Jack Parkman

There's a fairly easy way to kill tanking: go away from a straight draft system or even a weighted lottery system to a non-weighted lottery system, where every spot of a non playoff team is part of the lottery. If you miss the playoffs, you have no idea whether you'd pick 1st or under the current system, 20th. It completely destroys the incentive to be really bad....in fact I'd argue that it puts all of the incentive towards winning, because even if you fall short, you'll have a chance to get a franchise changing talent.

In a league without a draft lottery it's pretty cut and dry. Either you want to be one of the best teams, or one of the worst. Being caught in the middle is horrible.

The NHL playoffs are the best tournament in sports. You're missing out. It's the only league where the number of playoff teams is close to justified. The margin between an 8 seed and a 4 seed in that league is paper thin.

We already have 10.

I'd rather go through a long-term rebuilding process than watch 162 games of a team that is designed to win 77 games but if everything goes right, they might win 85 and sneak into the playoffs. You'd have a metric ton of that shit throughout baseball with an expanded playoffs. 10 teams with the current setup is the most I could handle. Otherwise you're giving owners an excuse to be content with mediocrity.

^^^^^^ The last thing we want as Sox fans is for ownership to have an excuse to not put the team over the top with talent. We've all seen way too much of that shit over the last two decades.

You could say the same about a hot goalie in the NHL, except that's just one guy instead of four. JS Giguere and Jaroslav Halak got hot and took their teams to the SCF and conference final respectively. That Ducks team and that Montreal team had no business beating the Stars and Capitals respectively in those seasons. Both won the presidents trophy(best regular season in the NHL) and were out in the first round because they ran into a hot goalie.

^^^^^ When it comes to the playoffs, less is more. I think the NFL has too many teams in the playoffs, and they have 6. The only league that could justify a 16 team playoff is the NHL, and even then it's iffy. The NBA should totally cut their playoffs to 8 teams. IMO 8 teams is the right amount, and you take the best 8 teams regardless of division or conference or what have you. If they're going to have such a large playoff structure, then they don't need as many games as they play in every league except the NFL.

It's not a negative, it's more about Buster Olney's tweet from this post: They were full of shit the entire time, and now they're caving and making themselves look like the "good guys." It's all PR bullshit. You're buying the con. They could have done this 4-5 weeks ago, but got greedy and thought they could squeeze more out of the players. Don't be fooled. All of the bullshit that happened for the last month and all of the negative PR is 100% on ownership. If they were actually losing money they would not have caved on the prorated salaries so quickly after the MLBPA called their bluff.

That's what's gonna be a huge issue. I still have my doubts about the integrity of these games. I'm glad they're trying, but it might turn out that it's nearly impossible to have a season with any sort of integrity because players get sick.

The owners agreed to full prorated salaries. Yes, it does prove that they were fulla shit the whole time.

That's not what I meant dude....I wasn't talking about sports....Are there gonna be fans? No. Keep going...I wasn't talking about there being no sports, I was talking about sports with fans, as it was BC(before covid) You're misreading the entirety of what I was saying.

It looked awful a few days ago. Goes to show that the owners were fulla shit an the MLBPA called their bluff.

Wonderful news.

Also, if Baseball comes back now would be a good time to make the move to an automatic strike zone. Obviously they'll still need umps for safe/out calls but you can really back the HP ump off except for plays at the plate. Social distancing is a good excuse for this.

Point taken. Have the done a good job in the EPL at keeping players healthy?

It's not fair to compare both a) soccer to baseball, as the ball is not touched by a player's hands other than by the goalie, who wears gloves or when the ball goes out of bounds. at least one player(the pitcher) touches the ball with his hands every play in baseball. b) South Korea's situation vs the US situation, as SK has been one of the absolute best countries in the world at keeping covid under control. For example, the NPB just had to shut down because players tested positive. They still haven't started a season in Japan yet.

Do they have fans or not? MLB owners seem vehemently opposed to operating without fans in the stands.

No, I don't think that the worst case scenario comes to pass. The worst case scenario is that a vaccine remains elusive for decades, or centuries, and that it wreaks havoc on humanity for a long time. I think we'll get one by the end of this decade, but not before late 2022. (evidence based)

I've done my research on this subject, provided links, etc. I don't think I'm overreacting at all. Would I call the majority of posters on here delusional? No, but I do think most are overly optimistic about covid. I get that it helps as a coping mechanism. I really do.(I know all about coping mechanisms) You're not operating within the bounds of reality. Do I think that we could beat the record for this one? Absolutely. Do I think we're going to get a safe vaccine in 18-24 months? No, because the evidence points to it taking longer than that. Somewhere between 30-48 months I think is a realistic goal, and it will still set or match the record.

I like to base my opinions on evidence. You? I don't like to base my opinions on assumptions that we can do something that has never been done in human history. It took a decade to get to the moon, for example when doing something that's never been done.

I didn't...I said it was a distinct possibility. There's a difference. NIH was getting close to a SARS vaccine in 2016 but got their funding pulled. It took them 13 years (!!!!!!!) to get that far. Most vaccines take a decade or more to develop. The record is four years. The upside is that we have the entire world working on it, so that might allow us to beat the record. There's also a distinct possibility it could take an average time frame, which is 8-12 years. It's also possible that we can't do it. Being realistic=/= being negative.

Just based on the historical fact that even if they did it in 3.5 years it would set a record. If you go by equaling the fastest safe vaccine ever produced, that would put us in early 2024. Again, if you're going to require everyone to be vaccinated you better be damn sure it's safe. It's an educated guess that if they have the whole world working on it to go through the proper safety protocols it would be widely available sometime in 2023. Late 2023 is a conservative best case scenario. If you wanted to be aggresively optimistic, you might get late 2022.

I'm constantly amazed by people's inability to accept reality. The sooner people accept it, the better off we'll be as a society. All of the assumptions I made are based on historical data. I don't think anything I said is unreasonable at all. Thinking positively is good for mental health. Being delusional isn't. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/why-coronavirus-vaccine-could-take-way-longer-than-a-year/ The experts are saying anything less than 3 years is incredibly optimistic. And 3 years would still break records.

I fear for both Robert and Eloy's health as long as Eloy is playing LF.