WicketMaiden

Me too. A couple of XBH from him tonight would be very handy. He's always carried himself with a bit of arrogance, so a guy like that on a bit of a tear might be the spark the team needs to bridge to Trout's return. Just one good month from Adell here would be huge for our season.

Shohei has just one hit (a HR) from his last 18 AB's (5 games). I really hope he was saving it all up for the Dodgers.

All this shows is that older generations have more wealth than younger generations. Duh. Of course they do. And most of that wealth will filter down to Gen X when the Boomers die out, and then to the millenials after that. Every generation thinks they have it harder than the one before, when in actual fact life gets easier all the time. My parents are Boomers - they didn't spend any money on unnecessary things. They saved. They didn't use credit. They mended things and fixed things to save money. They didn't have a microwave, several TV's, several mobile phones and gym memberships etc, and they often worked two jobs. They went without things they wanted but didn't need. How much of that do Millenials do? Because I know Gen X didn't do much of it, we spent our money and had fun instead.

Sometimes I wonder if you have any capacity for critical thought at all. I'm not a Boomer. Nowhere near.

A Town Called Malice: Crime drama Settled down to watch this with fairly high hopes - set in the 1980's with a good soundtrack, in South London and southern Spain a crime family try to get back to the top. Nice idea, but the execution is so bad I'd almost recommend it just to see how bad it really is. The script is so poor (and I'm being kind), the acting is awful, so wooden and forced, and I have no idea what the director was doing. Twenty minutes in to episode one I had to check to see whether it was meant to be a parody type of comedy. It's so bad it makes you laugh and it has a great soundtrack.

I think it's the same loyalty, our wives just have higher standards. Our wives divorce us for looking at and visiting other women - our teams welcome us back no matter where we've been, who we've been with, or for how long. Our wives divorce us for unreasonable behaviour and verbal abuse - our teams regularly allow us to verbally abuse them and don't really bat an eyelid to our unreasonable expectations, sulks, and venting. We divorce our wives when they betray us with other men - we divorce our teams when they betray us and move to another city. (Sometimes.) We don't divorce our wives because they're crap in the kitchen and burn dinner, or don't really have all the moves in bed, or have blown the family fun budget on yoga classes instead of paint-balling - we don't divorce our teams because they can't lay down a bunt and hit with RISP, or when they don't really have the moves out of the bull-pen, or when they've blown the budget on Wells, Pujols, Hamilton, rather than buying that nice shiny Beltre who would have been so much fun that Summer.

Cup of tea.

Wages have increased in line with inflation. Housing costs are included in that inflation calculation, as is energy, medical costs, food and several others. Education isn't included because not everyone uses it. So the point stands: you are just as well off as your counterparts in the 1970's, you haven't had your spending power diminished, as was claimed in the original post I replied to.

Booo! Booooooo! We saved you from Napoleon! Booooooooooooooo! *Numpty Notice: This is a joke... it's also true... but mostly it's a joke.

Oh, man, @Chuckster70, could we have a numpty emoji, please? I'd be wearing it out today, mate.

Is the sky falling in too? Even if it's a broken bone, Trout will be swinging a bat again in the middle of August. A week of that absence will be for the All-star game; Moniak will cover half of Trout's missed games and he's doing pretty well; and Trout wasn't really himself this year at the plate: so how much of a loss is it really? One game lost? Two, three? Then add to that there is a fair chance that Trout comes back raking after his break and is fresh and revitalised at the plate. And some of you want to trade the best bloody baseball player that has ever played the game? While he is having a career season? Performing at a level that has never been seen before? Numpties.

