You can't bank on either FIFA or the IOC doing the right thing. FIFA in particular, with Infantino cozying up to Trump, will pretend everything's fine just as they did for Russia and Qatar for the past two editions.

My take on him (as a Cubs fan fwiw) is that he’s a baseball hipster, open to being ahead of the curve on analytics while also a sucker for the nostalgic aspects of “old school” managing. I think ultimately he’s driven by a desire to be the cleverest guy in the room - and, often enough, he has been.

None of those seem like particularly “online” phrases to me. I’m thinking that this is more of the sort of thing where the way that Americans talk is received as very “meme-like” in the UK which, yeah, fair enough.

A salary floor doesn’t help players nearly as much as a cap hurts them. Trade-off for adding a salary cap needs to be a robust salary floor, at least 2 fewer yrs of team control, elimination of arbitration - they shouldn’t agree to a salary suppressing mechanism w/o taking on the ones in place now.

I think it’s interesting that the Athletics are still in Oakland’s spot alphabetically.

People might send in complaints but a curse word is not remotely close to being considered obscene IIRC. And yeah, the FCC is definitely not doing anything right now anyways. My guess is that anything like that would be processed in time but complaints like this are easy calls to dismiss quickly.

Profanity is allowed between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. “No f-bombs on SNL” is a Lorne/NBC policy as far as I can tell.

Cubs fan here, the Pope made that very clear earlier this week.

On the one hand, I would have taken that in a heartbeat after the first two innings of game 1. Beating the Brewers and reaching the NLCS would be an appropriate high water mark for this solid but flawed team.

But also, how that Dodgers bullpen has played will spot their opponent at least one win.