JSngry

Fun!

Gotta love the slide-whistle siren.

Offshore.

You know a helluva lot more honest people than I do, that's all I can say.

No, we're not. And tax returns? Seriously?

JUMBOTRON!!!! Just to clarify (and I think you got it, just making sure), will the decrease in # of pitchers in an inning lead to a parallel decrease in the # of pinch-hitters? If so, what does that do to individual seasonal stats (i.e. - earning potential) of marginal players? I still would like to hear some thoughtful thoughts about what's going on with the minors...that seems really significant to me, infrastructure, labor sourcing, talent development, etc. OTOH, money saving, because how many people get signed and paid with no expectations whatsoever that they'll play in the majors, they're just cogs in the overall system. OTOH, what does this portend in the way of signing established (as opposed to younger) talent from outside the US who will need little or no AA-AAA seasoning? And how funny can that money potentially get? If what is being unspokenly said is that there's more teams than "the game" can realistically support, then, hey, welcome to, what, 1980 or so?

What about fewer pinch-hitters? Possibility? Good thing? bad thing?

Yeah, but...not sure about not bringing in somebody because you don't know if they've got the stuff today to go three batters. What that does to overall staff wear-and-tear over the course of a full season...I don't know. Sure, hire better pitchers, or at least train better pitchers. Problem solved, right?

Well, here's my thoughts, for a penny, and overpriced by a nickel at that... Peterson imo is essentially, what's the expression, "wide, but shallow". This track sounds like somebody who says, "I'll show them that I can play quiet and thoughtful too!" and then sets about playing QUIET and THOGUHTFUL, and, ok, "quiet" is empirical, but thoughtful is as thoughtful does, and neighing like a horse doesn't mean you're gonna be running in the Derby, if you know what I mean. Keep in mind, I'm not an OP hater, but am also not really a fan either.

Oh, but they are. The really good ones make the law/rules, or get them made on their behalf. "Influence", I believe its called? Murder is for suckers. Money is for pros. OTOH, jocks are mostly dumb, and dumb people scare easy. So the money is probably wasted there. No matter, the Astros were not good at cheating. Having a little bit of success is not the same as being good at it. Actually being good at it is for career professionals, not renegade upstarts with god knows how many self-placed chips on their self-padded shoulders.. Now, let's talk about the rest of why baseball in its current state sucks: https://www.axios.com/mlb-problems-baseball-houston-sign-stealing-scandal-c91f94ea-386b-4671-9f09-4b582b6b26a1.html The deal about what's going down with the minor leagues...why is nobody talking about this here? That seems pretty serious to me. Talk about the "integrity" of the game (such as it is...). And really, it's a rule now that a pitcher must face three batters? Bring in the feral hogs!

The ability to buy (or otherwise secure) silence is fundamental to being a successful cheater. If you can't even do that little bit, hey, you oughta just leave it alone. Don't do something like this if you don't have a long game ready to go. Shit takes money, time, and a power bigger than some cheapass hubristical bullshit. The Astros were not good at cheating.

That session is going to be fine as a single disc, one take/tune album. But the real entertainment value for me was in hearing the whole session because the number of retakes is damn near funny. Me and a buddy were listening to it on a road trip and we'd here one pretty smoking take with a few minor imperfections and we're thinking, ok, that's the one, and then BAM right away here's another take. And then ANTOHER. And ANOTHER. We were like, WTF? was going on that day, was blakey punishing the band? Was Lion punishing Blakey? Anyway, this new release as being presented is gonna be just fine. Enjoy!

Liking this record more and more as I resign myself to accepting that Brecker is going to play like Brecker, and all that comes with that. His tunes here are great, and the band is outstanding, if not even better than that!

Will gladly listen to fact-based explanations of how far off I am by thinking that essentially they gave the position of a record guy who was in deep with the players to a record guy who's in deep with the records. I know I'm off by some, but by how much?

See, that's where you and I fundamentally go out of sync - I do not give even half a fuck what "players and other team officials (and fans)" are thinking, be it more and more or less and less. That has no relevancy or interest to me at all. And this is why - talk about idiocy - no, the Astros were not good at cheating, for damn sure not great. First of all, they got caught and are being punished. Great cheaters don't get caught, and good cheaters find a way to mitigate, sometimes actually avoid the punishment. And a really virtuoso cheater finds ways to steal and benefit from the theft without it really being provably "illegal". No, the Astros actually have not been particularly good at cheating.

