Leaderboard

I was never impressed by Beckman or his skills. I found the way he tried to ingratiate himself into UM football tradition that he had been no part of pretty cringy. You hang around it happens by itself, you can't appropriate for yourself. Marked him as grasping climber type - which dovetails with him gunning for Ernie.

there is very little reason to take any public display of patriotism seriously as 9 times of 10 it's just another grift.

I would say Schwartz was one of the smartest guys in the room... But not a good manager of emotions and the team...

For every off base NA singer there are many powerful ones Standing for more that day.

That's me. I'm usually in the ... why are we talking about the decision I made when I was 18 stage of befuddlement when some never-served decides to bask in my patriotic glow. I remember how annoyed as shiz I would be during my drill weekends at Selfridge after active duty when i was an Air Reserve Tech... which is a full time State of Michigan employee who works at the base -- who also is a drilling Air National Guardsman. So, i'd work my full week of day or night shifts in the command post and then on drill weekend these buzzing bees of patriotic enthusiasm would roll in from their other worlds and try to shine the US Air Force's apple on their Friday Night/Saturday/Sunday morning drill weekends. Don't get me wrong. I definitely will bore my fellow vets and others with my lame stories. Its just those stories are not about how wonderful it all was to serve 'merica.

Jared Goff is basically Tom Brady.

#20 … (but folks sure like to point to it like it’s a show stopper)

This. No guarantees Smoltz would develop the same way he did in Atlanta. Those last two months of ‘87, especially the last weekend where we caught the stinking’ Jays, are my best ballpark memories outside of 1984.

If you don't see the difference in how you approach the analysis of each shooter, that's a YMMV, I'm not going to argue it with you. Then again, I guess I don't really see what what the point is of the complaint about how things are classified. If your complaint is that crime related murder in Chicago is too easily accepted I won't disagree, but WTF, the dirty truth is that mass shootings are accepted just as much. Sure there is more press and hand wringing about them, but the actual net social inaction on both is about equal so I'm not going to give American society any credit for its 'thoughts and prayers' on the one while it still sits on its ass on both.

Baez has to return closer to his career averages if he hopes to get the stink of 2022 off him. This would be the best outcome for everyone, especially the Tigers. I’m not counting on it, though.

I have always maintained that there is nothing Smoltz could have done for the Tigers that would have matched the memories he provided in the 1987 title run. Over the next couple of decades they would have lost even if they had him. I'm also not at all certain he would have developed with the Tigers like he did with the Braves.

I get it. And if we did that for games played on national holidays I'd be ok with it. But I think having a moment of silence every game for some named victims of the day would make it lose its significance. It's a tragic world and not hard to think of some reason to have one every day but you can't do that.

True, you can't ignore years of control in the value proposistion, but purely on a pitching bases Joe was probably a better pitcher overall last season than Soto. Now maybe we can say a lot of Soto's blow-ups were in non-save situations that Hinch was brave/foolish/stubborn enough to have put him in, but just by the eye test, when a guy has lost his breaking ball and is down to basically one pitch, his results, even if good, are on borrowed time.

I am assuming that Soto has more value since he has three years left before free agency and is a "proven closer". That might require trade partners to have more faith in "proven closer" than I do though.

Probably should have said stereotyping. My point is, if you're sympathetic to a cause, you will be more open to listening and understanding what someone does that is on your 'team'. I'm not terribly sympathetic to democratic causes, so I think I did the same when I read this statement from you. Based on how my stereotypical view of most of you on this site, I read that as the only people that get offended are the idiots that think it's the military that gives us our freedoms. I can assure you, many people that are offended by those that sit, kneel, or refuse to come out for the National Anthem don't believe this. Personally I am offended by those that sit or refuse to come out, not kneel in part because even though I don't agree with Kaepernick, I appreciated the back story on why he began to kneel vs sit and I feel a lot of folks that follow Kaepernick understand that as well. So if they choose to sit or refuse to come out, to me that is a direct slap in the face of the military (as it was a military issue for Kaepernick which adjusted how he protested.) At the same time, it is their right to do it, so I try not to hold it against them which unfortunately so many others do.

I realize the NA is traditional at sporting events and other events, but I feel along the way it just becomes rote and really doesn't mean as much as it should. We're just going thru the motions. Like saying The Lord's Prayer or repeating the Apostles' Creed or such at church. We're mouthing words without thinking about meanings.

Not only would I be cool with it, I've advocated as much for decades, sometimes on this and the old forum. The one exception I might make is for international matches, such as Olympics and international cups.

From the story: Griner said Monday that she believed “we should not play the national anthem during our season,” a 22-game schedule compressed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Like Colin Kaepernick and others in sports, she is clear that her message does not concern the military or the flag. It’s about police brutality and social injustice. “I don’t mean that in any disrespect to our country. My dad was in Vietnam and a law officer for 30 years,” she said. “I wanted to be a cop before basketball. I do have pride for my country.” Brianna Turner, Griner’s teammate, agreed and took her opposition a step further. “I personally don’t think it belongs in sports,” she said, adding that “it’s not played at Walmart, it’s not played when you go to Six Flags. Why is it played before sporting events?” I see nothing wrong with this, but then, I'm not a red hat.

meh - lions are playing with house money as far as the Rams pick goes. They won the last freaking SB, anything in the top half is more than you could have hoped for in Sept..

