome would be that got fired, and this is irrespective to the merits of the underlying email investigation.
On how they got a Democrat to sponsor this bill, which is to exempt minor leaguers from minimum wage protections. The Democrat sponsor is Cheri Bustos of Illinois.
I mean, Democrats aren’t supposed to be for exploitation of the worker…. Which is what the minor league pay scale is. $1200 a month for 5 months of work… that’s exploitation. The teams can afford to pay more, and ought to obligated to as a function of the hours these guys put in.
Word police: “loop hole” Bustos, the Illinois Democrat, has a douche-speak statement that characterizes the minor leaguers pay demands as a function of a ‘loophole’ that can be closed.
Uh, that’s not a loophole. Woman must be stupid, profoundly.
I’m vaguely English. My Great Grandfather was born in 1900 or so, he was from Bournemouth. His family ran a brickyard, so it was not an abject Dickensian life with them working their own concern. But he did not get along with his father, so he swapped for a kid’s papers to America, this other kid going because he was an orphan or disadvantaged or something. So my g-grandfather left on this White Star lines ticket… no older than 13… that was kind of Dickensian. Came to St. Paul, worked on I think the NP, or one of the Hill railroads anyway, which is the explanation for so many of my forebears being in these parts. Married into the German-Irish in St. Paul as a young man. Died in 1989, well into my life. Kind of a tuffy fella I’m to understand, but he was sweet to the grandkids and great-grandkids. His working class English accent was so thick as to be nearly incomprehensible, might as well have been Chinese.
Anyway, everyone chooses an English soccer team to be a fan of right. I’ll take AFC Bournemouth. The hard part will I think be finding a stream cast to watch them play on.
Cuz he’s awesome.
http://www.twincities.com/2016/06/27/garrison-keillor-column-pioneer-press/
Guy sounds like he’s a conservative, and that is not the case, we all understand…
It used to be that a significant portion of American men carried the latent psychological trauma of a specific little league baseball experience, that of being the kid on the team who struck out all the time.
I incurred that, I probably struck out 95% of my plate appearances between 8th and 10th grade. Being ‘that’ player can either make you hate the game or it can cultivate a certain obstinacy.
I didn’t play 11th or 12th grade ball in HS. I don’t know that I would have got cut trying out, but I didn’t want to be ‘that’ player, so I didn’t go out.
Still, about that time as a teenager I started taking a couple thousand swings a summer just playing street ball. I had something of a hitting game by the time I was 20. When I was a useful outfielder in amateur ball in the 1990’s, I’d have seasons where I struck out say twice in 60-70 plate appearances.
Such that I had a mastery of something…it was kind of a short, low power stroke where you don’t lift your front leg and then plant it as a part of timing… just see ball and put the bat on it. I hit lots of flares over the infield this way, that was my thing.
Fast forward…. I go into old guy ball this summer having not played in 5 years. I got all these articulated wisdoms collected in my head about the swing, cuz ESPN and internet. I think I am going to have this nice rhythmic leg lift and plant, and it’s going to work cuz timing…. Then when games come, I’m completely helpless. Went 0/16 to start with 8 strikeouts in 4 games. Two weekends ago this guy struck me out 4 times, and I had hit a home run off him in 2003. He ain’t throwing harder now… I’m missing pitches down the middle where I absolutely think I’ve got them and then they go into the catcher’s mitt.
Went to the cage during the week. Not that I was looking for the ‘old’ swing, because I hadn’t really reflected on what the old swing was. But you go in there on the ‘fast’ machine at 45 or 50 ft or whatever it is, you got to get short to the ball. I got short and went ‘Hey! That’s what that was like…’
Anyway, this game yesterday…. 1st AB, went to a 3-2 count and I hit a fastball that dribbled to third, 5-3 play, easy infield out.
2nd AB…. This guy’s game was a fastball slider combo, and he rilly rilly was in love with his slider. Pitcher’s count, it was going to be a slider. I had fouled an FB straight back and took one called, we were at 2-2. This next pitch was as I say, destined to be a little nickel slider, and I’d like to say that piece of foresight was useful to me. But thing is not trying to do that elaborate step and rotate, the door of the subconscious was open. Zoned out, had some guitar riff in my head, and just put the barrel of the bat on baseball without conscious thought even as it had a little ripple on it. Flare… soft liner into shallow center field.