Howe cool would it be if Ozzie & Harriet came back to life and did Kodak commercials during the commercials?

And I have no idea what give you the idea that I'm defending it. I'd like to think that your reading comprehension ability was better than that. They cheated, they got busted. No argument, no defense. It happened, end of story, no defense of the action or objection to the outcome of the bust. I guess I could invest all my...whatever... into being "outraged" and all that, but that's what I did when I was a kid (and then some), but now, as a rational adult, I'd much rather look at understanding the context of how all this came to happen, and if all I do is BAD BAD PEOPLE did BAD BAD THINGS!!!! then...that's baby stuff. When they make a Hollywood Movie about this affair, I hope it's on the level of Eight Men Out, which is so NOT imbued with simplistic amped up "moral outrage". We can get that anytime, anywhere, and from anybody. It's easier than ever, and it's a GREAT distraction. You talk about a rabbithole - "moral outrage" is just that. What do we learn from it? Not a damn thing, except that there are bad people who do bad things. Wow, I'm so glad to learn THAT! What are our actionable takeaways? PUNISH THEM!!! Meanwhile, the systemic contributing factors go unchecked. The same things that create the opportunities for wrong to be done are allowed to remain in place, waiting for somebody smarter to game them a little better, until the get caught. Nothing gets fixed.. But god, are we morally outraged!!! And boy do we feel good about that! Babies. No wonder shit's going all to hell, nobody wants to work, they just want to feel. Well, feelings get hurt a lot easier than work gets destroyed, so prioritize the investment of energies accordingly. Or not. And driving with a GPS that talks to you is no different than following road signs. And getting in a self-driving car still boils down to using a car to get to where you want to go. And taking a a car trip based around charging stations is no different that planning one around gas stations. hey, let's just GO! Because, I suppose, the full impact of applied technology on our behavior is not really worth examining? Or something?

Do you even understand what a algorithm is in this context? It's a real, programmable, mathematical thing, maybe conceived as a speculative "what-if analysis", but concluded in a more or less certainty of an IF/THEN formula . This whole cheating system originated on an Excel spreadsheet. Not by a player or by a coach, but by a data guy who also understood baseball. And it worked, because in general, properly analyzed data tends to work, it reduces the chance of an unpredictable outcome.. That's kinda the whole point. Do you not understand how prevalent "Excel spreadsheet" baseball is today, on and off the field? You don't like it, I don't like it, but fuck us, there it is anyway. Would that it was just a baseball thing!. So what you "gain" by calling it that is simple - you're calling it what it actually is, not what your "impression" of what it is. Ty Cobb didn't have a computer, didn't have a whole team of people doing data/analytics, sure, but nobody did. But that was then, this is now, and damn near every team does have them, and they're certainly not afraid to use them. And where the Nationals need to be applauded loudly - far louder than all the simplistic crying about "cheating" is that they didn't whine about it, or play along with the "open secret", no, they took it for what it was, proceeded accordingly, and beat the cheat, not through "moral superiority, but by the good old-fashioned work-ethic of doing, not wishing. Same thing as the cheaters, only they did better work. Finally, management gets their shit together! If you'd prefer that things like this not be used at all, that we go back to a simpler, more individual skill-set based game and just, you know, let the ball players play ball and leave the calculus to the , well, yeah, wouldn't that be nice and all that. Let's Make Baseball Great Again, sure. But you know, this world ain't that world, and unless/until this society collapses under the world of it's digitality, it ain't gonna be. Not just the "game", the whole freakin; world. Like Beto!

Finally, a sensible response!

I suppose I should wish I liked Michael Brecker more than I do...but still, everybody came to play, and that matters.

Expectation bias, perhaps? It doesn't surprise me that it's OP, it's very competent, thoroughly "sophisticated", totally pleasant, but not quite engaging past that point of pleasantness. I stand by my original assessment.If I'm going to hear some OP, let it be this type of thing, and in this quantity.

