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why would we trade blake rutherford for Jon Gray? Jon Gray is a #5 pitcher at best

Buy the Cubs and trade their entire roster to the White Sox, replace their players with circus clowns

This is what happens when you have a government guaranteed loans and a society that shames people who don't go to college. As to the thread, as others have illustrated. Esentially impossible unless youre' well off.

This is one time where just being mentioned in that crowd is nice.

To be fair, there is no evidence to point to that the origin is Right or Left. False flag claims seem to piggyback the fact that the right have been gaining momentum in the polls the last 2 weeks. The hashtag #magabomber was instantly trending on social media. everything is pure speculation. hope they catch the perpetrators regardless of political beliefs.

Why the stamps? I don’t recall my courier even accepting them. Correct me if I’m wrong though.

Take that rhetoric to the filibuster.

College is a barrier of entry. Its not different than law school. Its a way to keep people out of the market and therefore have less competition for jobs. If masters becomes too common, then it will be double masters etc.

Eovaldi would have interested me if he was never traded from the Rays this year. Same guy, same arm, same everything and you could've signed him for 3 years and $30mm. Now? I fear on postseason alone he's going to go for 4 years and $56mm. I'd still kick the tires on him though. Can never have too much pitching. I'd max out at 4 years and $48mm.

If you ask anyone who coaches youth sports they'll pretty much all agree to a person that the parents are the worst part. I can remember this one mom particularly who told everyone in so many words I wasn't shit as a coach (this is a fair criticism honestly, if you think I suck as a coach you're allowed to think that) and that I didn't do anything and wasted her time (this is bullshit, I gave them at least 10-15 hours of my time per week FOR FREE on top of my day job - this actually deeply offended my wife more than me because she could see how much time and energy I was putting into this). But she was the main one who protested when I held practices at noon on Saturday afternoons and tried to complain about me to the commissioner, whose response was along the lines of "he is the coach and practice is when he says it is." She had a problem with the fact that her son didn't improve very much by the end of the year. 1. You bring your son to less than 50% of practices where I do drills with the kids for that specific reason 2. The season is only like 2 months, the fuck 3. The pitching rubber and mound are 45 feet. Your son can throw, on average, 44.5 feet. The only way he'll develop that arm is if he throws more and I left him in games to improve. He didn't, and I'm sorry if I couldn't turn your noodle-armed son into Chris fucking Sale.

