jung

On the age of the candidates, I am old as dirt and I am less than pleased with all these old farts running. Trump, Biden, Bernie....they are all too old IMO but folks much younger than I appear to be absolutely determined to vote one of these three guys in. Bernie turns 79 in Sept. So we would be expecting him to make it to age 83!!!!!!

That is May 25th! I would take the over on that bet all day long. Only shot I think they would have at that is to roll right into regular season games immediately upon opening the stadiums again. If we learn enough from China, SK, Italy, all the countries that are farther downstream than we are to suggest that there is little risk on the back side of the bell curve for contagion then maybe they make May 25th. There will likely be a good deal of pressure to get back up and running across the entire economy as so much of the economy is going to get hit in this. So many people are contractors or part of the gig economy and they are really going to take it on the chin. One of my friends does marketing promotions. She has had three of her promotions canceled just now with no new jobs coming up. Everybody is canceling everything.

There is one case to be made for a 3.75 month long season. Assuming they could be ready to play in a week (that actually sounds hard to believe but maybe) they could play maybe 3.5 months of super baseball, unencumbered by the need to get through a full 162 game schedule. They could just let it all hang out for 3 and a half months and then playoffs. Could be a fun change of pace.

Seems to me that last week we were at the bottom of the rather steep curve that Italy is on just ahead of us by about 12 days. Now we have started up that steep slope of contagion. If it peaks 4 weeks from today then we have something like a 16 week event. You end up with 4 weeks where if you are not testing the virus looks like it is patchy and hit or miss. Then you get 8 weeks right in the thick of things, 4 weeks on the upslope, a top and 4 weeks on the downslope. 4 more weeks where China is now with very few new cases being reported. So that would be 12 weeks left from last week. Puts us right at about the 1st week in June. Sounds like that would leave something like a 3.75 month season at that point. Jacko can chime in if I got any of the above terribly wrong. We would have been wise to follow the SK model. But that is water over the dam now. Gonna' be a tough choice but if that is what it is, they should probably just cancel.

This is about the most absurd statement coming out the ever remarkably absurd MLB that I could think of. This one REALLY takes the cake. They must be short of help over there if the same people working the cheating scandal are working COVID-19 issues.

Sarcasm alert because .........well.........its jung but "Can't we all just get along"

The Jet Blue crowd is really not much distinguishable from a 1970's or 80's style Fenway crowd. So Toronto's Jr lays into a pitch today. The wind catches it and it does not go to LF. Travis Shaw now wearing BlueJay's laundry takes the next pitch deep to RF. You can guess what you could hear from one in the crowd over the mics. "Why can't we get players like that"! Classic....just classic.

1) the Yanks have proven to be organizationally deep enough to survive those sorts of injuries. We have not proven to able to do that 2) The Red Sox being the Red Sox in the context of my comment was resigning Sale when they did and signing Eovaldi for too much money into a circumstance that included confronting the looming Mookie Free Agency. Clearly the Sale resigning is blowing up in our faces and I suspect signing Eovaldi for too much money will blow up in our faces as well.The pitching staff today looks like ERod and pray for 4 days of rain.

Seems to me that Manfred's penalty for Sox cheating has been meted out already. Its ............the Sox being the Sox. Just incredible. Not trying to rain on anybody's parade. But you have to admit, this is just so Red Sox.

I see the gallows humor is in full on mode today.

"Decent" as in somebody that has not given up a run an inning. This was predicable. I don't see anybody expected Sale would pitch an entire season. My outside expectation was that they would protect Sale and taper him off somewhere along the way. That was the best I was hoping for.

Which had fans watching every AB, which had networks cutting into programing to see the next McGwire/Sosa AB. Remember, at the time we as fans at least in general were not aware with certainty that McGwire and Sosa were juicing. They were both big guys hitting the ball out and though it took some degree of denial to put the juicing issue aside like that, many baseball fans were willing to go there because MLB was really in trouble for at least the second time in my lifetime because of the strike year. In that era, losing MLB, a real possibility was more of an issue. The general feeling was "you jerkoff millionaires and billionaires cannot even give me a full season of baseball, cannot even crown a champion and you expect me to just saunter back into your ballparks??????? f*** YOU and the horses you rode in on MLB. Fans were little interested in the fact that the owners were stupidly getting caught colluding in the late 1980's which ultimately led to the labor unrest and strike in the 90's. You collude to corrupt a contract as a bunch of franchisers and your ass is hung out in the breeze. You have to be dumb as a tree stump to try to get away with that. But fans did not care. They hated the whole miserable bunch, owners and players and blamed everybody. More distain for the owners but I don't really think it mattered. If the fans could have gotten away with it, they would have drawn and quartered the owners and tarred and feathered the players. Whether we now think it was interesting or compelling, Mcgwire/Sosa brought the fans back without question.