It can't, unless it has one created for it by a human who has an idea what to look at and then what to look for and then how to get there. Seriously, have you worked much in Excel? I do, just a little bit, but I work around people all day long whose job it is to look at data, look at trends, and then predict the future from there. If they get it right, they have a job. If they don't, they don't. It's very serious business, and it takes a very serious skill set, not just in terms of what to do with the data, but also what the data means. People are called "analysts" because they fucking analyze data, all the damn time. The more data, the more analysis, and good analysis is what leads to good decisions. And if not "good decisions", at least good in the sense that it gives you better odds of getting the desired outcome. Excel and other programs like it are capable of SO much more than just balancing your checkbook and stuff like that. Between data harvesting and data analytics, this is your life in the outside world in the outside world, whether you realize it or not.

Well, there you have it: Point 1) the dude collecting the data and formulating the algorithm obviously did have "careful human observation of what anyone with a sufficient background in the game could detect". Not only did he have that, he had shrewd crazymad analytical skills about what to do with what he observed. Point 2) The Nationals, to their eternal (if not readily self-acknowledged) credit did exactly that. I still say that this cheating by the Astros is the logical next step in Databall. Of course it's "wrong", but I'm not so sure that it shouldn't be taken as a sign that that cat is out of the bag and the next team to do it will be a lot sophisticated about how they do it (I mean, trash cans? How oil-fieldy. Gauche!). But just think about the implications to a game that is now damn near totally data-driven in every preparatory regard. You can use an algorithm to predict pitches. You can't unlearn that type of thing. It's a perfect example of the old adage "Be careful what you ask for, you might get it".

Trump is a trailing indicator, not a leading indicator. Thinking otherwise is a huge waste of time and energy, physical and mental. Save your time and energy for getting in front of shit. So...it's an "open secret", and nobody steps up to blow the whistle. That's kinda lame. But very all-American, pre-Trump. Don't upset the applecart. Even worse, it was an open secret, and nobody but the Nationals had the skill set and the motivation to actually figure out how to counter it? Talk about out of touch...The nationals should be proud as fuck about getting that done, not whining about having to do it...a 21st Century solution to a 21st Century problem deserves infinitely more validation than a whiny 19th Century response. I'm supposed to NOT laugh at a "game" that has long ago sold it's soul to spreadsheets and algorithms not being able to cope with an extended application of the same damn things into the realm of actual rule-breaking? Sorry, I laugh extra hard every time somebody acts like oh my, they CHEATED and then turns around and hedges with well, stealing signals has always been a part of the game. If that's a "real opinion" then all I can say is that it's probably not the "cheating" that bothers you, it's the technology of it. And it should be, because you are being "cheated" with this same technological paradigm damn near every waking moment of your life (only a slight exaggeration) Tell you what - when the game bans managers managing the game with a butload full of spreadsheets and such on their lap, when the game stops talking about using technology to call balls and strikes in the name of more reliable outcomes (yes, robo-umps, like electronic voting machines, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?), when the game pretty much decides that they'll not allow their brand to leverage all the social media that their is out their because of sincere concerns over data-harvesting, then I will think about not laughing. Until then, anybody who's actually surprised that this happened is a chump/ Some most of them are loveavble chumps, but geezus folks - what world are you living in? TOTALLY a laughing matter! Well, no, "gentlemen" don't. So yes, appearances (or as we say today, "optics") matter.

It's not just "a more efficient version". It's a whole new way to do it. They used a spreadsheet and an algorithm. They took reducing chance to a whole new level, they reduced the chance in reducing the chance. Of course the impetus underneath this is base, human greed pure and simple, and it goes back a least just a little further than "baseball". But geez, anybody who lives in the world of data and analytics, especially younger people who are immersed in the gaming/hacking world where "cheating" the "system" is pretty much the reason for being...nobody should be surprised that this happened in the sports world, other than it took so damn long for it to get done. At last, MLB finds a way to appeal to a younger audience, and what do they do with it? Look at ways to incorporate it into the game? No, they toss it out! The game is doomed to a slow death of analog obsolescence Look dude, I'm in the back yard of SMU. Death penalty those motherfuckers. Cancel their season. And then wait for them to do it again.