Balta1701

Only 13 people were arrested, because the police are on their side.

Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Utah, California, Georgia, New Mexico, Minnesota, Washington, Michigan, Oregon.

Just in case someone wants an official source, it took me a while of scrolling to find this. they arrested 14,000 during the George Floyd protests.

My bad. Was walking.

That's probably the only person in the crowd with a mask then.

Tim Anderson was a raw player, and in 2017 he was on a team that was being dismantled! If Madrigal needs to grow for several years like Tim Anderson, fine. He should be traded to a team where he can do that, and LaStella signed to fill the hole.

How good was the rest of the team around Moncada? What is Moncada's ceiling? How is it so hard to see the difference between those guys? Moncada - raw player, imported from Cuba, incredibly high ceiling, on a team with no championship aspirations in the first 2 years. Madrigal - experienced player, low ceiling but supposedly high floor, on a team that wants to win a championship right now. That's why I gave May of next year. If he's struggling months into next year with the things he's supposed to be good at, then we can't waste a season on him.

At some level, yes. The order would not have had to come from him, but it could have. The order would have had to have come from one of his civilian appointees.

Just as a note, there's something particularly amazing about the Confederate flag being flown inside the US Capitol building 155 years too late.

"Recruit white people". I mean, really.

At least no one could have seen this coming...

Frankly, if his ceiling is what, a 3 win player at best, and figuring out MLB quirks will take him years and not months, then yes, we are better off trading him and signing LaStella. This team wants to compete in 2021.

Yes! I want more from him. You used the word ceiling here - Nick Madrigal was not a "high ceiling" player, whereas Tim Anderson was. Nick Madrigal was a "High Floor, low ceiling" player. In other words, Nick Madrigal should be a guy you can count on to not struggle - by the exact phrase you used. I'm out.

Well, your post was in reply to me, and then blamed that on a vague "Some". I think that was a fair interpretation.

As long as you can promise me that you will be calling for his head if he's struggling on defense and with baserunning mistakes in May of next year, I will give him a pass on his rookie year. That's the biggest point - he doesn't get 4 years to develop at those things. He needs to be good at them right now. Will you join me in that agreement?

And the point in response is that Nick Madrigal should have been a nearly complete player by the time he came up. This is his current scouting report at the WhiteSox homepage, praising the things I'm focusing on that were missing from his game last year, including his baseball IQ. https://www.mlb.com/prospects/whitesox/nick-madrigal-663611

Dude what the bleeping bleep? No. Not one bit. The bolded could not be more wrong. We are having this conversation because he was incredibly bad at running the bases and was poor at fielding his position. I can deal without the power if the other things you said were true. I cannot give him credit for things he wasn't good at.

Nick Madrigal coming up last year and being a below average baserunner and fielder and making a number of mental errors is like buying a brand new Honda Civic, taking it to a mechanic, and being told the engine won't start, you need a new transmission, one tire is completely worn out, the battery leaked and melted its way through to the ground, and two of the doors fell off. In which case, you are probably more likely to suspect something is wrong with your mechanic. If the Civic drove you successfully around town last year, we would not be having this conversation.

You can only do budgetary things through that though. You can't add Supreme Court Justices that way.

And local things will matter too, but I'd still call them the odds on favorites.

But for Madrigal, what will it take to increase his WAR by 2 or 3 next year? It won't be because he hits 10 extra home runs or his batting average goes up by 30 points (frankly, over a full season, that still seems likely to go down rather than up). Rather, it must be because he rapidly improved on his defense and baserunning and eliminated the bonehead mistakes. If 29 games this year are an aberration, that's something we can tolerate. But there are zero excuses past day 1 of next year. He was drafted to be ready right now. Your last line implies you believe he's ready to solve those problems right now - you didn't say you were ok with him being a 0 WAR player for the next 3 years as long as he's a 3 win player in 2025. That's the entire point here, and why defense and baserunning are getting a focus. They need to be better now. The Anderson comparison is actually quite vital here. Tim Anderson had 199 community college plate appearances before he was drafted after playing football beforehand and that was the sum of his recorded baseball statistics. Nick Madrigal has been playing baseball all his life, had 501 recorded plate appearances in High School, was drafted in the 17th round out of High School, and had 670 plate appearances at Oregon State. Nick Madrigal should be better right now than what we saw last season.

Oh and to pile on - it's a redistricting/gerrymandering year, which means the Republicans will be the odds on favorites to retake the House as soon as 2022.

And yet, we've seen other names be dragged out into February lately quite often. The Machado negotiations, the Harper negotiations. The Betts trade didn't happen until February and then took a week for all the prospects to be sorted out. Keuchel and Kimbrel skipped a third of a season because they couldn't get a contract offer they were happy with. This is the current baseball system - the rewards for winning and the punishments for losing are not high enough to get very many teams bidding early.

I traded the House and Senate in 2010 for ending an economic collapse and signing the Affordable Care Act. I would make that trade again 10 times out of 10 (note - after losing my job this year I temporarily had to move to an Affordable Care Act plan, and would have been uninsurable had the ACA been overturned).