There is not a single NCAA baseball or MLB scout who will look at any high school player who is less than 6'2" 215lbs give or take. Period. End of story. It does not matter what that player can do or is capable of.

Let's put that in perspective. If Mariano Rivera were an American high school athlete today, he'd have a hard time getting serious consideration from a scout.

So given that all players have to be in the upper limits of physical size and strength just to get an audience, it's inevitable that the talent pool is going to be thin. One remedy would be to shrink the size of the player pool by about 30% or more. Eliminate about a quarter of the teams outright and shrink the rosters of the remaining teams. Same thing for D-1. Just scratch a quarter or more of the D-1 teams.

I am 100% positive that college football is the same. In the 'premier' high school programs, there are guys who can't start, can't START, unless they're 270lbs. How many high schoolers you know are 270lbs and can run a 5.0 40?

I'm not sure owners, television or the fans would tolerate that kind of constriction. So I think the 'fans' have a clear choice - be ready to say goodbye to your favorite teams or be ready to tolerate what you see now.

Bush used 'empower' about 20x. This is the shortform for "sucks to be you out there out of the lifeboat."

Cubans Bad

Jews Bad

Farmers Bad

Lesbians Good

War Veterans Good

Blacks Good

and so on, just so we know what we're supposed to support and hate, correspondingly. Because as far I can tell, we still have a country of thousands of tiny focus groups and special interests that haven't been outlawed yet. I'm waiting for the Salon firefight over all the old people in FLA now.

Since you have to be literally destitute to qualify for a Pell grant nowadays. In other words the population of people who are both homeless and wanting to attend private school is probably small, Hollywood feel good Pursuit of Happyness movies notwithstanding.

Right on to a Joshua Tree.

Our illegal population has grown about 2600% in the last 15 years. Best estimate 2007. We are now building 10,000 school seats per year, every year. Our tax valuation went up 70% at the beginning of the year. And the schools still can't keep up. And mind you, the legitimate residency growth is more than 8%/year every year. That's 8% more property tax paying homeowners every year.

If someone would like to suggest a solution to that that doesn't bankrupt me I'd like to hear it. If someone has a solution to the problem of some classes having 70% ESL I'd like to hear that too. If someone has a solution to the 50% non graduation rate, ditto.

Private schools, and by that I mean non religious private schools are, if you can get a slot, $15,000-$17,000 per year.

Right here at merry old Salon, Courtney Love had an article that lays it all out.

Love me, love my crazy relatives. Dems and GOP alike, if you're not with the furthest fringiest reaches of insanity you're viewed as disloyal. This country barely deserves a moderate government anymore and should just revert to alternating brands of extremism.

Seriously. How is one's beliefs about POWs from a war 35 years ago relevant?

Sharpshooters take whatever it is they take to make them shoot better. I bet there's a high performance drug for librarians too. I guess it really just comes down to which venues you feel passionate enough about or have spent sufficient cash on to have any opinion worth considering at all.

Me? Don't care. Anyone who's gone to a minor league baseball game understands that those players aren't LESS beefy, often because of their age, they're actually bulkier. So pumping up isn't giving people with mediocre talent more talent. It's just not. Not in baseball it's not.

So if this repeats, oh well....MD's do dish out SSRI for reasons other than mental health as well. SSRI's can be given for problems in the gut. Whether this is the best approach or not, I don't know, but there it is.