caulfield12

A Private War (real life story of Guardian/Sunday Times Middle East correspondent Marie Colvin) is excellent...and heartbreaking as well. First time I can remember a Bond girl having such a successful dramatic run. I Care A Lot (about elderly/assisted living fraud) is supposed to be an excellent dark comedy as well, putting Rosamund Pike squarely in the Best Actress discussion.

Or find a middle infielder with athletic ability and requisite arm strength (not TA, but Wilson Contreras) and see if a conversion works. Generally, it has been easier to move those guys to pitcher over the last two decades.

Cooper was given a ton of trash, in all fairness. We also got excellent bullpen results with lots in inexperienced performers last year, for example. Keuchel had an unexpectedly strong season, and Bummer emerged as a Top 10 AL reliever. For every Reynaldo Lopez, Cease or Rodon, there have been ten Ranaudo’s or Hector Noesi’s. Dunning was nurtured back after injuries to the point where he became (in)valuable trade bait. The proof will be in the pudding for Katz with those three names again in this year’s rotation, as well as Kopech. Time will tell.

One can argue both the 1987 and especially the 1991 World Series were great for baseball, and neither Twins’ team was objectively great...but massive home field advantage and a few superstar performers added to high drama. Pretty sure there were some .500ish or lower Padres teams during the Peavy era that make it but were quickly dispatched. Baseball survived.

But then you have the Padres/Dodgers issue, as well as the NL East, where 4 of 5 teams are legit contenders. Yet the AL/NL Central teams have been rewarded by beating the hell out of the Pirates, Royals and Tigers. Or the Rays trying to compete with NYY, Boston and now Toronto again every season.

You’d really have to go back to some of the Cardinals teams or 87/91 Twins with the massive home field advantage.

The one thing you have to be careful with is letting the top teams sit too long...which used to be really tough on hitters in cold weather stadiums. That said, momentum is your next day’s starting pitcher. The Padres had a near-miraculous comeback against the Cardinals but ran into a buzz saw in LA, which was clearly the superior team this year. AL/NL Central teams were all clearly flawed, and that showed up in the results. The Twins lost again. The A’s were shocked to actually advance a round. Now we can argue the Astros weren’t deserving, but that’s not the same thing as saying they didn’t have a lot of talented players remaining on their roster. In a normal year, pretty sure Houston is one of those teams on the outside looking in, but it was only a 60 game schedule, so impossible to know for sure what transpires over a full 154-162 games.

AP study: MLB average at around $4.4M for 5th year in row NEW YORK (AP) — Major League Baseball’s average salary ahead of a postponed opening day remained at around $4.4 million for the fifth straight season, according to a study of contracts by The Associated Press. Following an offseason when Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, Anthony Rendon and Christian Yelich all agreed to $200 million-plus deals, the flattened salary curve is evidence of a shrinking portion of the pie for baseball’s middle class. The stagnant stretch is unprecedented since the free-agent era dawned in 1976. https://apnews.com/article/e4ec65ed068d9b636ac9c302453eac26

If those teams #18-30 have almost no chance to make the playoffs, why not strip down to the screws with $25-30 million payrolls? Therein lies the problem. Last year, many teams like the Reds and Padres were incentivized to at least compete for a playoff spot.

Another Drink (Druk)...one of the top five films of the year, so refreshing and unique Minari probably wins foreign film here, but this one will stick with me for a long time like Promising Young Woman Madds Mikkleson rules!

Vaughn should have been playing last year? Really?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/a-wakeup-call-how-resilient-new-coronavirus-variants-could-prolong-the-pandemic-152538072.html Another reason herd immunity was a bad strategy...Manaus, Brazil. “How can you have 76 percent of people infected and, at the same time, have an epidemic that’s bigger than the first?" asked one Brazilian epidemiologist. The answer may have come on Jan. 10 with the discovery of P.1., the new Brazilian variant. Its mutations resembled the strain from South Africa, but it appeared to have arisen independently. A second variant (P.2) was soon detected as well. Both were linked to reinfection in individuals. In December, according to researchers, P.1 accounted for 42 percent of the cases sampled in Manaus; in January, that number skyrocketed to 85 percent. It’s unclear how much of Manaus’s second surge can be attributed solely to reinfection; other factors — including increased transmissibility, an overestimation of the city’s initial infection rate and the natural waning of immunity — could be playing a part as well. But the risk is apparent. When B.1.351 became dominant in South Africa late last year, triggering another massive surge, participants who received a placebo in Novavax’s vaccine trial caught the disease at the same rate whether or not they had experienced an earlier infection, implying that “prior infection with COVID-19 may not completely protect against subsequent infection by the South Africa escape variant,” as Novavax wrote in a news release. “It has global implications,” Shabir Madhi, the lead investigator of the South African Novavax trial, told the Wall Street Journal. “The immunity that was induced by the prototype virus is not protective [against the new variant].”

