1) the Nationals couldn't crack 2% of total respondents (tied with the Rays & Marlins) & didn't rank as a favorite at all in either the Northeast or South regions, and
2) the Twins' unfavorable rating was third lowest, trailing only the Rockies & Royals.
The Twins rate quite well in the Midwest. The Cubs leading by far makes sense, but the Tigers and Cardinals are only barely above the Twins.
The midwest rankings are pretty much by metropolitan population order. That sure makes the White Sox' rank stand out!
I find it odd to see the Cubs ranked so favorably; living where I do colors my perspectives.
It's a bit jumbled. MSP has a million more people than St. Louis, Kansas City has 600k more than Milwaukee, and Cincinnati has a 100k more than Cleveland.
MSP is no more than 700K more. Okay, KC is under-represented, but otherwise the list is "pretty much" in population order. It's even closer if the Cardinals steal fewer of the Royals' votes.
I thought they seemed more off than this, but then I realized I was thinking of them in descending order of Electoral College votes.
I'd love to see this poll every 5 years, or even every 3.
Also, 989 respondents seems incredibly low, particularly when you get into regional breakdowns which will have less.
sample size is a critical point. With 4 regions, you only have ~250 each, which is pretty small, particularly when you are trying to estimate so many things.
I'm all for bringing in another team in New York, especially in Brooklyn, but I don't think the Mets' ranking supports that argument.
The Angels' ranking is really sad. They are in the second-largest TV market in the country and have the best player in baseball and a sure Hall-of-Famer that is extremely popular and they rank lower than the Twins. Of course, the Twins don't share a market with a team that has the best pitcher in baseball and has been a regular in the postseason. The fans around where I live seem to be able to switch their favorites with how well the teams are doing. The Angels even have a more favorable TV deal, at least for the fans. I only recently am able to get Dodgers games if I wanted to and that's only because Time Warner bought out Charter.
The Angels (and the Rams) have always been and will always be the little sister of any other LA team in their sport. Besides not having the lengthy history of the Dodgers, southern LA barely exists to the rest of the city.
The poor Clipps don't even merit a mention...
The Angels have made two mistakes with their team identity – dropping "California," and then the whole LAAofA fiasco, which should've capitalized on the Orange County cachet of that era. Their ballpark is pretty terrible, but no worse than Dodger Stadium once you push past the nostalgia factor for Chavez Ravine.
I intentionally left out the Clippers because they play in LA, not in Orange County. They may have been terrible for a long time, but at least they were relevant (ie: received mention in jokes on Carson, etc) and were not ignored.
Don't the Rams play in LA proper?
It'll be interesting to see which team wins (loses?) the futility fight between the Rams & Chargers. I'm just happy for San Diego.
Do they? They played in Anaheim when I lived there, and they've moved at least once since then.
The Rams will be the Los Angeles football team and the Chargers will be that team from San Diego that moved in. There are plenty of Chargers fans around because they were the closest team for a long time when there was no L.A. team, but I know a lot of football fans that liked not having any team here because then they could get more national and regional games on network television here.
USC and UCLA are bigger than any pro team will ever be in LA. Especially the Lambs.
The Rams will be moving where the Hollywood Park racetrack once sat. The Rams play at the Coliseum in the interim.
Now, I think we all recognize that the current edition of the Twins is hugely flawed, particularly in the pitching corps. But a forecast that they will go 26.5-41.5 the rest of the way (currently 48-46)?? That is projecting an epic second-half collapse.
Sure, their current Pythag is 41-53, so the boys have substantially outperformed their overall Runs Scored vs Runs Allowed. At some point, however, one has to adjust to observed outcomes, no? And if they merely matched their Pythag the rest of the way, they would go 29-39, for a season record of 77-85. I wonder if the projection is somehow putting greater weight on their lousy home record, assuming that that is the "true" signal and that their excellent road record is noise?
FanGraphs predicts 78.3-83.7 for a rest-of-season percentage of .446. That's based on their projections. I think they include current season results for the players. Their Pythag is .4362 so FanGraphs thinks they're a bit better than that.
Speaking of, apparently that Garcia deal hasn't actually been completed. I wonder what happened there?
I was wondering about that, too. Of course, it's possible that nothing has happened--the reporting may have jumped the gun, or there may still be some details to be worked out. I guess we'll see.
probably "pending medical exam" or some other bureaucracy
For whatever it's worth, this says the deal is not as close as some assumed, though it may still happen.
