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When baseball historian Bill Humber first heard about the golden at-bat idea that Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred floated on a recent podcast, he was a little taken aback. Read this article for free: Already have an account? As we navigate through unprecedented times, our journalists are working harder than ever to bring you the latest local updates to keep you safe and informed. Now, more than ever, we need your support. Starting at $14.99 plus taxes every four weeks you can access your Brandon Sun online and full access to all content as it appears on our website. or call circulation directly at (204) 727-0527. Your pledge helps to ensure we provide the news that matters most to your community! When baseball historian Bill Humber first heard about the golden at-bat idea that Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred floated on a recent podcast, he was a little taken aback. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? When baseball historian Bill Humber first heard about the golden at-bat idea that Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred floated on a recent podcast, he was a little taken aback. “I kind of laughed, actually,” Humber said Wednesday. “I thought it was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever heard.” MLB has seen its share of change of late, but the thought of a team using one at-bat each game to send any hitter it wants to the plate — even if it’s not their turn in the batting order — was quite a curveball. “This can’t be real,” former Blue Jays pitcher and seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens posted on social media. Wild-card playoff tinkering, pitch clocks, shift rules and automatic runners are some of the more significant changes to the game in recent years. All had varying levels of detractors and the golden at-bat discussion is no different. Critics are eyeing it like a meatball thrown across the middle of the plate. “It doesn’t really fit within the logic of the game in my mind,” said Humber, a Canadian Baseball Hall of Famer. “I look upon it quite askance to be honest with you. I don’t see the point of it in a way. “I mean to some extent, the magic of baseball is those unheralded batters who arrive at a situation that one wouldn’t have thought that they would ever have been in, and allowing them to bat in place.” Humber cited a number of grand baseball moments that might not have happened if a golden at-bat rule were in effect. “One can imagine when Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run against the (Brooklyn) Dodgers in 1951, Willie Mays was on deck,” he said of the ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’ that gave the New York Giants the National League pennant. “What if they had a golden at-bat and put Mays at bat, maybe he would have struck out or popped up or hit into a double-play or who knows what. There’s lots of situations like that.” What about the two famous World Series-winning walkoffs? Would the skippers have used a golden at-bat to get their best pure hitter to the plate? Bill Mazeroski went deep to give Pittsburgh the Fall Classic in 1960 and Joe Carter’s walkoff blast in 1993 gave the Blue Jays their second straight World Series title. Mazeroski’s power numbers were middling while Carter, who led the Blue Jays in homers and RBIs that year, had a mediocre batting average. “I think the magic of the game are those moments that are unpredictable and yet kind of create some of the joy of the game in our memories,” Humber said. ” I think this kind of runs afoul of that tradition. “I’m not a fan, let me say that. But that’s not to say it won’t happen.” Manfred first mentioned the golden at-bat idea publicly in an interview with John Ourand on Puck’s “The Varsity” podcast. The commissioner said the subject came up at a recent owners’ meeting. Retired sportswriter Dave Perkins, who covered the Blue Jays for years over his long career at the Toronto Star, said use of a golden at-bat would be “a travesty.” “On the surface I say it’s absolutely stupid and ridiculous,” he said. “But a lot of other things I thought were stupid and ridiculous worked their way into the games and they’re even OK with me now.” The subject of potential rule changes like the golden at-bat came up when Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins met with the Toronto chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America earlier this week. “It’s interesting to me because we went through so much change over the last couple of years,” he said. “Getting to that change was a scratch and a claw and a climb. And then once the change happened, everyone — for the most part — thought, ‘OK, that went OK and it seems like there’s a better product on the field.’ “So now the dialogue around change is with a much more open mind whether it be players, staff, the exchanges, the ideas, even if they seem very difficult to wrap your head around. They’re not getting stiff-armed as much as they were the first go-round.” Scott Crawford, operations director of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, said he prefers a traditional setup where any player can be a hero at any time. “I like the team aspect of the game where you get your shot,” he said. “You can be a No. 8 hitter and you can come up with a big hit and win a World Series and (a superstar like Shohei) Ohtani can strike out.” This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 4, 2024. Follow @GregoryStrongCP on X. Advertisement Advertisement
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Attorneys for Fox Corp. asked a Delaware judge Friday to dismiss a shareholder lawsuit seeking to hold current and former company officials personally liable for the financial fallout stemming from Fox News reports regarding alleged vote rigging in the 2020 election. Five New York City public employee pension funds, along with Oregon’s public employee retirement fund, allege that former chairman Rupert Murdoch and other Fox Corp. leaders deliberately turned a blind eye to liability risks posed by reporting false claims of vote rigging by election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic USA.At a town hall meeting with the bureau workforce, Mr Wray said he would be stepping down “after weeks of careful thought”. Mr Wray’s intended resignation is not unexpected considering that Mr Trump had picked Mr Patel for the role in his new administration. Mr Wray had previously been named by Mr Trump and began the 10-year term — a length meant to insulate the agency from the political influence of changing administrations — in 2017, after Mr Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey. Mr Trump had demonstrated his anger with Mr Wray on multiple occasions, including after Mr Wray’s congressional testimony in September. “My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day,” Mr Wray told agency employees. “In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.” Mr Wray continued: “It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway — this is not easy for me. I love this place, I love our mission, and I love our people — but my focus is, and always has been, on us and doing what’s right for the FBI.” Mr Wray received a standing ovation following his remarks before a standing-room-only crowd at FBI headquarters and some in the audience cried, according to an FBI official who was not authorised to discuss the private gathering and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. Mr Trump applauded the news on social media, calling it “a great day for America as it will end the weaponisation of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice” and saying that Mr Patel’s confirmation will begin “the process of Making the FBI Great Again”. If confirmed by the Senate, Mr Patel would herald a radical leadership transformation at the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. He has advocated shutting down the FBI’s Washington headquarters and called for ridding the federal government of “conspirators”, raising alarm that he might seek to wield the FBI’s significant investigative powers as an instrument of retribution against Mr Trump’s perceived enemies. Mr Patel said in a statement Wednesday that he was looking forward to “a smooth transition. I will be ready to serve the American people on day one”.
