nrockway

Right! Forgot about that one, Sanchez rocks. I don't think anyone expected he'd be a Cy Young frontrunner, but man, they trade him for Mead and then don't even give Mead a shot. Big W for us if Mead can outplay Chandler Simpson/Morel. Shouldn't be too hard.

oops, didn't see this post. really? I thought it was kinda endearing. usually he's just moping. Lu just seems like a socially awkward dude but is getting in on the fun. at least that's how I'm reading into it. I hope he sticks around.

you're forgetting one: not a very good salesman of male enhancement products...or whatever nugenix is. testosterone apparently.

https://packaged-media.redd.it/0hhf9wy0r9if1/pb/m2-res_480p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1754895600&s=6ceabc9c15d9bedb14f0e0619198669bab58c01e I've never seen Luis this ecstatic. They need to work on the handshake. Luckily they'll have the next decade (alongside multiple World Series appearances and MVP awards) to figure it out. But seriously, what if these two combined for, like, 12 WAR next season? Conceivable.

looks like Jacob Gonzalez is really hitting the ball since the call-up. Does he actually look better or just a hot streak? Meidroth should be back soon, but I wouldn't mind seeing Gonzalez get a shot this year if another infielder goes down. Charlotte's roster looks like it could beat last year's Sox...

Schriff had a much better call on this moonshot, but something about hitting it to the concourse is extra special. boring call, you're right.

The Rays have made some pretty bad trades lately. Manzardo for Civale was dumb. They didn't get anything for Eflin. The Arozarena trade looks pretty good. Parades is way better than Morel. Am I missing any big ones? edit: maybe they got good value for Jason Adam, but he looks really good in San Diego and Lesko has been injured. I thought the idea was that they trade for pitchers and 'fix them'. Seems like they broke Civale and Hauser (we'll see what he does the rest of the year). Do they have new management or something?

holy s%*#

Have to think he'll start walking more and lowering the K's as teams adjust. I don't think he's had a real opportunity to show off his 'eye'. He's been better than I thought he would be so far, at the plate and defensively, but the 'plate discipline' is I think what set him apart in the minor leagues.

LOL that's really funny. She'll fit right in. https://imgur.com/DXzxtVe I guess her accuracy rate was 91% which doesn't seem like a strong showing. based on this data. Maybe pretty good for a first ever MLB outing, who knows. That first pitch is so funny though.

I feel like this is a white guy, internet take because it ignores the fact that, you know, the people who live in those neighborhoods don't exactly like living around crime either and being the victim of a stray bullet or mistaken identity. Black people are moving out of Chicago at a faster rate than any other group (this is from 2016, but it has accelerated, these people do some good research on it). Most of the victims of violent crime are Black. White North Siders are pretty much segregated from it, probably drive a car, and tend to have opinions like this. It's not a binary between "Chicago is hell on Earth" and "Chicago is just fine, nothin' to see here". Per capita is a useful statistic, but think about how much a singular crime will affect a population of 2,000,000 vs a population of 5,000. Rural America is in fucking trouble too, we shouldn't ignore this. They don't have grocery stores either. There are no jobs unless the town has a mine or a furniture workshop or something. Drugs infect these communities. It's sad, you can go town by town in Wisconsin or wherever and see the places where methamphetamine has shown up. Check it out, crime usually stems from a lack of jobs. You don't go robbing people when you're gainfully employed, do you? You make a good point that this has absolutely nothing to do with race but primarily economic anxiety. Check out this report from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority: there is a strong positive correlation between 'fear of crime' and 'social vulnerability'. AKA the people in wealthy neighborhoods think there is nothing wrong but those who are vulnerable might disagree with them. There's the point about Fox News and there's a reason that propaganda works, because there's a shred of truth to it. Of course they misinterpret it for evil, hateful purposes, but you can't really address the propaganda and counter it if you just stick your fingers in your ears and pretend everything is just fine. edit: anecdotally, I'm thinking about some meeting I attended years ago discussing development around the 43rd Green Line where a bunch of idealistic white people were talking about how the "no loitering" signs around the area were racist, but the Black business owners are like, "uh, we put those signs up". Consequently, that project went forward and now a bunch of whites live there in what is pretty much a gated community (go check out The Forum though, what a cool place. give them money).