Why does AMR's entire FMD LTE show up in the sidebar?
(That is a lot of acronyms in a short space).
Because, AMR.
I blame the Kanji
Updated removing the Kanji: That was it.
Doesn't surprise me. It's an ancient plugin that probably gets confused by multibyte characters.
I've used kanji in the past and don't recall that happening though. Weirdzos.
But was it part of a major treatise though?
I wonder if a particular character triggered it.
Irony jerseys. No surprises of Twins and Royals jerseys on the list.
Lefty's Twins card shown in the article is really, really sad.
That year was the breakthrough season for a 22-year-old phenom named George Brett, who has said he learned a lot about how to carry himself from the aging Killebrew. Killebrew retired at the end of the year.
I have never heard of Harmon being carried drunk from a bar. I think a person could write a book about Brett, though.
Boone reveals that it was more than a simple matter of aging that caused him to fall so fast. Instead, he writes, he was a “substance abuser” whose alcohol problem grew worse during that period.
“I needed a drink. So I had one, and then another. I’d polish off a six-pack of beer and reach for another six-pack. Eventually I made the mistake of switching from beer to clear — from the slow, easy buzz of Bud Light or Miller Lite to the sharper edge of Absolut and Ketel One, a bottle at a time,” Boone writes, adding in the next paragraph: “Nobody knew how much I was drinking. To the baseball men I loved and trusted, it seemed like the usual late-career crisis.”
Hadn't heard that before.
That's a sad story. I don't mind drinking now and again, but I'm about the same age as Boone when he was in Minnesota, and I can't imagine downing a bottle of vodka at a time. I'd be absolutely, 100% wrecked the next day. Getting out of bed would be a near superhuman act.
In college, my friend Greg and I realized there might be a problem when we went out and bought a 1.75 Liter of Captain Morgan, polished it off in a couple of hours, and were annoyed we didn't have more; to top it off, we woke the next morning without hangovers.
I had heard stories of him involving strip clubs so it's not too surprising.
[Redacted]
There's a quality picture of Nick Blackburn doing a Nick Blackburn thing in that article.
I'm kind of busting at the seams today. My wife is meeting with her boss on Monday to discuss what her new duties will be at the private Christian School she works at (she teaches but also does other stuff at the moment), but he also mentioned she will be getting a raise and that "she'll like it." We took that to mean a "significant" raise of hopefully 10% or so, which would be just enough to offset the increase in our health insurance premiums since our boys are no longer eligible to get their insurance through the state. But I've heard through the grapevine that the state has changed its laws so private schools are required to meet the minimum teacher salaries of comparable public schools and that the teachers at her schools are getting an average raise that will be 3 times or more what we were hoping for. I've decided not to tell her so she can be completely surprised on Monday, but it's hard not to get excited about it, so I had to post this info somewhere where she won't see it.
At the same time, we are just about to close on a refinancing of our mortgage that will allow us to consolidate our debt and significantly reduce our monthly payments. So we will be increasing our income at the same time that we our reducing our monthly costs.
Good luck. Hope it all works out well.
Dido. Hope it is a great turn for you all.
Question for those in the know: Runner daughter tells me it isn't good to be lifting different weights on complimentary weight machines -- for example, I lift 3-reps of 12 of 70lbs on the rear/delts, but 130lbs on the pecs/fly ("the Hugging machine"). Is this a problem?
I'm not super familiar with those machines, but in and of itself, being able to lift different weights on different movements is not a problem. Some movements are going to be "easier" or "harder" in that they involve different groups of muscles, sometimes more muscle mass than others. Your potential for leg pressing is going to be way higher than your potential on the pec deck, for instance. Sometimes it depends on leverages, too. If you have weird ratios of forearm to upper arm lengths or really long or short arms, that could impact how much you can lift on different machines
My view on it is that if you are working both push and pull movements for upper and lower body, then over time things will even out. The better you are at a lift, the more difficult it is to make progress, so your lagging lifts will, as a general rule, tend to improve faster than your good lifts. If you are worried about your upper body pulling being weak relative to your upper body pushing, you could maybe add in some dumbbell rows or something like that before or after.
My 2 cents anyway.
Never heard of that caution. Interesting.