The problem with that is most are expecting to need at least $2-3 million for retirement, especially when SS perhaps is theoretically cut by 20% in 2035. Of course, there are no easy shortcuts. The problem with the GME story is it encourages day trading as a career (yet again, remember 1998-2002?), instead of disciplined, dollar cost averaging monthly/quarterly investments. The other issue is counting on 7% for the next decade. You still need to factor in taxes and inflation. Things have gone so well for so long...one can just look up the ten year return for VTSAX, VFINX, etc., and believe that 200% returns over a ten year time frame are going to be the new norm. Of course, setting out too ambitiously leads to lots of young people losing patience...look at the returns for many from let’s say the tech crashes of 1998-99, 9/11...through the worst of 2008/09, you might have very little growth or even losses over that time frame. But if you panicked and sold then, chased high returns and sold low...or panicked again this March. Heck, there were many who thought Trump would destroy the stock market were he to be elected, and he had the second best GOP record after Reagan of all the modern presidents. So best to ignore all that noise, look at your porfolio once or twice a year and keep plugging away. But for young people, tuition costs/loans, saving increasing amounts for house down payments, marriage/ring/honeymoon and then the exorbitant cost of child raising and health care make saving a challenge until age 45-50, when it’s way too late to take advantage of the effects of compounding.

Well, the Rockies managed that feat as recently as 2017-18 and some are now calling them the worst combined organization/GM in baseball. https://www.startribune.com/twins-starting-to-map-out-plans-for-return-of-fans/600016808/?ref=nl&om_rid=48311239113&om_mid=2318334409 That the Twins are able to plan out having limited numbers in the stands for ST and Opening Day...compared to the White Sox situation, might be yet another reason/excuse JR is tapping the brakes on excessive (at least in his eyes) spending.

He’s a lot more lenient than Judge Judy or Judge Dredd.

Well, it has happened four times within a decade that we’ve added premiere players (at their positions) as free agents...Dunn, Robertson, Grandal and Hendriks. We could be charitable and add Abreu, so that’s 5 in the span of 13 years.

https://www.ajc.com/sports/mike-check-blog/could-braves-benefit-from-mets-connection-to-gamestop-stock-saga/T6LJ244MPVCMNO6JHTQ7G2DKD4/

https://sports.yahoo.com/dodger-stadium-covid-19-vaccinations-shut-down-protesters-012430216.html Among the protesters were members of anti-vaccine and far-right groups, per the Times, with signs urging people to not get the vaccine. The group reportedly went out of their way to avoid political apparel: A post on social media described the demonstration as the “SCAMDEMIC PROTEST/MARCH.” It advised participants to “please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple. No flags but informational signs only. “This is a sharing information protest and march against everything COVID, Vaccine, PCR Tests, Lockdowns, Masks, Fauci, Gates, Newsom, China, digital tracking, etc.” One of the protesters apparently livestreamed the incident, which can be seen here. One witness told the Times that the protesters were baselessly telling people in line that the the coronavirus is not real and the vaccine is dangerous.

What just happened?

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-predicts-the-2021-golden-globe-nominations/ On the Rocks was a nifty little film....if you’re a Lost in Translation/Bill Murray fan, you’ll like this one as well.

Yeah, although I hope the controversy brewing on the part of audiologists and abled/disabled community doesn’t get Riz Ahmed’s likely nomination for best actor sidetracked. News of the World is almost exactly what I expected...Dances With Wolves Meets Tom Hanks, although clearly an inferior film to that. A little dose of anti-Trumpism/populism thrown in there as well, which didn’t come as any great shock.

Novavax is the one that really seems ready to go with eight partnerships for production and distribution ramping up around the world...

The problem is you’re buying Ozuna really high...if you look at his last five or six seasons, he hasn’t been tremendously consistent. Can we really afford to sink $15 million into a bat-first player?

No, a genius again for motivating him with the lack of security about his future...put up or shut up time, no excuses, etc.

Esteban Loiaza (minus the cross-border trafficking operation)