Hairyducked Idiot

Ultimate freeroll. If the Cubs do anything cool it counts, if not it’s just a glorified ST anyway who cares.

Same. Logo looks like a snake with its tongue out

Yup. I think the current format is perfect. I go back and forth on the DS being 7 games instead of 5 but that's it. Have you ever been watching game 4 of some random AL division series like Angels-Twins or whatever and thought “man, I sure am glad we are guaranteed at least another week of this before moving on to the ALCS”? I mean, I haven’t, but I also don’t actually like baseball so maybe it’s me.

It’s a fake season, do whatever you want, but don’t you dare touch the playoff format for real seasons in the future

They're a bad team that only got in because 11 per conference felt awkward. If they win a series, they should be forced to do an apology line instead of a handshake line.

One of those games was the 2015 Wild Card game that singlehandedly ended the Pirates' mini-window. It felt well in hand at 1-0 in the first, then Schwarber making it 3-0 in the third felt like a dagger.

Just hitting the driver? I know you just started and didn't know if you got irons as well. That's pretty good for first time on the range. A lot of times people have a hard time getting the ball up in the air due to various reasons so good to see you're getting 170+. Just the driver. I think there's a lot of carryover from hockey that helps. Being conscious of where your weight is on your feet, generating power from the hips, letting your hands lead and the club follow. I'm not an athlete at all but I am a huge nerd about technique. The best tip I've gotten so far is from that Saguto guy. I was twisting myself up trying to turn 90 degrees backwards for the windup with just my shoulders and it felt crazy awkard. He suggested collapsing your back hip to get the first 45 degrees, then turning your shoulders to get the remaining 45 degrees, and that felt *way* more natural and let me uncoil easier.

After getting a hitting mat, a $50 driver off amazon, and hitting into a blanket in my backyard enough to feel confident I wouldn't send the club flying out of my hand or hit the ground 2 feet behind the ball, I went to the driving range today for the first time. It went a lot better than I expected. I pulled my share of ground balls foul past the third baseman, but by the end of the session I was hitting about half of them reasonably well and clearing the 167 marker on the fly routinely.

The Pittsburgh RSN wants Ohio Pirates fans to call their local cable deliverer and demand that it carries the local RSN so they can watch Pirates games. The RSN will charge that local cable deliverer a pretty decent fee for this right. If they don't black out the games, then there's no reason for all those cable companies to carry the RSN at all. So they pay MLB a ridiculous fee to, among other things, impose the blackouts to make sure they're the only way to watch the game for literally anywhere the team might have a concentration of fans.

And since the whole point of this season is to keep the local cable deals happy, then the blackouts are gonna be even more important to them.

I've been watching tons of Youtube. I really like Jay Saguto but I can't tell if he's a good teacher or a nutjob. Is it harder than staying put with knives on your feet on top of ice? Easier, but harder than the soccer classes I took.

I am starting to learn to golf. It is difficult, in case anyone didn't know.

What if the player's case is traced to something outside of his job? What would that matter? The entire point is these guys can all easily infect each other after getting it from anywhere. The whole premise of reopening the season is the theory that big strong men can't die from it so it's not really an issue. They've basically created a new DL category assuming the guys that test positive just need a little R&R. It has been more or less accepted that a huge surge in positive tests will very possibly cause it to shutdown. If, and I don't anticipate it happening, but if a player actually dies from the disease during the season it blows the whole thing out of the water. The *justification* is big strong man can't really die from it. The real reason is $. They'll find a new justification if they need it.

What if the player's case is traced to something outside of his job? It'll still cement the possibility as real (and perceived to be more likely than it is, perhaps) and lead to pulling back. We've made long standing/permanent changes to society in reaction to plenty of unlikely events that just hadn't occurred yet before. I think seeing a player die would make players far more fearful of getting it, too, even if they can prove he didn't get it from "work." Maybe I'll end up being wildly wrong (as per usual). But remember, we're not talking about what you or I would do. At the end of the day, MLB just needs 30 billionaires, some politicians and ~750 willing baseball players. The amount of money they stand to lose if they don't have some sort of season is enormous. They didn't become billionaires by prioritizing lives over money.

