MLB trade rumors and news: Astros and Braves advance to Championship Series
Brett Davis-USA TODAY SportsThe Astros advance to the ALCS for a fifth straight year while the Braves reach the NLCS for a second year in a row. The MLB Daily Dish is a daily feature we’re running here at MLBDD that rounds up roster-impacting news, rum…
The Astros advance to the ALCS for a fifth straight year while the Braves reach the NLCS for a second year in a row.
The MLB Daily Dish is a daily feature we’re running here at MLBDD that rounds up roster-impacting news, rumors, and analysis. Have feedback or have something that should be shared? Hit us up at @mlbdailydish on Twitter or @MLBDailyDish on Instagram.
- Freddie Freeman hit a tiebreaking homer off Brewers closer Josh Hader in the eighth inning of Tuesday’s NLDS Game 4, lifting Atlanta over Milwaukee 5-4 and sending the Braves to their second straight NLCS.
- While Gavin Sheets homered to give the White Sox an early 1-0 lead in Tuesday’s ALDS Game 4, the Astros ended up coasting to victory, beating Chicago 10-1 to advance to the ALCS for an incredible fifth straight season.
- Kiké Hernández hit a walk-off sacrifice fly on Monday night, lifting the Red Sox to a 6-5 victory as they became the first team this year to advance to a League Championship Series. While Boston reached the ALCS relatively quickly, their series victory over the 100-win Rays wasn’t an easy one, and they won their final two games in walk-off fashion.
- This time of year, managers begin to be picked off one by one from their clubs. One that seems to always be on the hot seat is Phillies skipper Joe Girardi. At this point in time, he’s contracted through 2022, a fact that baseball president of operations admitted to The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Scott Lauber. But beyond that, is there a long-term future for Joe in Philadelphia?
- There were rumors swirling at the end of the season that the Padres were going to be making some pretty major changes to their coaching staff including at manager. Those rumors proved to be correct as the Padres relieved Jayce Tingler of his managerial duties, although it sounds like they would like to keep him in the organization in some capacity.
- Last Tuesday’s edition of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry wasn’t much of a contest, as the Red Sox took a 2-0 lead in the first inning and never trailed again, beating the Bronx Bombers 6-2 in the AL Wild Card game to advance to the ALDS. They’ll face yet another AL East rival, going up against the Rays in the five-game series.
- Need a primer on the teams competing for a World Series title this October? Check out our Andersen Pickard’s playoff preview.
- New Rockies GM Bill Schmidt got down to business on Tuesday, signing first baseman C.J. Cron — whose 2021 campaign was the most productive by a Rockies first baseman since Todd Helton was in his prime — to a two-year, $14.5 million extension and right-handed starter Antonio Senzatela to a new five-year, $50.5 million deal with a $14 million club option for 2027. While these moves won’t necessarily make the Rockies better in 2022, they at least should help prevent them from taking a step backward this offseason like they’ve done over the last few years.
- The Nationals took on an interesting reclamation project back in July when they acquired infielder Alcides Escobar and gave him his first major league opportunity since 2018. They were impressed enough by the 34-year-old’s performance to bring him back into the fold for 2022 on Tuesday.
- Clayton Kershaw avoided UCL damage but will not return this postseason. With the 33-year-old set to hit free agency at season’s end, it’s possible that he may have thrown his last pitch for the Dodgers after 14 seasons in blue and white.
- The rumored shake up of the Mets coaching staff got started in a hurry last week as the Mets relieved Luis Rojas of his position as manager. The Mets are simply declining his option for the 2022 season and it sounds like the organization is interested in him staying with them in another role.
- The Giants have successfully overcome virtually every obstacle that’s been thrown their way this season, but they’ll now have to overcome another big one, as their hottest hitter, Brandon Belt, will potentially miss all of the postseason with a fractured thumb.
- After just four starts with the Padres, veteran starter Jake Arrieta was designated for assignment. This could be the end for the 2015 NL Cy Young winner, who rejoined the Cubsprior to this season but was released by Chicago after posting a 6.88 ERA. He joined San Diego last month in hopes of helping an injury-plagued rotation, but he threw for a 10.95 ERA as the Padres more or less fell out of playoff contention with a late-season meltdown.
- MLB is requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for all non-playing personnel this postseason.
- While we saw a unique situation with the All-Star Game moved out of Atlanta this season, generally the venue for the ASG is set well in advance and it stays that way. The league announced that Seattle will be be host of the 2023 All-Star Game
- The Royals became the latest MLB organization to adopt a more modern front office structure, promoting longtime GM Dayton Moore to president of baseball operations while elevating assistant GM JJ Picollo to general manager. While Moore will still oversee day-to-day operations, this move will give Picollo, who has drawn interest from other clubs in recent offseasons, more authority and keeps him in Kansas City for the long term.
- Dodgers right-hander Trevor Bauer will remain on administrative leave through rest of season. The real issue that remains is that this is a paid administrative leave. The police and MLB are still working on their own investigations, and it’s very possible that Bauer could face criminal charges. Bauer has not thrown a pitcher in a major league game since June 28th of this year.
- While it was known that Yankees’ reliever Zack Britton had been dealing with elbow issues that were going to require surgery, there was some optimism that he could avoid major surgery and the subsequent recovery period up until recently. Unfortunately for Britton and the Yankees, he was unable to dodge that bullet as he underwent UCL reconstructive surgery that ended his 2021 season and will keep him out for most of 2022 as well.
- Given the team’s recent run of success with very limited payroll, a lot of teams have expressed interest in the availability of Rays’ VP and GM Erik Neander to help run their own teams. Those teams were unable to pry him away and now it looks like he will be with Tampa for the foreseeable future, as Neander received a promotion to president of baseball operations.
Spread & Containment
The Coming Of The Police State In America
The Coming Of The Police State In America
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
The National Guard and the State Police are now…
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.
Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.
The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.
Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.
In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.
The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.
When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.
If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.
We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.
My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.
It goes like this:
1) lockdown,
2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,
3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,
5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,
6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,
7) businesses flee the city
8) cities fall into decay, and that results in
9) more surveillance and police state.
The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.
It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.
But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.
It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.
Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.
As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.
The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.
Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.
By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.
The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.
Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.
The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.
The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.
But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.
What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.
As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.
The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.
Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.
Government
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate…
Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.
A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.
Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels
Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.
In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.
According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.
But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.
“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”
The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.
“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”
The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.
1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID
COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.
Uncategorized
February Employment Situation
By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…
By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert
The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.
Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.
Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.
The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.
The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.
Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.
As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.
Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.
The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.
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