Three protestors in Boston protesting a proposed pipeline project. This is the third article in a series delving into the contentious topic of carbon capture and storage at point-source emitters like power plants and industrial facilities. My first article discussed the three technologies used in CCS, and my second examined their strengths and weaknesses. This article is about a dirty little secret habitually glossed over by CCS supporters: there simply aren’t many places to store captured carbon dioxide. A small coal-fired power plant with a 100 MW capacity running at 80% utilization would generate nearly 700,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year. Triple that figure for a medium-sized coal-fired plant and multiply by ten for a large plant. You might be considering 700,000 metric tons in a theoretical sense, so I’ll state it in visceral terms. That weight in steel stacked in a city block would stand fifteen stories high. That weight in corn would completely fill a professional sports stadium. Finding sufficient space in which to store that much of anything is not easy and requires non-trivial engineering. iOS 18.1.1—Update Now Warning Issued To All iPhone Users Leak Reveals Trump Crypto Bombshell As Bitcoin Suddenly Surges Toward $100,000 Price Matt Gaetz Controversy Explained: Sexual Misconduct Allegations Sink Trump’s Attorney General Nominee Capturing carbon is only one-third of the CCS battle Geologists would suggest that there are plenty of geological formations that could store an enormous amount of carbon dioxide. Indeed, carbon storage capacity is a good news-bad news story. The good news is that the U.S. is the world leader in carbon dioxide storage capacity. The bad news comes in two parts. First, there is hardly any operational storage capacity outside the U.S., as indicated by the dark green sections in the graph below. Storage facilities are in early stages of planning and construction, but at nowhere near the required scale. Capture (orange) and storage capacity (blue / green columns) globally. The second bit of bad news is that even in the U.S., where storage capacity is often related to enhanced oil recovery—extracting oil from tight reservoirs by injecting pressurized CO 2 —facilities emitting carbon dioxide aren’t situated near suitable underground storage sites. Since many emission sources are far from viable storage sites, transporting captured carbon dioxide represents a daunting engineering and political obstacle. Post-CCS transportation of CO2 represents a huge political and engineering challenge Interstate pipelines must be approved by several federal regulatory agencies and are subject to further regulation if traversing or bordering on environmentally protected areas. State regulators must also approve such plans, and the pipeline company must jump through various municipal hoops pertaining to taxes, zoning, and land use. The pipeline company must finally secure contiguous property for the entire pipeline route through easements or the arduous legal process of eminent domain. Once the property has been purchased, the pipeline constructed, and the regulatory hurdles cleared, operating a carbon dioxide pipeline can be fraught with peril, as the residents of Sartartia, Mississippi—a town situated near a CO2 pipeline that burst in 2020—know too well. Considering the difficulties in planning, permitting, and operating a CO 2 pipeline, it would be reasonable to ask how long it would take to build out the infrastructure necessary to transport carbon dioxide, and how much of it already exists. There are only just over 5,000 miles of pipelines permitted to transport carbon dioxide, only 1.25% of the 400,000 miles of natural gas pipelines in the U.S. The natural gas pipeline system has taken ~100 years to build, suggesting a long road lies ahead for the buildout of CO2 pipelines. (Make sure to check out my recent article about two U.S. start-ups that are generating electricity from natural gas pipelines without burning any gas!) You might expect that natural gas pipelines could be repurposed to transport carbon dioxide, but these pipelines must undergo significant renovations—including replacement with pipes constructed of thicker, specialized steel—to be certified to carry CO 2 . Building out new pipelines is expensive. The 2,000-mile Midwest Carbon Express pipeline was estimated to cost $3.5 billion, or $1.75 million per mile. Spending this much money might make sense for a coal-fired power plant generating 700,000 metric tons of CO 2 which can be sold to an oil major that needs the pressurized gas for EOR. However, will the owner of a small manufacturing facility generating a fraction as much CO 2 pony up $1.75 million per mile to transport their emissions? CCS infrastructure is being built out The situation is not as bleak as I have painted it. Several large oil and gas companies are building billions of tons of CO 2 capacity in the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast industrial corridor region, an area responsible for about half the refining capacity in the U.S. and a major center for chemical production as well. For example, the Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive is developing the Bluebonnet Hub ; Chevron, Total, and Equinor are building the nearby Bayou Bend CCS facility, and ExxonMobil is building a facility to store CO 2 from Linde’s blue hydrogen production center. These storage facilities will store many billions of tons of CO 2 underground. This incremental progress is great, but facilities less accessible to storage hubs will find it difficult to transport carbon dioxide if they invest in equipment to capture it. Smaller emitters are out of luck due to the expense of pipeline construction unless they are situated very close to accessible pipelines. I have been speaking with a few interesting companies with viable solutions to the CCS quandary described in this series. One start-up, Neustark , a young Swiss firm has developed a great solution for storing captured carbon dioxide without burying it underground. Neustark’s solution works especially well for smaller emitters that have no way to use lower-emission technologies in their processes. Follow my work here to learn more about Neustark’s solution to the biggest deal killer for CCS. Intelligent investors take note.
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