Solid "concur" with Ubel. I'd think your body capacity will be what it will be, and unless you've clearly underdeveloped a muscle group worthy of focus, continue using a balanced program that works all of them. I hardly even pay attention to the weights on the machines. It never occured to me to make sure I could do a "10" on both my presses and pulls.
Lift to failure with an eye towards improvement, and let biology take it's course.
Also would advocate free weights wherever possible/practical.
There's a gym at work I mainly use for the shower (great set of trails to bike on next to me). When I have been down there and not doing cardio, I've stuck to machines mainly because I wouldn't know where to start with free weights. The people that do know what they're doing look cool though.
Thanks. I mentally called hogwash to her "balanced muscle groups" warning, but was just curious. I lift as much as I can do 3-reps of 12 of, regardless of muscle group. Yeah, free weights aren't going to happen. I prefer the machines in that they better isolate/direct my movements.
they better isolate/direct my movements
Understood. Also...double-edged sword, that.
Here's where I butt out and fall back on Zee's first principle of exercise planning advice: Just do something.
Yep. I never look down on anyone at the Y, because they're there!
My two cents: you want to train complementary muscle groups (both pulling and pushing exercises) and if you do so faithfully, imbalance is not something to worry about.
You said it way better than me.
I decided that today was the day I eat smarter; I spent real time preparing something to bring to work that didn't force me to fall back on fast food, which has put me at a weight where I simply don't feel like myself (though you wouldn't call me "big").
Naturally, just as I'm clocking out to lunch, a new department head in the store strides back to the break room with free pizza for everyone.
Tomorrow, I guess.
Everything in moderation.
Including moderation.
I appreciate both your comments.
I hope only moderately.
Kyrie wants out of Cleveland and Wolves are reportedly 1 of 4 teams he'd prefer to go to. Don't see it happening, but still, just being on that list shows how times have changed.
Wolves are reportedly 1 of 4 teams he'd prefer to go to.
Love must've talked it up in Cleveland.
Twins are today's free game of the day on MLB.tv plus you can watch it on Yahoo as well, though I'm not sure if that is a better option for anyone.
Tom Kelly on his muscular statue: "I guess I did manage in the steroid era. I didn't realize I took any."
Solid.
As I said yesterday, I hope that famous Zubaz-and-stogie pic was the basis.
wife's out on business. got volunteered to watch her friend's two kids as well. big storm came through, power's out. send help (and beer).
SSS and all that, but this 538 piece exploring likeability/hateability of baseball franchises is another indication the New York metro desperately needs another team. Two other things struck me:
1) the Nationals couldn't crack 2% of total respondents (tied with the Rays & Marlins) & didn't rank as a favorite at all in either the Northeast or South regions, and
2) the Twins' unfavorable rating was third lowest, trailing only the Rockies & Royals.
The Twins rate quite well in the Midwest. The Cubs leading by far makes sense, but the Tigers and Cardinals are only barely above the Twins.
The midwest rankings are pretty much by metropolitan population order. That sure makes the White Sox' rank stand out!
I find it odd to see the Cubs ranked so favorably; living where I do colors my perspectives.
It's a bit jumbled. MSP has a million more people than St. Louis, Kansas City has 600k more than Milwaukee, and Cincinnati has a 100k more than Cleveland.
MSP is no more than 700K more. Okay, KC is under-represented, but otherwise the list is "pretty much" in population order. It's even closer if the Cardinals steal fewer of the Royals' votes.
I thought they seemed more off than this, but then I realized I was thinking of them in descending order of Electoral College votes.
I'd love to see this poll every 5 years, or even every 3.
Also, 989 respondents seems incredibly low, particularly when you get into regional breakdowns which will have less.
sample size is a critical point. With 4 regions, you only have ~250 each, which is pretty small, particularly when you are trying to estimate so many things.
I'm all for bringing in another team in New York, especially in Brooklyn, but I don't think the Mets' ranking supports that argument.
The Angels' ranking is really sad. They are in the second-largest TV market in the country and have the best player in baseball and a sure Hall-of-Famer that is extremely popular and they rank lower than the Twins. Of course, the Twins don't share a market with a team that has the best pitcher in baseball and has been a regular in the postseason. The fans around where I live seem to be able to switch their favorites with how well the teams are doing. The Angels even have a more favorable TV deal, at least for the fans. I only recently am able to get Dodgers games if I wanted to and that's only because Time Warner bought out Charter.