Agreed...Manfred is obsessed with changing the game itself as a means to draw fans and he has a cracked dome. Manfred is an idiot!

I don't. MLB certainly would not have considered marketing the fact that Mcgwire/Sosa literally saved MLB from itself in the way that Bird/Magic saved the NBA. The difference is that as far as we know Bird and Magic were not juicing and did not have coil-over springs in their basketball shoes or other such nonsense. Mcgwire and Sosa were juiced to the max. Same for the cheating scandal. I don't see any way MLB marketing is influenced by the cheating scandal. MLB will just want to sweep that under the rug ASAP. I do think Manfred understands that Mcgwire/Sosa saved MLB but he does not understand what about Mcgwire/Sosa was so compelling and what about it captured the imagination. Hence, we end up with super juiced Manfred baseballs because HE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND. There is nothing interesting about 170 pound soaking wet pipsqueaks hitting juiced baseballs a mile. Manfred's super juiced baseballs will not and do not create what was so interesting and compelling about Mcgwire/Sosa.

Agreed...but it just points out that much more clearly the MLB position. It might be the wrong position but its theirs. I would really have to know more about their licensing agreements, their broadcast agreements ...all of that to be able to gain any feel for whether they have their heads screwed on straight or not. As you would know from reading my posts across a broad range of topics I don't think MLB has its head screwed on straight about much of anything. But in this instance the crux of the issue might be in documents/contracts that are not visible to me.

MLB is addicted to the monetary opportunity they see in their TV network, MLB Network. That's why. That is where they put the highlights. They have shows on the best defensive plays, HR's, best offensive show, best pitching job, all sorted weekly. They have features they run on their prime time show, I think, "MLB Tonight" that are so defined. They are certainly not going to upload it to a media that does not return them the revenue numbers they appear to believe they will get out of their network. I am not convinced that MLB thinks that in this instance what works for the other major pro sports (free uploads) will work for them. They could be right. I could see them able to make that argument to themselves though I would really have to think about it to see if I would agree with them.

I tend to agree with you on this point. They are all milking it now. IMO, none of them think it will be here in a 100 years nor even 50 years. I don't think so either. They are not interested in saving it. Funny how similar that is to everything else we are doing in this country. We have become decadent in a way that is beyond reasonable. We have become decadent in a way that would amaze even the staunchest cold war Communists. Not meaning to draw on politics but there are stark political parallels to what is happening in MLB that makes what is happening in MLB not at all surprising. In fact, your average 2020 Russian as decadent as he is would make any cold war Communist roll over in his grave.

ERod looked real good. Change looked like he never had an off season. Just threw it like 2019 never ended.

Voit looks like he lost a bit of weight in the off season.

Game got pushed to NESN+ locally by the Bruins.

1:00pm start. NESN says it has the game

Well there are two sides to every coin. The drug induced HR battle between Sosa and Mcgwire literally pulled MLB out of the doldrums of the strike years which almost killed MLB for at least the second time in its life. Where Manfred has gotten it wrong is that the HR battle between Sosa and Mcgwire was exciting. There is nothing exciting about seeing poorly struck baseballs hit by pipsqueaks leave the yard. His ultra-juiced baseball is a fail as has been most of the garbage Manfred has foisted onto the game.

Some of them don't even wear normal "sleeves" to pitch. Now they have to wear this thing.

I am sure some of them are just loving that!

I don't think the players understood how capable the owners are of finding a loophole or a way to take advantage of a contract that they did not think of and the consequences of same. They did not think the Owners would try to collude with each other either. It takes real scurrilous types to actually attempt to collude to corrupt a contract because if you do that your ass is really hung out in the breeze. But the owners were quite capable of trying regardless of how STUPID it was. It required a law suit which the Owners promptly lost to resolve that mess. MLBPA still has good legal representation when you compare it to, lets say the NFLPA. But its not the equal of either Marvin Miller or Donald Fehr. Miller was the best MLBPA had. Fehr was not quite as good. But Fehr was better than anything they have today for a legal team or legal representation for contract negotiations.