If a player dies from COVID? Nah, if that happens it’s dunzo. What if the player's case is traced to something outside of his job?

I'd be pretty shocked if they cancelled. As long as they can find 25 x 30 players to fill the rosters, they're gonna run through something and declare a champion to fulfill the TV contracts.

The discussion about goalies came up while I was taking a break, but as a veteran of four years worth of terrible adult beginner rec league hockey, this subject is to me like native issues is to OMC. Nhl teams finding emergency goalies instead of skiing up players has been around forever. I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but I think they pulled an amateur goalie out of the stands during a stanley cup final back in the newsreel days. Basically everything on skates is harder than it looks. Making tiny knives on the bottom of your feet move your body the way you want them to is way more ideosyncratic than it intuitively feels. Goalies tend to be among the best skaters on the team because making small, accurate movements is actually really hard. Staying square to the puck and not leaving half the net open means moving precisely the right amount side to side or in and out every time the puck moves, and the puck is always moving. No matter how I type it, google thinks I'm looking for Scott foster so I can't find the video, but a major junior team had a skater suit up in an emergency a few years ago. He gave up double digits goals and didn't look remotely comfortable.

As someone who covered several dozen high school basketball and volleyball games on reservations before Da Bum took my job, I guess I have a responsibility to wade in. Changing the names and characterizations is as much about forcing white people to acknowledge the truth of their cultural legacy as it is whether or not the victims feel personally offended. We live in the aftermath of a multi-century campaign of genocide and theft that was colonialism, full of gaping wounds that need to be addressed. Addressing long-standing instances of cultural appropriation are important symbolic victories (well, as important as symbolic victories can ever be, where no real wealth or power changes hands) in the campaign to get the beneficiaries of colonialism to overcome decades of propaganda and realize that the world requires more from them than merely not perpetrating new harm but to actively roll back existing harm. It is not enough to merely Not Be Racist Anymore, things have to actively be changed.

I think if you're a 12th seed you should have to play in front of the home team's fans and also have an additional penalty like playing with your opposite hand stick

I saw a poll on twitter a while back that asked whether it was worth it to have a baseball season was worth it if just ONE person was going to die as a result. Most people, including myself, said no. Of course, there are fatalities that happen due to baseball. A fan might fall trying to catch a ball (or after having too much to drink). Somebody might get hit in the head with a bat or a ball accidentally. These things happen, and it's just the risk we take by going out the door every morning. By going to these places, we are accepting the 1 in a million possibility that it might be us that gets hurt. If it's just a matter of accepting that risk, I'm okay with having a baseball season. My issue is that most of the risk isn't being shouldered by the coaches, players, and fans. Most of the risk is that somebody will get sick at one of these events, and then come home and spread it to their families, their coworkers, etc... and those people will spread it as well. People far removed from the chain of decision-making will be the ones bearing the brunt of the cost. Something about that doesn't sit right with me. I hate this entire line of arguments because everyone *knows* they don't really live their life by the "if there's even a chance one person could die, we must shut it all down" standard, and they're just *daring* me to be the never-diagnosed-but-everyone-knows aspie who points that out.

Having a season doesn't bother me. If you take reasonable precautions, the chances of transmission chains happening because of playing an outdoor sport should be pretty slim. Some players are going to inevitably test positive, but some players would test positive without playing too.

So what? I love hockey Same but the NHL is funny

Hockey remains the world champion of weird stuff happening. Team TBD won their draft lottery, meaning the No. 1 overall pick goes to the winner of a second lottery made up of teams that lose the made-up play-in round if the playoffs ever happen.

So I take it we won't be hearing from Jake for awhile.

The financial incentive to fulfill the TV contracts and declare a completed season are huge. It may prove impossible, but they'll give every imaginable effort to make it work.