The Angels (and the Rams) have always been and will always be the little sister of any other LA team in their sport. Besides not having the lengthy history of the Dodgers, southern LA barely exists to the rest of the city.
The poor Clipps don't even merit a mention...
The Angels have made two mistakes with their team identity – dropping "California," and then the whole LAAofA fiasco, which should've capitalized on the Orange County cachet of that era. Their ballpark is pretty terrible, but no worse than Dodger Stadium once you push past the nostalgia factor for Chavez Ravine.
I intentionally left out the Clippers because they play in LA, not in Orange County. They may have been terrible for a long time, but at least they were relevant (ie: received mention in jokes on Carson, etc) and were not ignored.
Don't the Rams play in LA proper?
It'll be interesting to see which team wins (loses?) the futility fight between the Rams & Chargers. I'm just happy for San Diego.
Do they? They played in Anaheim when I lived there, and they've moved at least once since then.
The Rams will be the Los Angeles football team and the Chargers will be that team from San Diego that moved in. There are plenty of Chargers fans around because they were the closest team for a long time when there was no L.A. team, but I know a lot of football fans that liked not having any team here because then they could get more national and regional games on network television here.
USC and UCLA are bigger than any pro team will ever be in LA. Especially the Lambs.
The Rams will be moving where the Hollywood Park racetrack once sat. The Rams play at the Coliseum in the interim.
Expected wins of 74.5???
Now, I think we all recognize that the current edition of the Twins is hugely flawed, particularly in the pitching corps. But a forecast that they will go 26.5-41.5 the rest of the way (currently 48-46)?? That is projecting an epic second-half collapse.
Sure, their current Pythag is 41-53, so the boys have substantially outperformed their overall Runs Scored vs Runs Allowed. At some point, however, one has to adjust to observed outcomes, no? And if they merely matched their Pythag the rest of the way, they would go 29-39, for a season record of 77-85. I wonder if the projection is somehow putting greater weight on their lousy home record, assuming that that is the "true" signal and that their excellent road record is noise?
FanGraphs predicts 78.3-83.7 for a rest-of-season percentage of .446. That's based on their projections. I think they include current season results for the players. Their Pythag is .4362 so FanGraphs thinks they're a bit better than that.
Speaking of, apparently that Garcia deal hasn't actually been completed. I wonder what happened there?
I was wondering about that, too. Of course, it's possible that nothing has happened--the reporting may have jumped the gun, or there may still be some details to be worked out. I guess we'll see.
probably "pending medical exam" or some other bureaucracy
For whatever it's worth, this says the deal is not as close as some assumed, though it may still happen.
Why does AMR's entire FMD LTE show up in the sidebar?
(That is a lot of acronyms in a short space).
Because, AMR.
I blame the Kanji
Updated removing the Kanji: That was it.
Doesn't surprise me. It's an ancient plugin that probably gets confused by multibyte characters.
I've used kanji in the past and don't recall that happening though. Weirdzos.
But was it part of a major treatise though?
I wonder if a particular character triggered it.
Irony jerseys. No surprises of Twins and Royals jerseys on the list.
I have never heard of Harmon being carried drunk from a bar. I think a person could write a book about Brett, though.
I was hoping for Bret Boone.
Googlin' led me here.
Hadn't heard that before.
That's a sad story. I don't mind drinking now and again, but I'm about the same age as Boone when he was in Minnesota, and I can't imagine downing a bottle of vodka at a time. I'd be absolutely, 100% wrecked the next day. Getting out of bed would be a near superhuman act.
In college, my friend Greg and I realized there might be a problem when we went out and bought a 1.75 Liter of Captain Morgan, polished it off in a couple of hours, and were annoyed we didn't have more; to top it off, we woke the next morning without hangovers.
I had heard stories of him involving strip clubs so it's not too surprising.
[Redacted]
There's a quality picture of Nick Blackburn doing a Nick Blackburn thing in that article.
Heh, I saw that too.
When I read that article, I thought of all the Blues Gretzky 99 jerseys.
How could the answer not be Pete Rose??
