The Sir

Easy, he’s at 107 games. So multiply everything by 1.5. 216 hits, 105 runs, 45 doubles, 24 bombs, 78 RBIs, 24-for-32 in SBs, and 16 walks to 139 strikeouts.

Serious Streisand effect going on in this thread.

Is this some sort of common joke about the Angels’ name, or did you invent it so you could let us all know how smart you are?

Assuming he doesn't hit again tonight, Timmy will have a seven point lead over LeMahieu with twenty games left.

There's something we agree on wholefuckingheartedly. They hit something like .171 for that series and forced our pen to get two outs. Erase the AJP play and I still don't think they win that game, and they still don't win any of the subsequent ones. They got annihilated and tried to act like Eddings changed the course of that entire whole postseason.

Seriously. We think our organization is a mess, but the Angels are far worse. They've got one of the best players in baseball history, and in his eight years with the team, they've put up a winning record thrice and only went to the playoffs once (and got swept right out). Pujols went from being one of baseball's greats to being atrocious for pretty much his entire time with the team. Upton fell off a cliff, Ohtani's been unremarkable, and after Adell, their farm system has nothing. I'm still sore at them for trying to put some sort of asterisk on our success even though they got destroyed in the 2005 ALCS, so I don't feel bad about it at all.

This. Harper is a good power hitter, but it seems more and more likely that his insane 2015 was a fluke and he's never gonna be a consistent .300 hitter. He's a .250 hitter who walks a lot and might have a few outlier years where he gets a .900 OPS. His defense sucks. He's had two years in the last four where he hasn't even put up 2 bWAR. He's hyped up because he's been a baseball prodigy since he was in high school and is a total showman. Good for him, and a good player, but he's not Mike Trout. Machado is better, I think, and brings more with the glove, but he's only managed a .900 OPS season once, and that came in at .905. Mike Trout's worst season was .939. He's in a whole other league from anyone on the planet. And because he's on a shit franchise and probably will be for life, nobody's gonna notice.

I'm really trying to square these two very different posts, Jack. On one hand, you seem to need a heavy amount of supervision to function, whether it's clearly defined goals set in advance or 1-to-1 meetings with your boss, or whatever. On the other hand, you expect more and more responsibility and are disappointed when you don't get it. Responsibility requires autonomy. If you need checkups and timelines and supervision, that's fine, but you're not going to move up much. Managers need to not only manage other people, but also themselves. Nobody holds my hand or checks in on me throughout the day- my boss is 400 miles away. They can rest easy because they know that I understand the mission and will get it done. If you need meetings to make sure you're prioritizing the right things and using your time effectively, nobody is going to empower you with more duties and responsibilities.

I'll go one step further than you here. Even if that is the case, Mr. Pitts should be strapped to a gurney for final shots. You go out with a gun intending to rob someone, and they end up dead? I don't care if they step in front of a bus trying to get away from your crazy ass- that's murder. You die. And before an internet lawyer comes along to lecture me about intent, I understand intent. I just don't care. If you commit felonies that result in the deaths of innocent people, their blood is on your hands. On a similar note, I really appreciate states (I think mostly southern, but I'm not sure) where burglars get charged with murder if one of their compadres dies in the act. You break in, I shoot your point man, and his murder is on you. That's the way it should be.

I have to say I will never get tired of Jack Parkman musings about life. I don't agree with most, if any, of them, but they are always entertaining.

Good point. I was kind of combining the two qualities and some of my examples are probably more work ethic than attitude. But work ethic is similar to attitude in how easily it is controlled. You might add weight quicker than me and naturally run slower or do less sit-ups, or your mind might not be as agile, but you’re not lazier than me for any reason other than your own choice. You could decide today that you’ll be the hardest working person in your office tomorrow and then you could go and do it. It’s that easy and it’ll change your entire life.