The same uniform as the rest of them. Do you get aroused when you watch baseball, oldsox? I don't judge.

soon as I turn on the tv, some guy named Caiaphas is hitting a home run. what would the pope think. never heard of this Hudson guy

It isn't fake news and your perspective is fair. I think people here hand-wave away the crime simply because 'murders' are down; well murders aren't the only crime. The CTA is a mess since COVID. You don't really want to be in the Loop after dark anymore. The schools are somehow getting worse. Cops are playing pranks on regular people and don't bother to follow the rules of the road. There's no accountability for anyone in a position of power, public or private. I'm skeptical about raising a family here...where would the kids go to school, I can't afford private school, and could they play outside after dark? If my kid is anything like me, he'll be too dumb for a magnet school. This is to say, I think we're at our worst period since I've been alive -- which is all the more reason to think about how the locals can improve this place. The North Side is in pretty good shape, development in the Loop is booming, but we need to improve the rest of the city. The only thing the City can think to do is open up a grocery story or a fast food joint and say they've "created jobs". They're minimum wage jobs that you can't support a family on. I'd probably sell drugs too if the only other option was to work at Chipotle.

You're right, but whether or not people even like baseball, there's pride in the region and the team is a powerful symbol to represents it. There is no point in there being two teams in Chicago if it's "downtown" and "north side". Send the Sox packing at that point. Live in Illinois and root for the Dodgers and Yankees and Real Madrid. I am asking/expecting the elected officials to have pride in themselves at the very least even if their constituents don't specifically care. We elect people because they're supposed to be thinking about this more than the regular joe, we have a republican government, we don't pass every policy by referendum. I don't expect everyone to have that same perspective as me on this, but everyone can see how stupid of a policy this was if the whole idea was to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the region only to remove a major revenue generator and move it north. We don't have any money, but elected officials all seem happy to just burn the little taxpayer money we have left for literally no gain.

MLB's first female umpire is currently officiating first base in this Florida/Atlanta game if anyone is interested.