I believe the issue is video games and electronic devices that have taken away from the pickup game mentality. I have a 14-year-old freshman and have asked this very question to him and his friends. His friends are split up between those who are active in sports and others that are not. They all, however, want to play video games pretty much 24/7. They don't want to go outside as much as we did growing up. And to be honest, if we had the same video games and access to electronics I probably would have been the same way. My son is very active in baseball. We moved him from in-house/LL back when he was 10 years old. I wanted to prep him for HS baseball and give him the best chance to do it. He was already throwing too hard for the kids in LL to catch and in fact, his LL coach moved him to the OF because his son ( 1b ) was too afraid to catch the ball. Travel baseball has been great for competition in some aspects, but it's becoming too watered down. I have a background in college baseball and focused on the development of the kids and getting the kids ready to play at the next level. A lot of my fellow coaches, however, are trying to win all games and trophies. We had a team last year in the area play 105 games and had a kid with almost 150 innings pitched. That's insane. Every kid on my team pitched. I spread it out across all arms. The parents in travel baseball are horrible as a whole. They all believe little Johnny is going to not only make it to college but start at SS. I was helping our 10u team try out kids last summer and one of the mothers comes up and states that she wanted to know if her son was going to play SS and CF throughout his career because she wanted to get him the best baseball scholarship available. I looked at this 9 year old and asked her, so anyone in your family have a background or pedigree who played baseball at an advance level. Nope. Why do you think your son is going to do this. She just said she had money and that should solve everything. I told her that this is a very complex sport to project a 9-year-olds development pattern and how they will grow if they like the sport, and what their long-term goals are. The boy was very much undersized as well. He looked like a kid ready for tball. I asked how tall was the father, she said 5'4. She was 4'11. No one in her family is over 5'6. But Jose Altuve is short and made the majors. I told her that citing a unicorn as a pattern of success is not a good thing to base future success with. I ran the tryouts. The boy was afraid of the ball, couldn't catch, hit or throw. I referred her to the local LL. She was livid with me. A week later I get a snarky email about how she made some travel team that has like 7 teams at 10u and is cashing a check at her son's expense. I talk about how hard it is to move onto each level. When we play in national tournaments like Perfect Game, Cooperstown, etc you see how you truly fit in. It doesn't help to stave off delusion. My son hit .750 in Cooperstown and I had some parent screaming at me to put their kid in at SS and to lead off over my son because some "mythical" scout was there to look at their 12-year-old. Its insane. That boy was hitless and was striking out against advanced pitching at a rate of 85%. Parents treat travel baseball like free agency. Each year they jump from program to program. More worried about the brand than the training or what is best for their kid. In travel baseball, exposure to professional training is probably one of the best benefits. Those programs who focus on winning first probably are not going to build your boy into the player that they are going to be. They focus also on the boys who mature early. My son pitched last year in a tournament in Texas where one of the Texas teams was averaging a 14u player that was 6'1 and 200 lbs. They were bigger than the varsity team at his HS. I shut my son down for the fall to give his arm, body, and mind a rest before the HS grind picks up. He plays for an HS travel team in the summer that starts working out in November. He works out 3 days a week with a trainer. Has a hitting instructor and I am his pitching instructor. Unfortunately, the days of walking up and playing HS baseball because you want to are over. I have heard some of the HS coaches state they want relatively finished products in HS and don't want to teach kids fundamentals.

Disclaimer: I am a fan of analytics, and read fangraphs pretty religiously. However, Greg is right when he says that pitchers getting hurt is because of analytics. Pitchers aren't throwing harder because they're better athletes, they're throwing harder because if you can't miss enough bats, you can't make it to the big leagues anymore. Strikeouts are king for pitchers, and to chase strikeouts the pitching mechanics being used these days are pushing the human body to the limit. That is why you see more instances of thoracic outlet syndrome and a lot of Tommy John surgeries. They have found that altering the timing of the arm in the delivery makes a pitcher throw harder. It also puts a ton of stress on the arm, by breaking the kinetic chain. Instead of chasing health and clean mechanics, pitchers now chase velocity, because you're more likely to strike guys out. The decline of the ground ball specialist and pitching to weak contact at lower velocities, is killing careers, and it is a rare pitcher that makes it to FA without losing velo or being completely healthy. There was a reason why it used to be freaky if a pitcher threw mid-upper 90s, and 100 mph was special. It was even more rare that those guys didn't get hurt. Now they're all over the place. Why? Because emphasis has been put on max velocity vs. pitcher health. Pitchers use timing tricks to achieve high velocity, and more tricks to correct their timing. Eventually it breaks down, and the pitcher breaks, as we're seeing with Kershaw. Analytics are a huge part of that, as they have rendered the 130 K/220 IP contact specialist obsolete. Sabermetricians have said those pitchers aren't valuable. This is the market inefficiency that needs to be exploited. Baseball needs more pitchers like Mark Buehrle. This coming from a guy who absolutely loves watching the hard throwing ace, and 15 strikeout games. They are the best part about baseball, in my opinion. I love hard-throwing pitchers being dominant. Verlander is one of those freaks of nature. Strasburg isn't. Verlander hasn't had an arm injury in his career, and is still throwing 97 mph at age 36. Enjoy him as a fan of the game, because he may be the last of a rare breed.

Kind of reminds me of Chatwood last year. The heavy metrics teams loved him. I may be way off, but I could see him getting 4/48-60 million.