Day: July 22, 2022

This could make baseball a lot more watchable

UncleScoopy

With this new controversy about the humidors, the Red Sox have been looking for a better way to treat their balls.

I think they have found it:

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Sydney showed some pretty good form – in more ways than one.


Given the score, they may as well have left Sydney in to pitch the whole game (see below)

That’s the most runs the Sox have ever allowed in a game, and is only two shy of the all-time modern era record for most runs scored or allowed by one team in a game. One team has scored 30 runs, three teams have scored 29. It has been a sobering week for the Boston nine. The Red Sox have been outscored 55–8 in their last three games. That minus-47 run differential across three contests is the all-time worst in the modern era.

The Blue Jays had scored 27 runs in the first six innings last night and seemed a safe bet for the MLB record, but they scored only one more in the final three stanzas. Most disappointingly, they managed only one run in the ninth, in which the Sox moundsman was a back-up infielder. The Jays also fell two short of the record for the most hits in a 9-inning game (31, last matched by the 1992 Brewers).

One old-time team did get more than 31 hits in an extra-inning game, and that was quite a story. The 1932 Cleveland Indians got 33 hits in a game – and lost 18-17! Their pitchers could not contain the mighty Jimmy Foxx, who had six hits and a walk in that game, including a double, three homers and eight RBI. Foxx also singled and scored the winning run in the top of the 18th inning, so he had a pretty decent day.

Nobody could contain Foxx that year. He finished with 58 homers, 169 RBI and a .364 average. That year his number of total bases on hits and walks was an astounding 554, the third best total in MLB history and the highest ever achieved by a non-Yankee. (The best two totals were achieved by Babe Ruth in 1921 and Lou Gehrig in 1927. Foxx almost matched Gehrig’s 556, but the Babe left them both in the distance at 602.)

Sydney Sweeney goes goth

UncleScoopy

But one of the best kinds of goth – the kind with large, nearly bare breasts

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As somebody pointed out in a recent thread, fashion is harder to understand than Finnegans Wake or Quantum Mechanics. What is the point of this look? You take a beautiful young woman with a spectacular figure and completely obfuscate or distort all the things that make her attractive in the first place. Maybe it never got weird enough for Hunter S. Thompson, but it frequently gets too weird for me.

Bannon Is Convicted of Contempt

UncleScoopy

This decision was obvious. He was accused of defying a subpoena. He defied it. End of story. The prosecution’s case lasted about 30 seconds; the jury’s deliberation was similar.

How is a defense lawyer supposed to rebut such a clear-cut case? Given the lack of an insanity plea, and the judge’s lack of tolerance for political grandstanding, they presented no case at all. My guess is that they will argue on appeal that the judge ruled incorrectly when he disallowed some of their defense strategies. That must have been the grand strategy that caused Bannon to avoid a guilty plea.

Bannon’s personal, off-the-record defense was that “He wanted to testify under oath that at all times he was doing what he thought the law required him to do.” His lawyers were probably wise to advise against that, given that judges do not take it especially kindly when defendants try to lecture them on the law, especially with the legal theory that the law “requires” people to ignore subpoenas.