Dems can try to recruit Murkowski to become an independent.

That happened in Chicago when Chip Caray was run out of town for basically not being his grandpa.

My god the Raiders suck.

My son has Jacobs on his fantasy team and is going against a kid in his class who is a total jerk. We are enjoying rooting for the Raiders tonight!

Maybe I'm late to the thread so sorry if this was said. Russia thinks Whelan is a spy and wanted a spy in return. They did not consider Griner a spy so were willing to deal on it. I believe NPR told me that.

But did they appeal to young people and bring new fans to the team? What did the consulting firm from Chicago conclude?

When I first heard about it, I assumed he was selling them because that is who he has always been.

This is a bigger thing than I think most people credit. When you have two people in the booth, they spend a fair amount of time talking to each other and when you can't tell them apart, 'conversations' don't make any sense. Add that to the fact that you often are listening to a game in a noisy environment like a moving car or while you are working around the house, it's just a bad recipe. Whatever thier individual qualities, whoever paired them was a sonic idiot - a person with no actual 'ear' for sound at all.

I think this is the kind of thing that almost nobody knows anything about. It's like baseball fans complaining that their GM didn't try to get their favorite trade target. How do you know they didn't try? It's just another excuse for MAGAs to hate Joe Biden, to whine about Blacks and gays getting special treatment and to pretend that they are the only ones who care about military personnel. It covers all their favorite topics.

Orlovsky has long been a cheerleader for the Lions... Keep up the good work dude... We hear ya'!!!

That was a terriblre home run call.

I don't know who the last is either, but I know Al Bumbry lost two years of minor league baseball after being drafted into the service. He had been drafted by the Orioles out of college, then the next year by Uncle Sam. He was one of the few to actually serve in Vietnam as well. He went back to the minors in 71 when he got out of the service and was AL rookie of the year in '73.

Hard to have lived through the Monaghan era in A^2 without concluding he was a total jerk. Was very sad when he bought the Tigers. He was sort of like the precursor to guys like Elon Musk. Worked really hard at one thing and did it well and immediately thought that made him competent in a bunch of things he knew nothing about, but he came from less educaitonal background than Musk so it was worse. Then he went a bit off the deep end with his Catholicism. Luckily that more or less led him to removing himself from the public scene - at least in MI.

I was a very junior advertising grunt at one of the bigger ad agencies in Detroit. My client was a sponsor of the Tigers radio broadcast and I had Rick Rizzs call me asking if he could do commercial work, in exchange for a car. I was excited and starstruck until he basically started stalking me after that. Seemed like a nice dude, though, and he eventually respectfully honored the restraining order I filed against him.

I see that Al Avila is trending on twitter, click on it, and its people asking if he made this trade. Very harsh and undeserved.

ernie never lost a rose bowl

Did you see the Whelan family's statement. Talk about grace. "The Biden Administration made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home, and to make the deal that was possible, rather than waiting for one that wasn't going to happen."

I like the Malloy acquisition. One of my hopes going into the off-season was that they would start putting more emphasis on OBP skills, something they have been lacking for years. Dumping Reyes and the Castros was a good start. The next step is the acquisition part. Malloy is likely not ready yet, but I love his profile. I am not too sorry to see Jimenez leave. He still has promise, but has never shown any consistency for any length of time. I'll take the chances on Malloy's greater upside.

Not really, but at least we're having fun! Apropos of nothing: I've long wondered why non-Christians, i.e., Jews, Muslims, atheists, et al, don't consider celebrating Christmas as a secular holiday, which it is. Because if you think about it, you can see that Christmas is really two different holidays: a religious holiday for church and Jesus and creches and the like; and a secular holiday for parties and Santa and presents and trees and decorations and the like. As far as I can tell, neither has a thing to do with the other, although a lot of people do conflate them. (My personal favorite decoration is the nativity scene attended by Santa and his reindeer.) Logically speaking, "Merry Christmas" has way more to do with the secular than the religious, because being "merry" is much more akin to partying than praying. And even "A Charlie Brown Christmas" drew a very bright line between the vacuousness of secular Christmas and the spirituality of religious Christmas. (In Charles Schulz's opinion, anyway). Maybe non-Christians will come around to this idea sometime, and I hope they do, because secular Christmas could be a thing that unifies, if everyone can be cool with that idea. (I’m looking at you, evangelicals.) And if someone does try to dump a turd in the punch bowl by mentioning Jesus 300 times in a two-minute conversation during a secular Christmas celebration, well, we can simply relieve them of their drink and point them toward the nearest church.