Balta1701

That line drive hit the turf stuff and the beads looked like a giant water splash.

That’s why I really wanted HFA.

Garret needs to shave that.

I think he was safe but lots of missed calls there tonight.

16.8 fWAR for the White Sox Starters, 12.2 for Houston. So the White Sox do have better starters, but Houston has a better offense and defense. It’s a close matchup on paper, and home field would have been important.

Houston has scored 45 more runs than the White Sox, has a stronger defense (second fewest errors in the big leagues, better uzr). So The White Sox do have a pitching advantage but that isn’t the whole game.

If I were a gambler and I had to ask myself out of 2 coasting teams which team could “flip a switch on”, and one of them made their first playoff appearance in 12 years last season and the other team made the ALCS last year and has won a title and been in the playoffs 6 of the last 7 years, I would always pick the experienced one. Hell, they literally did it last year - barely made the playoffs, barely missed the World Series.

I had no idea off the bat if that would actually go. It was clearly out of most parks but I had to wait after the last 2 Games to see it go.

Bloop that.

Boom.

I will add agreement on this one.

I think they did yeah.

Was a nice swing by Romy

Damn. Still a serious play.

Holy shit LG

Hypothetically though your team should also score at least one over those three innings.

“Questions a person named “Tex” should not say in front of the women in their life.”

Every commercial break on MLB tv now features on average 1.5 appearances of Shaq.

This would be a 26 game hit streak if I were the official scorer in Oakland.

So this happened today. Let's see, important details - they already previously authorized boosters for immune compromised individuals because they know we're a freaking mess, so that wasn't this group. The fundamental data here is that the first 2 shots in you normal people produce a set of antibodies that seem to fade over 6-12 months, and those antibodies are the direct shield against infection. However, the protection against severe disease appears essentially unaffected - basically you can get it in your nose, you can get sick, but even if the antibodies decrease over time, the vaccine has trained the immune system well enough to target the virus that it kills off the virus before the virus can kill you, by making more antibodies and such. A booster shot has been tested in Israel and it has been shown to massively increase the body's antibody response, which could well restore a strong immunity against infection. However, there are problems - first, that would take shots away from countries lower on the list. Second, and this seems to have been a bigger problem for the FDA - Israel's data is almost entirely in an elderly population, so Pfizer was asking the FDA to approve something for an age group that hasn't been tested yet. So, if you're 65 or older, or otherwise at high risk, they've recommended it, but they won't go outside the data to approve it for the general population, which I have a hard time arguing against. Tell Pfizer to come back with more complete data to demonstrate safety and usefulness in a full population - they haven't demonstrated that booster shots to everyone will affect the course of the pandemic based on this data.

ugh. Just so someone says this, the scientific evidence over the last few months has come down hard on the side that this was a zoonotic virus, circulating in some population of animals, that spilled over to humans and went wild after an early super-spreader event at the Wuhan animal market last December. There's case tracing, there's testing of family members of people who work at the lab, and there is some extremely powerful DNA evidence on the side of this. While the Chinese government remains uncooperative for reasons that are unknown, and for that reason the hypothesis of something else deserved testing, right now the evidence is strongly on the side of "virus that was out there in some animal population, yet to be identified".

That said, the White Sox won a game in Tampa this year. They didn't in Houston.

Yes. But if you are doing something that poses a danger to the people around you, then the rest of us have an equal right to block your access to places of work, schools, and places of business so that you cannot pose that danger to the population.

This franchise hasn't exactly been a model of sharing health information this year though, we were just talking about that the other day. Remember how Grandal was "ahead of schedule" the whole time on a 4-6 week injury and came back after 6 weeks?

If you happen to get tickets on Monday, I guarantee you will be able to re-sell them if the Astros wind up as the #1 seed.