I'm kind of busting at the seams today. My wife is meeting with her boss on Monday to discuss what her new duties will be at the private Christian School she works at (she teaches but also does other stuff at the moment), but he also mentioned she will be getting a raise and that "she'll like it." We took that to mean a "significant" raise of hopefully 10% or so, which would be just enough to offset the increase in our health insurance premiums since our boys are no longer eligible to get their insurance through the state. But I've heard through the grapevine that the state has changed its laws so private schools are required to meet the minimum teacher salaries of comparable public schools and that the teachers at her schools are getting an average raise that will be 3 times or more what we were hoping for. I've decided not to tell her so she can be completely surprised on Monday, but it's hard not to get excited about it, so I had to post this info somewhere where she won't see it.
At the same time, we are just about to close on a refinancing of our mortgage that will allow us to consolidate our debt and significantly reduce our monthly payments. So we will be increasing our income at the same time that we our reducing our monthly costs.
Good luck. Hope it all works out well.
Dido. Hope it is a great turn for you all.
Question for those in the know: Runner daughter tells me it isn't good to be lifting different weights on complimentary weight machines -- for example, I lift 3-reps of 12 of 70lbs on the rear/delts, but 130lbs on the pecs/fly ("the Hugging machine"). Is this a problem?
I'm not super familiar with those machines, but in and of itself, being able to lift different weights on different movements is not a problem. Some movements are going to be "easier" or "harder" in that they involve different groups of muscles, sometimes more muscle mass than others. Your potential for leg pressing is going to be way higher than your potential on the pec deck, for instance. Sometimes it depends on leverages, too. If you have weird ratios of forearm to upper arm lengths or really long or short arms, that could impact how much you can lift on different machines
My view on it is that if you are working both push and pull movements for upper and lower body, then over time things will even out. The better you are at a lift, the more difficult it is to make progress, so your lagging lifts will, as a general rule, tend to improve faster than your good lifts. If you are worried about your upper body pulling being weak relative to your upper body pushing, you could maybe add in some dumbbell rows or something like that before or after.
My 2 cents anyway.
Never heard of that caution. Interesting.
Solid "concur" with Ubel. I'd think your body capacity will be what it will be, and unless you've clearly underdeveloped a muscle group worthy of focus, continue using a balanced program that works all of them. I hardly even pay attention to the weights on the machines. It never occured to me to make sure I could do a "10" on both my presses and pulls.
Lift to failure with an eye towards improvement, and let biology take it's course.
Also would advocate free weights wherever possible/practical.
There's a gym at work I mainly use for the shower (great set of trails to bike on next to me). When I have been down there and not doing cardio, I've stuck to machines mainly because I wouldn't know where to start with free weights. The people that do know what they're doing look cool though.
Thanks. I mentally called hogwash to her "balanced muscle groups" warning, but was just curious. I lift as much as I can do 3-reps of 12 of, regardless of muscle group. Yeah, free weights aren't going to happen. I prefer the machines in that they better isolate/direct my movements.
Understood. Also...double-edged sword, that.
Here's where I butt out and fall back on Zee's first principle of exercise planning advice: Just do something.
Yep. I never look down on anyone at the Y, because they're there!
My two cents: you want to train complementary muscle groups (both pulling and pushing exercises) and if you do so faithfully, imbalance is not something to worry about.
You said it way better than me.
I decided that today was the day I eat smarter; I spent real time preparing something to bring to work that didn't force me to fall back on fast food, which has put me at a weight where I simply don't feel like myself (though you wouldn't call me "big").
Naturally, just as I'm clocking out to lunch, a new department head in the store strides back to the break room with free pizza for everyone.
Tomorrow, I guess.
Everything in moderation.
Including moderation.
I appreciate both your comments.
I hope only moderately.
Kyrie wants out of Cleveland and Wolves are reportedly 1 of 4 teams he'd prefer to go to. Don't see it happening, but still, just being on that list shows how times have changed.
Love must've talked it up in Cleveland.
Twins are today's free game of the day on MLB.tv plus you can watch it on Yahoo as well, though I'm not sure if that is a better option for anyone.
Solid.
As I said yesterday, I hope that famous Zubaz-and-stogie pic was the basis.
wife's out on business. got volunteered to watch her friend's two kids as well. big storm came through, power's out. send help (and beer).
We love Kuip and Kruk(ow).
Kuiper surprises fan who dropped foul ball.
I was watching last night but missed the payoff to this.