Thanks man. I don't want to reignite this whole thing with Jack, but the events of of my own life over the last two weeks have demonstrated how important my harping about positive attitude is. Nine years ago, I was 23 and I went to my initial officer training for the Army. I was physically fit and reasonably intelligent, but I had a SHIT attitude. I complained constantly, and I almost prided myself on being that guy who pointed out how fucking stupid everything was. My father told me before I joined the military that I needed to control my "fuck you" face- instead, I perfected that face and wore it in perpetuity. Needless to say, my peers and instructors didn't like me all that much. The instructors never would have counted on me for anything and, when we rotated through course leadership positions, they gave me the most irrelevant ones just so they could check the necessary boxes and move me along. We did peer evals, and if I ever peeked at someone else's, they'd compliment me on things like intellect, and then place me at the very bottom of the group being evaluated. Why the fuck was that, I thought. Why would you shit on the smart guy? Oh, right. Because I was an asshole. In the middle of August of this year, now 32, I was sent to a mandatory professional development course for my current rank. My intellect is about the same as it was a decade ago, and my physicality has decreased slightly- I'm building my old man strength, but I'm a little slower and fatter than before. But that all pales in comparison to my attitude. I simply decided that things were going to be different this time and so they were. I cheered on my classmates during the run on the fitness test, even though I was also running it myself. I volunteered for the primary leadership position in this course and got it. The instructor called me after hours to tell me about peers who were struggling and to make sure I got them the necessary assistance. One graded item for the course was known as professional officer quality and our grade in that category needed to average out to 85% across all students. Nine years ago I would have made it super easy for the grader, because I would have gotten a fucking ZERO. This time, I got 100%. Even though I passed my main event on the first day of evals (it's an hour long brief you have to give, so evals are scheduled over several days), I volunteered my free time to listen to other people rehearse their own briefs, staying up with one guy until 1 in the morning. This isn't to brag- it's just to point out that by far and away the biggest factor in how you are perceived in any organization is your attitude. A bad one will destroy you, but a good one will advance you farther than you can imagine. It's also the easiest to control- if I showed up out of shape, it might have taken me weeks or months to get to where I needed to be. If I was unfamiliar with the fundamentals, it'd take some significant studying to get caught up. But attitude? That was a snap decision, and soon as I set my mind to it, it was done. This applies to the military, to school, to sports (yeah yeah, without complicating this too much, talent does apply here- but if Moncada and Robert can both hit the shit out of a baseball, the one who has a better attitude and pours more of their heart into practice is going to, generally, hit more of the shit out of more of the baseballs), to business, to jobs, to wherever. More than any other single thing- have a positive attitude.

Personally, I think that you named yourself after Holden is the most “Caulfield moment” ever.

This is a quicker response than you might deserve, because I slept for four hours and have something huge going on today, but you're missing my point. Where am I taking anyone's freedoms with my mindset on this? What's the consequence here? Death, as in North Korea, or losing my respect? The latter. Do you not have freedom if you say something that irreversibly leads me to consider you a douchebag? No. I don't want to have anyone shot or locked up or fined for criticizing the government or soldiers or protesting or being in the press or whatever (your mention of Christians is bizarre, honestly). The vast majority of conservatives (and liberals) are the same way. But while Kaepernick has freedom to kneel (I would never deny that right to him, and I do believe I went to war in some small way to support that and that our heroes DIED to support that), we also have freedom. I'm under no obligation to look at him with admiration. In the category of freedom of speech, I'm going to use that to suggest that Colin Kaepernick is far less worthy of a citizen than others of us. That's not restricting his freedoms at all.

That’s why I enjoy living in a state with castle laws, and fully intend to shoot anyone I find breaking in to my house. Yeah, yeah, maybe you’re just here to steal a few things and not do anything truuuuly nefarious like murder my family. Why should that make a difference? You’re taking the philosophy that I should work so that you can have nice stuff. 5.56 is nice. Why don’t you have some of that?

Uh, probably because he was going to quick sell it to a fence for $50 in order to buy dope. Doubtful that he was prepping for a new job at a Fortune 500 or an admission to Harvard law. You’re not dealing with a societal genius here.

And I can’t wait to not care. But I hope you have fun with that. 😎

I stayed in a US military hotel in Munich when I was 13. We had an early flight to catch, so we were moving stuff out to the car at 3 or 4 in the morning. I placed my dad's laptop bag in the hallway and then went back into the room to get more stuff. I was in there for no more than 30 seconds. I came back, the hallway was empty, and the bag (with computer) was never seen again. Old man works in software, so he was fucking pissed. Still wonder where the hell the bag went.

Ain’t that the truth. I think the answer is no, but could he ever play his way out of the HOF? I mean, Angels’ Pujols has been bad. Frank Thomas got attacked for his “decline” and it wasn’t a tenth as bad as Pujols’. His OPS has dropped from 1.037 to .930 because of his time in LAA. Truly awful. Angels’ fans must hate him more than we hate Dunn or Laroche.