I wasn't kidding, I had bad information. Not afraid to admit when I get something wrong. The US is miles ahead on guns per capita, but it's not so much the case with the percentage of households with firearms. Yes, the US is still no1 for that stat too, but only by a couple of percentage points. US is 42%, Finland 39%, Bosnia 35%, Switzerland 29%, Norway 26% and so on. But the murder rate does not correlate: Murder rate per 100,000: US - 8.5 Finland - 1.6 Bosnia - 1.3 Swiss - 0.5 Norway - 0.6 The USA is also 55th in the world for murder rate, yet no1 in the world for firearms per capita. It's not the firearms, it's the people holding them. *links to data (it is not exhaustive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_guns_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

This is an interesting question and one that I have pondered and investigated. It isn't about the guns. Many other countries have more weapons per capita but a far lower murder rate. It is something else. Culture? You have a strong culture of the individual, most other countries have more of a community focus. In Europe we have free health care and state pensions and state owned utilities in some places too, and we love it. We have an attitude that we are all in it together, whereas in the US you have more of an attitude that everything is down to you as an individual. This naturally breeds discontent among you in the US, and breeds social harmony in Europe. Depression Medication? RFK Jr has some fantastic research showing the prevalence of SSRI's being taken by the people involved in these shootings. The US has an enormous problem with it - interesting article on SSRI's and other meds in the US here: https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2021/11/07/americas-epidemic-of-antidepressants/ I don't know what the answer is, but I do think those are two very relevant factors in your comparatively extreme levels of person to person violence. Honestly @Taylor, I think you were born in the wrong country.

This data does dispute your indisputable 'fact'. It shows that the value of real wages has been steady since 1973 and has not diminished as you contend, and the actual real value of wages since the 1960's has risen.

The worrying aspects are the walks and strikeouts in high leverage situations. Facing some high class relievers in some of those situations won't help, but even so, he walks a third as much and strikes out twice as much when you compare his high and low leverage situations. It reads to me like he is doing something different in clutch situations, but he is also having some terrible luck with that .125 BABIP.

The Idol: HBO This was panned by critics and viewers alike, and I think unjustly. It covers some dark subjects in between all the beautiful, almost naked, people on view. Odd that they made in 5 episodes instead of the original 6, but it still ends in an OK place. Lily-Rose Depp is stunning in the lead role.

That's funny. You should ask for a refund from your college. 'The New Deal' was part of US economic policy from 1933 to 1939, so I very much doubt anyone on this board benefited from that.

His BABIP with RISP is even worse: Season Leverage BB% K% BB/K AVG OBP SLG OPS ISO BABIP wRC wRAA wOBA wRC+ 2023 Low Leverage 10.8% 18.9% 0.57 .302 .392 .465 .857 .163 .354 25 7.1 .377 141 2023 Medium Leverage 7.1% 18.6% 0.38 .212 .276 .343 .619 .131 .229 13 -6.1 .271 68 2023 High Leverage 3.7% 37.0% 0.10 .077 .111 .077 .188 .000 .125 -2 -5.0 .091 -57

Interesting. Luck could also be a factor here: this year Ward has a .276 BABIP (batting avg on balls in play), which is 49 points below last year (.325) and 30 points below the MLB average (.305).

There aren't any rules, per se, but an expectation of at least a modicum of maturity, most of the time. Constantly making penis references is just tedious, and has been since childhood. Cals seemed to mention them so often for a while that I actually started to think he was in the closet and was banging on the door to 'come out'.

Maybe you haven't been paying attention this year. Neto, O'Hoppe, Moniak, Estevez, even the revitalised Thaiss have been great fun to watch this year, and they will all likely be better players next year. Plenty of reasons to watch this Angels team outside of Trout and Ohtani.

I'm an Angels fan so I won't be going anywhere, for good or bad.

Nobody did. Before he came to the Halos, Rendon averaged 146 games per season during the prior four years in Washington. We broke him.

For the first time in years I'm genuinely interested to see what Perry does at the trade deadline. I'm hoping for good things.

I'm glad you got your owed earnings back @Don, shame they're still trying to penny-pinch but that's the corporate world these days. It's just business, if they won't pay your true value, find someone that will. I have occasionally regretted joining a particular company, but I have never regretted leaving one. Once I feel that a certain level of trust or fairness has been breached, I'm out of there.