It's really tragic and a lot of that interstate/redlining stuff was pioneered right here in Chicago! Redlining is obviously a Northern innovation because the South just had, you know, legal segregation, they didn't need to be all that clever about it, and it was largely the private sector up here doing this dirty business. I think the government's role in it is more complex (good and bad) and I probably won't dive into that here. Well, maybe a little bit...I'm making it a smaller font because the reader could probably just skip over my opinions...plus it ended up being more than "a little bit". I think there were a lot of 'well-intentioned' policies that totally failed for a variety of reasons (like the housing projects, right?). I think we could try them again though and do a better job with hindsight and within a democratic society that is a lot more enfranchised than it was in the 1950s. Manhattan does a pretty good job of it. You might still find working class people living there who maintain reasonable commutes to their jobs; you can barely say the same thing about, say, San Francisco or LA, where regular people cannot afford the rent or home prices on their salaries and are forced to move out of the city, yet still must commute to where the jobs are. Unlike Chicago, if you commute to San Francisco via BART, you pay a higher fare the further you travel. In part, that makes sense, but it makes less sense when you consider a general trend of 'land is more expensive the closer you get to the urban core' so we're basically charging the poor more in taxes than the wealthy just to show up to work. The same logic is true of California's state gas tax. Wealthy people in Santa Monica are paying less in taxes to drive their cars than regular people in Riverside...their professional job on Wilshire Blvd or in DTLA is close to home or they might even work from home. I don't think you can really telecommute to a construction or restaurant job. The people in Santa Monica probably drive newer, more fuel efficient cars too. A well-intentioned environmental policy, right, that the poor bear the brunt of. This might be an OK policy if there was coinciding social policy that helped lift people out of poverty, offer a reasonably-priced home close to their job, provide childcare, college education, etc. New Deal kinds of policies. There were government subsidies for electric cars ((will be again in 3 years I assume), but you're still paying, I dunno, $25k for a car instead of $32k. It's a lot of money either way when the 1990 Honda Civic drives just fine. I digress, but while 'well-intentioned' policies are nice, the old adage about "the road to Hell" strikes me as very true in this context. The Robert Moses comment piqued my interest because the guy is best-known for carving up New York with freeways and is less well-known for producing its still-functional system of public housing, against a lot of backlash. We talk about public housing in America like it's a dirty word, but it works well in much poorer countries (I like Croatia as an example) and it works in NYC. We can do a better job of it in Chicago than we did before. Part of its failure here is the 'white flight' to the suburbs which eroded the City's tax base. Tax revenue that was meant to fund the maintenance and upkeep of these projects. Taxpayers didn't really 'flee' New York City though, so I think that's part of why their system has been successful. I think younger, high tax bracket people prefer to live in the city these days rather than in the suburbs, so that could be beneficial in terms of funding various projects. I also think we could be more creative with creating new sources of local revenue...why couldn't a government-run business 'compete' with the private sector and set a certain standard? Again, a New Deal idea, nothing new for America; the Public Works Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, etc. did a lot of good to bring us out the Depression, set high standards that private businesses had to best if they wanted to make a profit, and arguably helped turn America into the most economically-developed country on Earth. It isn't socialism, in fact it's probably the reason why communism never took off here during the 1930s. It's just liberalism. To the topic of redlining/segregation, federal civil rights policy actually sought to address the issues of the South and totally ignored the North, so redlining continued up here for some time and nowadays we just have de facto segregation. Last I checked, Milwaukee and Chicago were the two most racially-segregated cities in the country. Well...it depends how you calculate it, here's some list that UC Berkeley produced with 2020 census data where Milwaukee is 5th, Chicago is 4th and Detroit is 1st. This is a very boring document (The Chicago Area Transportation Study [CATS], 1962) that we were required to read in school, but it sure was eye-opening and gave me a better understanding of how the spatial arrangement of our 'liberal' city and its highways reproduces poverty and segregation (and traffic. so much traffic). I don't think we are even trying to address it 60 years later and unfortunately still basically follow the approach outlined in this document that proved to be...frankly wrong and pseudoscientific. To me it's interesting because I think the people who worked for CATS (Katz? Getz?) were intelligent, mostly thoughtful and well-intentioned, but treating human beings like a chemistry experiment or a population of honey bees just doesn't make much sense. There are no laboratory conditions for building a 10 lane highway through your town. I think the document gets interesting at the bottom of pg 49 when they are deciding ideal locations to site expressways within Chicago and how it might impact "the community". It's worth reading the couple of pages IMO, but some key highlights are "there are no communities in the city, only in suburbs like Oak Park", "farmland produces identity", "projects like Lake Meadows (at King & 32nd) make an area safer and more attractive (not a community though)". They conclude that the only thing expressways should not divide are "trade areas". Which is a pretty ambiguous term, so when it came time to implement CATS and other similar plans across the country, guess where they built em...so I don't think these plans are explicitly racist, but were thoughtless and didn't consult the public enough and had, really, no social viewpoint at all at a time in American history when Civil Rights was front of mind. It was 'rational' and scientific, only they were wrong and science doesn't work like that. Even beyond the segregation aspect, it's just a pretty awful thing for cities and all people who live in them. Have to appreciate the 'NIMBYs' in SF who opposed this 'modern, progressive transportation system'. Sorry for the (probably incoherent) wall of text, I'm pretty fascinated by this topic and I think it relates to all this ballpark stuff. A ballpark could be a potential opportunity to do something good for the public, or at least not make a place worse. It bothers me that city officials, bureaucrats, aldermen, non-profit consultants, for-profit consultants, my neighbor, etc seemingly just want to rubber stamp this project without doing any kind of analysis or considering potential negative side effects. Or to consider the project at all. People still think professional sport is a non-serious industry despite the fact that it is one of the highest performing investments there is, it prints money, and is showing no sign of slowing down. Why doesn't the alderman stand up for a massive cultural institution and development opportunity in her ward? Why should any South Side alderman want a potential development opportunity to leave here and move to the Loop? Forgetting the economics, don't they have pride in their South Side team? Couldn't they be imagining options to improve the current site rather than to lose it and the team for nothing? The parking lots are a huge opportunity I think, and perhaps there are upgrades to be made to the park rather than to raze a perfectly good structure. Could pony up a big project like...reorient the park so that the skyline is in view. Some guy on Reddit made this up, suddenly you have one of the best looking parks in MLB. Build some 'fun' places on the parking lots, bars, batting cages, whatever. Consider the L stop, the freeway access (I know I just spent 1000 words shitting on it), the rising incomes in the neighborhood and I think you just have a really great site for a 'ballpark village'/entertainment district kind of thing. Also, check this out, there's already a baseball park there.