Boy, that’s a trip when you zone out. I had said, I wanted to play old guy ball if all it meant was I got a vigorous throwing session once a week. I hadn’t occurred to me the door to the zone would still be open.
I’ve recently been made cognizant of this personality type that’s rilly, rilly wound up about what the Fed does with interest rates. But, I dunno… such that I think I’m newly cognizant of these guys, they resemble the old gold bugs. I’m not sure they aren’t the same.
I think they have a better argument than the hard money people did though. Far as I can tell it goes like this:
A necessary / mandatory component of “growth” is positive interest rates. Easy enough, but we have central banking, and Fed won’t raise the benchmarks. They say it’s because we have a structurally soft economy, but it’s actually because the government’s debt expense would be huge(er) with it accruing at real world rates.
Now, some of these guys have an inflation phobia that hasn’t come to pass, but I have some sense their finger on this Fed / rates thing is on the mark. You got righty and lefty economists saying, hey increase the rates… fed won’t do it. Why? Is the economy really that soft? I don’t think it is, not that soft here.
Anyway, they won’t raise rates, business still has to make money. If business is not doing it easy in a commercial expansion in a growth environment, they’re doing it by imparting productivity. The obvious way there is to reduce your labor input, and you do it by reducing the amount of man hours or by reducing the man hours’ cost. Generally you steer away from reducing man hours…. You’d reduce output and then have no product. So what’s sought almost universally is a way to reduce your labor cost.
These Brits were pissed about a lot of things. Such that it was ‘migrants’, it wasn’t primarily ‘refugees’ they objected to. It was Poles and Serbians let in by EU rights to migrate, that were taking jobs from native Brits: http://www.vox.com/2016/6/22/11992106/brexit-arguments
So its trade, right, a globalism thing as much as the trade agreements. Cept you can bring in cheap labor instead of cheap products. We’re having that discussion here in the US
I don’t know where I was going to end up with this, narratively, but its Trumpian, basically: this business of undercutting native labor rates to keep commerce chugging along in a no growth environment is a sop to the 1%. Here, Democrats are way, way complicit in that. You’d just not think that would remain tenable. Maybe it won’t.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/06/24/blue-cross-blue-shield-individual-insurance-market
If the blues aren’t making it work, no one makes it work. If the blues don’t stay in, no one will stay in.
Full blown actuarial death spiral, but I’m sure Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein will be around any minute now to tell us not to get excited, and that’s its ‘working’.
Jerrid Weaver only throws 83 now.
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=29592
This allows me to first interject…. There was a time I used to get base hits off guys who threw 83. And I’ve seen guys this year in my 35+ league who throw 83. It’s to say, it’s not a big deal. It’s short of elite athlete territory.
Anyway…. Jerrid Weaver is (was) an elite athlete who threw 92 say from age 18 to age 31. You look at these guys, a lot of times their ability to throw the elite fastball has an obvious relationship to their elite genetic given musculoskeleton. Weaver would be one of those guys, he is tall and (was) strong enough to throw with pro speed.
So the kinesiologist / pitching question is… If you got the pro musculoskeleton… this doesn’t wither that dramatically at age 33, you’re still a 6’ 5, 220 dude or whatever with all that leverage to impose on the baseball. So what changes that you lose your fastball?
I think it’s got to be either:
They don’t through hard because they got an achy elbow or shoulder and it hurts to throw hard
Or
They stopped doing roids
Or….
And this doesn’t seem to seem to have a sub-current of chatter with fellas mulling it… I think people get this vague Meneire’s thing as they get older where the balance mechanism in their ears degrades and you can’t make those fast movements without feeling like you are going to fall down. So if you’re a pitcher, you’d slow down. Slow down your pivot, put the brakes on your push off the rubber. And your fastball isn’t going to have as much life.
And I think these guys slow down to adjust without even knowing it sometimes. Not everyone would be affected to the extreme of course.
Zingy Skyway Lunch 