Balta1701

You gotta add Dylan Cease to the list of really big things. If he struggles, the team is in real trouble. If he’s solid, then there’s rotation depth, the 5th starter being weak doesn’t destroy the bullpen, things don’t immediately fall apart if Keuchel gets hurt for a while, etc. if Cease struggles or gives a lot of 4 inning outings, things would be on a knife edge at best the whole year - no one else can get hurt or struggle. To me that seems to be one spot where things could cascade, either everyone gets on a roll together or everything falls apart because they can’t cover for that many weak spots.

Yankees used 9 starters last year. 3 of them, King, Clarke, and Loaisiga, had more outings out of the bullpen than as starters.

No, it is not strange. The booster shots would be in response to the virus having evolved over time. Evolving our response to deal with new variants makes perfect sense.

The problem with saying there’s a lack of evidence also is that there’s a lack of evidence that he isn’t ready, as we have really no idea how he looked in Schaumburg last year other than internal team statements that they liked what he was doing.

I’m sure that’s the plan, but the number of predictions people have made this offseason that require “and absolutely nothing will go wrong with the plan” is rather impressive.

Shin-Soo Choo signed to play in Korea for a little over $2 million https://es.pn/3dNQVrB

If you choose fangraphs rather than B-R he only put up 0.1.

Moncada was supposed to have very weak symptoms if at all also, but then it turned into long-COVID/brain fog for him over time. He hit .299 with an .843 OPS for the first 16 games of last year, including an 8 game hit streak, and then hit .188 over his next 36 games. There's literally no way to predict what the end result will be in any person, we've seen enough of this damn virus to understand that. Hopefully Jose has no internal damage and never really has anything to worry about, but you can be certain that's the case in like June.

But the J&J definitely reduces the chances of severe symptoms too, so it is also dramatically reducing the chances of heart damage. You should consult your doctors on this for certain, but one option would be to take J&J as soon as it was available to you, and take one of the others in a few months once they have become available to everyone. If I got offered J&J that’s almost certainly what I would do. The #1 thing you don’t want is to get exposed to the virus before you have protection, and it’s extremely difficult to avoid any possible exposures if you are around anyone.

Ok, I got it as a metaphor. Let's say I tell you that this season, Nick Madrigal gets 179 hits in 600 at bats. I tell you that Nick Madrigal gets 7200 at bats in his career. How many hits does he have in his career? Does he have 3000 hits? No, because he would have had to hit .416 to do that, and no one is doing that. Does he have only 1000 hits? No, because his career average would be .138, and he wouldn't have gotten 7200 at bats if he was that bad in all the other years. Maybe his career average was .320 and he got better after this season. Maybe he hit .270 the rest of his career and this was his best season. All those second-order details matter for figuring out exactly how many hits he got, but it's somewhere around 2000 - because the number of career at bats was 7200. As long as that doesn't change, the final number is somewhere within a reasonable range. But, if after this season, he was challenged to a fight by 100 duck sized Nick Madrigals and was badly wounded in the battle, came back, and hit .100 the next year afterwards, he probably would not receive another 6600 career at bats. Instead, his career would probably end. This hopefully is the vaccine effect - not only does it hamper Nick Madrigal's ability to get hits the next year, but hopefully it also cuts off the number of infections we get overall. In this metaphor, the role of the vaccine is played by 100 duck-sized Nick Madrigals.

Based on everything we have seen elsewhere, the vaccine may not make it so that everyone who gets the virus is never ever contagious, but it absolutely seems to shorten the window where people are contagious even in the worst cases. I think many people get exposed and never build up enough virus to reach contagious. So that is important too. If you had a vaccine that was 99% effective at preventing death but still allowed people to build up a large amount of virus in their system and hold onto it for a long time, so no change in transmission, then it is possible that you could have had 5000 deaths instead of 500,000. But there’s one more factor on top of that - the health care system. When New York was hit, their hospitals were overwhelmed completely. Cuomo’s entire nursing home controversy came about because he had sick people that were likely to survive, but he had no place to put them. California’s hospitals ran out of oxygen in December. The death rate of untreated COVID is something like 5-10 times that of the rate with aggressive treatment. If you run out of beds, people die waiting for them. Both in New York in April and nationwide in December (specifically in the Cali outbreak), the death rate ticked upwards because doctors and hospitals were overwhelmed. Limit the number of cases going there, and the death rate goes even lower. Of course, then other feedbacks might be “do more people get the virus if they aren’t scared of dying so they don’t wear masks”, and “is it 99% or is it 98.7% or 99.3%” because that significant figure matters at that level. Then there are proposals that the B117 variant could be more deadly, that could matter. Then you have to consider that if the virus is alive in a population who can mostly fight it but not completely, you create a selective pressure where a new variant that gets around the vaccine could be favored. So lots of details matter. Short answer: in that range and a lot better.

Ok...so I would like there to be general bets taken as to whether or not there is a better CF in baseball right now. That one...might be a bit of a challenge. Say top 2 and I'll believe it.

You could put that as a goal but I seriously doubt they all make it.

Are they doing antibody testing on everyone, and this means that his came back positive for the antibodies and they need to recheck to be sure?

Right now I'm in "police officer on TV show 2 days before retirement" mode.

Mel Kipers column today suggests a late second or early third is a price the Jets should take for Darnold.

At the very least, your “next” was insufficient as a “all conversation on this point stops” given that point.

DUIs where the offender falls asleep at the wheel or where he is involved in a collision could be charged as a felony if the prosecutor decided to do so. Felony DUI could also be decided based on BAC. Furthermore, there are some states where there is no time limit, if you get a second DUI it could well be charged as a felony, Arizona is not one of these. In fact, I will guarantee you there are people in this country who have served months in jail for doing things exactly like Tony LaRussa and who were then charged with a felony. He is a rich, well represented white guy, and so your statement that he is not a felon is tantamount to a statement “he’s rich and white, this is not open to debate. Next”

Some of this may be scientists being overly cautious, I will grant that. But I will note what the risk is right now, the risk is all still on the side of increased spreading - today, we have way more people who are waiting to get the vaccine than have been vaccinated so far. If the handful of people who have gotten their shots are going out maskless, picking up the virus, not showing symptoms, but transmitting it - they could become a major way that the virus could resume spreading in the unvaccinated group. Furthermore, vaccinated people who get weak cases of the virus could be a great way for the virus to evolve resistance to the vaccine response - the virus didn't see any pressure to evolve that ability until there was a vaccinated population where having that trait would improve its fitness. We've got a line that is what, 3-4 months long already? We're also seeing that vaccine acceptance is increasing as more and more people get it. I almost am ok with people being overly cautious right now rather than accidentally evolving a truly resistant variant. When we get to 70% of the population vaccinated and it gets more difficult to get the last 30%, then maybe we worry about how much of a problem we've created.

You are correct, and I don't think that it's a coincidence that a team with that kind of drought is also where a guy has a public chat like this.

So a second and a fourth for Darnold vs. a First + for Jones? If it requires a first and a second for Jones I'd really rather not do that.

what is the price for Darnold?

Those would have been fair and accurate based on last year. I read your line about adding 2 cy young candidates and legitimately had no idea who you meant by the second.

Gotcha. "Got cy young votes" would have been more accurate as neither of them were in the final 3, and a closer wasn't really a candidate even though he got a handful of 3rd place votes.