I'll bite on this one. My friends have died with the flag on their shoulder. I'll never forget standing at the edge of a creek in southern Afghanistan and seeing the floating body of an American Soldier who had disappeared five days earlier when he knelt directly on an IED's det plate. I never saw combat, but even the slightest thing that reminds me of that creek still brings tears to my eyes. And like the flag, in the service, the National Anthem isn't just some words and a beat- it is sacrosanct. Your "friend" was wrong to make it about race. There are stupid people of all creeds and colors and what have you who disrespect that hymn. I don't care if you're a BLM acolyte or a Pat "America sucks because it tolerates gays" Robertson type or just some fat drunk idiot who screeches "PLAY BALL!!!!" around the singing of the word "home". If you're trying to make a political point by disrespecting it, know that I will completely disregard your point. Whoever you are, whatever you believe, whatever leads you to do it, if you can't just stand quietly and respectfully for two minutes, I have no respect for you at all.

Avoid the filibuster crap, avoid the filibuster crap, avoid the filibuster crap... I want to talk about fitness! So I finally got a slot in a military professional development course that I've been waiting on for four freaking years. It starts on Monday. On Tuesday, I'll take an initial physical fitness test- no worries there. However, the final part of an official army fitness test is a height/weight screening. I'm 5'7" so I'm allowed to be 174 lbs. Well, I'm 190, so...fuck. I'm going to get taped. Three measurements around the waist, three around the neck, stuffed into some antiquated algorithm and out comes a number. Common knowledge is you gotta have a fat neck and a slim waist. Well, I've got a tiny fucking neck. The algorithm will put me at just over 24% BMI and I'm allowed 24%. It rounds down, luckily. I can help myself by puffing my neck a little bit and I'll probably be OK. But I'm still nervous because the future of my career depends on this silly system. So what can I do eating wise and exercise wise in the next five days to slim my abs or buff up my neck? Literally a half inch less or a half inch more in either category will make all the difference. I'm thinking unseasoned tilapia fillets with asparagus and water, and doing crunches/situps/plank in the morning and evening. I'm in good shape because I'll happily beat the shit out of myself, but I'm a terrible nutritionist. Help!

Last five starts, Nova has 37 IP, with TWO earned runs on 20 hits and six BBs.

It's alright, man. I'm not trying to claim that my background was worse (again, I've had a happy life thus far); I just wanted to emphasize that everyone has struggles and that we shouldn't assume what anyone else is going through. And we shouldn't let those struggles be the end of our world. The victim mentality that puts this stuff up on a pedestal serves no one. It just poisons the person who has it. You've shown that mentality sometimes, honestly, but you've also said some things to suggest you can take the bull by the horns and get past all of it. I hope you do and I hope it works out for you. Nothing but the best, dude.

I didn't miss the point. You talk about needing other people to be blunt and direct, but if what you just said was the actual point, it was hidden far between the lines. In your original post you literally said, "don't fucking tell me I haven't been through hell". You also said you've faced what I have and then some (pretty obnoxious to assume what other people have done and dealt with in their lives). All because I pointed out that everyone has struggles. The entire point of your original post was that you've had a rough go of it. And the other posters in the thread have made mention of your love of the victim card- so I'm not imagining things. If you can't see how toxic that is for you, then I don't know what to tell you.

Conspiracy theories are lame as fuck.* Epstein was a rich, well-connected asshole who finally realized this was the big one and no amount of money was going to save him from it. He didn’t want to spend years being gawked at and having all of his sickening details dragged out into the open, and suicide was preferable to this state of complete disgrace. The jail’s suicide watch was weak because they have limited resources for a fixed amount of tasks and bodies had to be elsewhere. So Pedo Jeff had and took his chance. Also, trying to argue whether Bill Clinton or Donald Trump is more of a pervert is like...oh I suck at analogies, but imagine something really fucking pointless. *If you just want to read about something shocking and twisted, go read a book on the creation of the modern Middle East, particularly towards the end of World War I. Lawrence In Arabia by Scott Anderson is solid. There’s connivances, there’s backstabbing, there’s incompetence, murder, suicide and more! And it’s all undeniably, documentably TRUE. Leave the conspiracy theories for the fringes.