called it

The other side of the Dodgers move is even worse in my opinion. 1,800 or so Mexican-American families were forcibly removed from Chavez Ravine to build the stadium. The City used eminent domain and claimed they would be building public housing on the site before deciding public housing was something communists do (FDR is history's most famous communist I guess, but this was the height of the Red Scare), and gave it to a rich guy instead. In an era of 'housing covenants', Chavez Ravine was one of the few places where non-whites were actually allowed to live in Los Angeles. City of LA was legally able to eminent domain the land for well below market value because it was deemed 'blighted' (nonsense term but initially well-intended) and the municipality received federal funds to purchase the land for the purpose of public housing. The plan was pretty ambitious and would have added 3,600 units of housing Obviously that didn't happen. Public housing in LA never happened. Part of the reason it's such an expensive place to live and the poor are now being relegated to San Bernandino or Texas. Poulson was elected mayor with some rigorous campaigning from the "Citizens Against Socialist Housing" and canceled the 'Elysian Park Heights' housing project. The federal government told them that the land must still be used for "public use" and that's how they got the Dodgers, by being subsidized by a federal program designed to house the poor, in this case poor people of color. Everything the Dodgers baseball team was doing to improve the sport by signing Jackie and Campy, in my view, is unfortunately contradicted by the Dodger Stadium saga. Anyway, the conservatives of the time decided that baseball was of "public use", I think it is of "public use", so why do we let billionaires administer it instead of the citizens in a democracy?

So O'Malley claims. I'm skeptical of this. And skeptical of pretty much anything in that Caro book (since better books about Moses have been written since 1974). Maybe he didn't like baseball (bummer), but O'Malley couldn't convince a lot of other powerful interests (or the public for that matter) and it wasn't so simple as "he hated baseball thus the Dodgers moved". Here's a good article on the topic. I'm very much more so interested in 'revising' the view on Moses than I am about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox and baseball in general. Nothing to do with the man himself but I think Caro did a lot of damage to the public sector with that book and opened the door for the sort of Reaganomics that still infects society; though I really liked his books on Lyndon Johnson. I digress, the article is pretty long and so I've excerpted some key quotes, but it's a worthwhile read in my opinion: https://historycooperative.org/journal/revising-the-revisionists-walter-omalley-robert-moses-and-the-end-of-the-brooklyn-dodgers/ Fetter, Henry. 2008. Revising the Revisionists: Walter O’Malley, Robert Moses, and the End of the Brooklyn Dodgers. You can't blame public officials for the superwealthy manipulating people's emotions for maximum profit. I say it often, I think sport should be considered a 'public good' akin to how they do it in Germany. Even more than that because American culture is very much rooted in sports. Sports prints money and Americans have the best athletes in the world because that's pretty much all we focus on. This massive industry is culturally-produced and the 'owner' adds absolutely no value to the enterprise. He steals away value from it, in fact. Kids can throw a curveball or a perfect spiral or dunk a basketball but they can't point to Germany on a map, can't do math, don't understand the words they read in a book. I think kids should learn all of the above, but maybe we can take the 'money' from the profitable thing and invest it in the not so profitable things, like functional literacy. Municipalities don't have any money and have no source to raise any besides raising your property taxes or selling off our parking (I don't think we can do that again). Why shouldn't sports be a source of public revenue? It is in Green Bay and the Packers are one of the best sport franchises in the world. We the public are subsidizing these billionaire welfare queens anyway, why not just cut the useless people we all hate out of the equation entirely? Because we as Americans worship Supply-side Jesus and the 'market forces' are his angels? Too late for the Sox. Maybe in 30 years. If it's profitable to move the team, he's gonna do it. So what about his expensive house. You don't afford a $200mil house by being kind and ethical.

I can't imagine what he would've said about Jason. The team could be on pace to win 100 games and in the midst of a close game and he'd be giving us his opinions on the collected works of Charles Baudelaire or something and what it means for Luis Robert's slugging percentage. Interesting comment though. Schriffen evidently signed a "multi-year" contract which I interpret as "three". I'd give him another year before forming a real opinion I guess. He could be a lot better if he tried to understand the sport even a little bit. I think he makes "better" points this season, but it isn't really close to other PBP guys. Other teams' PBP announcers seemingly have more knowledge on our players than Schriff does. I can't imagine he watches other teams' games. Or our minor leaguers. This guy could be hyping up Braden Montgomery a lot more, but does he even know he exists? It's a day job and not a passion. If he can't make it a passion, they should find somebody who actually loves baseball. McKnight is like that, but his voice is so bad. I mean, no offense, it sounds 'fine' if he was just some dude, but you can't expect me to listen to that guy 100+ times a year. Maybe he could write notes for Schriffen though. tl;dr: get Brooke Fletcher in the booth yesterday

bump

oh no. made things interesting though. can't just turn these games off after the second inning this season.

lol the one time he thinks about taking a pitch

speak for yourself. which you did. then you spoke for "everyone else" lol.