Day 720

• After a 16-hour session on Monday, MLB and the players union will have six hours today, starting at 8 AM Pacific, to try to finish a deal.  If no deal by 2 PM, the first month of games is off.
• And word is, they're nowhere close, at least according to someone on Mike Greenberg's Get Up! program. 
• MLB is expecting the cancellation of games -- it's not going to start billing annual plans on it's subscription MLB.TV service.
• If there is a season, there are negotiations to bring some weekday games to NBC/Peacock and Apple TV.
• NO DEAL at the deadline.
• WHEN is all this going to finally stick on Dana White  Cain Velasquez has been arrested today -- ATTEMPTED MURDER.  San Jose shooting.
• ESPN was forced to take down a meme picture from the series "Euphoria" glorifying a teenage murderer.  I hope someone got fired over that!   
• At least two men were arrested Sunday night in Las Vegas for getting in the face of the Democratic governor of Nevada, spewing misinformation about COVID, and threatening to hang him.  And people wonder why I'm done with COVIDiots.  If they want a civil war, Putin may give it to them!  One well-placed suitcase nuke would probably do the trick!   
• Tonight should be a very interesting State of the Union address, between COVID, Putin, and all the political realities of America.
• A strange and rather bizarre story from game shows hit the airwaves last month.  In a fancy of apparent coincidence, three players on Wheel of Fortune each hit the $100,000 bonus space and solved their puzzles on three consecutive nights.  At least one conspiracy theorist believed this was as a result of the show rigging for large-scale winners during the time period.  That conspiracy theorist has been banned from a large-scale game-show community as a result.
• This is false, because of two things:  First, as Pat Sajak had to interject when the theory and the wins went viral, it is a Federal offense to take part in any scheme or artifice to do so -- has been for 65 years or so.
• Second, consider the following:  The current bonus wheel was put into place in October of 2001, over 20 years ago.  Given an average of, say, even 150 episodes a year (which is almost-certainly low, even with a COVID-shortened period), that's 3000 bonus spins.  It is believed that there are 24 spaces on the wheel, meaning that the odds of hitting the $100,000 wedge on any night are 1 in 24 (on the bonus wheel, the amounts are not known in advance for any given wedge).  That would mean 1 in 13,824 for three such successive occurrences.  If you then extrapolate 3000 spins into that, that would mean odds of about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5.  And if you even take 1000 3-night blocks (which is not how it works), the odds are still about 7% over the course of this period of time.  It's not *THAT* out of the question!  It really isn't!!
• Again, I try to separate out from a lot of this rabble by showing my work.  If I tell you something is rigged, I'll tell you why I believe it is -- and show evidence to that effect.