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he also has lacked any sense of touch so far. Maybe better receivers solves part of that, but on too many throws he made it harder on his receivers that it had to be.

If they go double offense in the first round, they’ll take the skill player at 5 because there is no OT head and shoulders above the rest. But it’d be easy to see them go Delane or Bain or Downs with one of those picks too.

A little backstory here. I was there at the Michigan Democratic Party convention yesterday at Cobo/Huntington Place. At the convention, Democrats had the chance to vote on their parties nominees for the offices of Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Board of Education, and Boards of Regents. The more progressive candidate's won and beat out candidates pushed by the Labor Caucus in some instances and other instances, who the Labor Caucus wanted was the same person that most progressives wanted to win. There were two instances where the progressive choice beat the Labor Caucus choice. One was when Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit beat out Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald for the Democratic nomination for Michigan Attorney General. Savit is your typical Ann Arbor liberal and has been a reformed-minded prosecutor. The other instance was in the UofM Regents race where, as you mentioned Amir Maklid, beat out the Labor Caucus Choice. In other instances, like the Michigan Secretary of State's race, the choices progressives and labor wanted were aligned, with Garlin Gilchrist winning the SOS nomination. For years, the Michigan Democratic Party convention process was controlled by labor unions, more specifically labor union leadership of the major unions in the state (UAW, LiUNA, Building Trades Council, Carpenters, MEA, and AFT). More specifically than that, it was controlled by the leadership at the Michigan AFL-CIO (of which many unions belong to like the UAW) and it's President Ron Beiber. Ron Beiber doesn't like progressives. Ron Beiber loves Ron Beiber more than anyone else in the world. He also loves playing kingmaker. And for years the Michigan AFL-CIO, Labor Caucus, and Ron were the kingmakers. If you go back to pre-2016 conventions, there would be 3,000, maybe 3,500 people at most that participated in the convention nominating process. That allowed for Ron, union leadership, and the Labor Caucus more broadly to bring 1,500 or so people to a state party convention and control the nomination process and who wins these races. Now that more people, from all walks of life are showing up to the convention, they don't have the votes to run the show like they used to. This upsets Ron very much. Yesterday, there were people from all across the state who came. People from local community Democratic Clubs and Congressional District Clubs, and College Democrats chapters. As well, there were people from activist organizations like local Indivisible Chapters, The People's Coalition, Michigan United, Detroit Action, Ranked Choice Voting Michigan, Mop Up Michigan, DSA, etc. With more local Democrats attending and more people from these types of organizations, they aren't going to follow and do what Labor Caucus says to do. Furthermore, when you nominate uninspiring candidates like Karen McDonald, not everyone in Labor Caucus is going to stick with their team. Some of those people voted for people like Eli Savit as well. So the days of labor controlling the party with a handful of voters is over it appears.

with Acker out I'd put my money on Brown and Schostak. Epstein is apparently a Trumper and I don't see Maklid getting the support of Alumni, who do most of the voting in a regent's election.

Junior seems to be the front-runner there. He'll split the profits with RFK Jr

I'd prefer a grading system which broke out coach decisions from player decisions. I get its all put together as a matter of team performance, but being sent into sure outs is a fundamentally different problem for a team to solve than than having runners who don't run the bases well, so as a diagnostic metric I would prefer that cases be spilt.

It sucks that we have to imagine how good he would be playing 33 minutes a night and guarding the top player most of the 4th quarter.

April 20 https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/april-20

True, too soon. Where did they end up last season? I would think they would end up better this season with McGonigle taking extra bases. The temporary loss of McKinstry kinda hurts.

Ausar Thompson was named one of the three finalists for DPOY.

Revealing their draft strategy?

Losing home court advantage on the first game of the first round is a possible way to lose this series. Orlando only needs to win their home games and now that they've shown they can win in Detroit, even the next 3 possible games here are questionable, even if somehow we do win one in Florida. And we have to wait until Wednesday for the 2nd game, stupid scheduling.

Why did the official Lions Twitter post this? I know former Lions players Tracy Scroggins and Chris Payton-Jones sadly passed away. But this seems like an odd thing for a professional football team's Twitter handle to post without context. Was this a Dan Campbell quote at sometime in the past? Was this a Wayne Fontes quote after he got caught with cocaine?

His footwork is not there, too many flat footed throws. He has the arm strength to get the ball there but the accuracy suffers. Getting him right will be the difference between a team that can make the playoffs and one that loses 4 games in the big ten.

It's not ranked by stolen bases. The statistic includes all base running plays such as taking the extra base and being thrown out trying to do so as well as stolen bases. They are good at taking the extra base on hits, but they get thrown out a lot too. The baserunning sample is probably too small to be meaningful now.

Base running shouldn't be ranked by stolen bases. I'm not sure what all is included with a general statement like a team is ranked 19th in base running.

But doesn't the original team have to pay to get him back? I really dont know that rule...in any event, Harris did bring him back?

Maklid beat out Acker, who had his own issues to deal with....

They've had some dumb sends home, which is a reflection on Cora rather than the team's base running ability.

IRRC, Workman was lost to the Cubs via Rule V last off season. Played a few game for the Cubs, they traded him the White Sox but apparently that doesn't change the Rule's requirement that if he falls off the major league roster he comes back to Detroit, so when the Sox Cut him, he ended up back in Toledo.

Lee probably won't play (at least start) today against a RH SP but that play he made yesterday was very impressive. He showed major league arm strength.

Small sample size still. Highs and lows of just a few weeks can't be used to predict future results. Or do we think Tork will end the season with zero home runs? And in a perfect world, Riley will still end up with 20-25 home runs but also end up scoring more runs, with more hits and walks. And yes, runs scored depends on other hitters. With most power hitters, there's a trade off for cutting down on strikeouts and it's usually less power. We'll see....

I think Harris re-acquired Workman? I may be wrong because I don't really keep track of how we get talent, just that we do get talent. But, in case anyone was wondering why we didnt bring him up, he's another LH bat. And we've been desperate for RH bats since last summer. The need was ignored all winter.

Is the final result of more walks and fewer strikeouts in exchange for far fewer homers and lower wRC+ acceptable? I ask because that’s what’s happening so far.

This is like praising the person who bought the cake ingredients at the store, instead of the person who baked the cake.