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I'm embarrassed to say that it's literally been over a decade since the last game I was able to attend in person. Where is the best place to park these days? What kind of cost should I be budgeting for parking? "Back In My Day", I used to park in an underground lot below Grand Circus Park that was steps from the park and it only cost $5. Is that lot still around? I imagine the days of it costing $5 are long gone?

No, I regard them similarly to how I regard Max Clark. I am still very hopeful and will be excited to see them when they are back.

I agree. Cleveland is in first place because they have a consistently performing superstar, a solid bullpen and good defense and we do not. Our strength is based on depth and starting pitching which the injuries have decimated. What is worrisome is some of our depth is starting to look shaky.

Surprisingly, that is true about the pitching, but I was expecting them to improve significantly with Valdez and a full year of Melton. I am not disappointed with the hitting. I was not expecting it to be a strength and it's pretty much what I hought it would be. Their fielding has been a disaster and I think the impact of injuries to Meadows and Baez have been understated.

I don't think Hinch can do anything about having poor players. Hinch is about as good managing a pitching staff as I've seen and that is 90% of a manager's job. Yeah - I think his motivational talent is maybe marginal but I don't think that is all it's cracked up to be in baseball and we don't seem to have clubhouse issues. I haven't seen figures for this year but I still feel like the Tigers take too many strike ones, but I'll live with the two latter nits for the sake of the former.

So, you're not counting on them to ever contribute to the Tigers ever again, but also, you're not counting them out for their entire careers? In other words, out of sight, out of mind? is that fair?

Also a touch of bad luck: we are at 19-23, and pythag says we should be 21-21.

Bultman says Cossa will no longer be waiver exempt next season.

I didn't know anything about Olson that anyone else didn't know. I have just come to the conclusuion that pitchers with long-term injuries can not be counted on. I am not assuming that Olson and Jobe are done for their careers. I just am not counting on them. I am hopeful that Olson will some day return to form. And really, Jobe has never proven anything at the MLB level. He is still a good prospect.

Pitching and hitting stats roughly the same as last year. Defense went from average to abysmal. Base running went from ok to meh.

I have Stathead and FanGraphs subscriptions and that is it. FanGraphs also is mostly unusable now without a subscription. Pretty much any major news or sports site is really hard to use now without a subscription. This was inevitable, but I miss the old internet. I don't subscribe to read opinions and propaganda which is what news has become

I think a lot of people thought all winter that we would get something out of Olson this year. I was myself hoping to. You probably knew something we didn't, but It wasn't until February when he went under the knife and was declared out for the year. I also think some people expected (still expect) something out of Jobe, but again, even if he does come back in August, he won't be going full bore until next spring. If you don't bake players into your projections because of injuries sustained during previous years, does that mean you regard Olson and Jobe as being done done for their careers?

Just as true now as in 1963

I agree with this. The problem is that mainstream Dem policy disagreement with the current Israeli government draws an Arab emigree population (among others) to the party who actually are revuanchist wrt the existence of Israel and eventually they become a constituency for harder anti-semitism - IOW the situation brewing in Dearborn MI or Omar's district in MN. This is a hard problem because I don't want the main stream Democratic party to be in bed with Netanyahu.

I expected nothing from Olson and Jobe this year. Once a pitcher gets seriously hurt, I expect nothing from them him until they get back. Players that get injured in previous years are not baked into my preseason expectations.

It's true, I do have a Stathead subscription.

💯 There is no urgency here because we are just so decimated right now. Yes, I know it's early and we should recenter our focus on winning now, but that's just it: it's early, and we have a weak division. We do have a good deal of time yet, so rushing guys back, or rushing guys up, smacks of the kind of desperation that's not warranted just yet.

He wasn’t paying taxes then. His father and possibly was. Trump was not aware of such things. And RedLining was a real thing then. Gotta keep the undesirables out of the neighborhood and the women barefoot and pregnant

doesn't all the "sports reference" site block ad blockers now unless you pay up?

https://adblockplus.org/

Also, Reese Olson and Jackson Jobe, both of whom we'd hoped to get positive contributions from this year. Olson is gone for good this year; Jobe might be back in August, or might not, and will be on training wheels if/when he does come back. Torres has been out, and now Carpenter. I'll mention Verlander because some fans were really counting on him to be his old self this year, although I myself and a lot of other fans never did expect much from him.

Paul Krugman posts to a substack since he's left this gig at the NYT, and he's been writing about the comparison between Europe and the US recently, and that's a big part of his point. The US looks richer but it's really just in the bias of the accounting system. Labor productivity the EU is just as good, but Europe always looks like it's lagging because Euros have just decided to work less per capita - they actually value quality of life so they take time off to live it. Same applies to the fact that public goods are far better in Europe than in the US (healthcare, transportation etc), and finally, social equity is much better in Europe than the US which is a driver of social unhappiness in the US. And the proof is in recent (well, pre Trump) immigration figures. People came to the US from Western Europe all through the Post WWII era. Few have recently. Euros are only 10% of the immigrant population today and many of them are H1Bs recruited by US industry.

As for the Tigers' home jersey situation, I dislike that the addition of the orange tops and moving the City Connects to Mondays means more games at home during which they are not in the traditional home whites. If there's any lemonade for me here, I do dislike the oranges less than the City Connects, so at least they're wearing the City Connects on the day of the week the Tigers will be playing fewer home games on.

When I see both teams in colored jerseys, my gut reaction is that I put on the wrong game.

Paying attention is exactly the point. You're reading a governing trend from the noisiest data points: aldermanic social media posts, a primary race in a single Illinois district, candidates distancing themselves from AIPAC. That's real political pressure, and I don't dismiss it. But political pressure from a vocal constituency is not the same as ideological capture of a governing party. The Democratic mainstream haven't abandoned Israel, but while they have complicated their relationship with the current Israeli government, that's not the same thing, and besides, it's what Israeli opposition figures and mass protest movements have done as well. The distinction that actually matters is the one between policy-driven anti-Israel sentiment (even when it's overwrought, and even when it edges into troubling territory) and the kind of ethno-nationalist, eliminationist antisemitism that has historically seized control of parties and governments, and is doing so again on the right in real time. The former is a problem that bears close watching. The latter is the thing that has historically gotten people killed. Conflating them because they share some surface rhetoric muddles, not sharpens, the analysis, and lets the genuinely dangerous version off the hook by treating it as merely one data point along a bipartisan spectrum.