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The “are they going to the playoffs?” sounds like a quintessential non-baseball fan thing to say. A baseball season is like walking with your friends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and only taking a day off every 10 days or so. It’s like a pilgrimage. It takes a long time because there are so many games. Rain or shine you’re out there. Sometimes staying in a campground, or taking shelter under a bridge and sometimes staying in fine hotel nursing your sore feet. A baseball team is a commitment, a vocation, and it’s not a walk in the park. The journey is more important than the destination. The playoffs so-called seem a long way off. Relish the moment, relish the scenery of the eternal now. Time is extended. Other sports only occur once a week, have set timetables, and sometimes have a two week gap and that’s not much time walking. It’s easier to think about the destination and consider that the only sustenance. You’re never really nursing sore feet. A baseball season is like an entire lifespan and the next year you rise from the dead and you’re in a brand new body and you can do it all over again having lost some compadres and gained some new ones. Sometimes at the end of a season’s coast to coast walk, something really special will happen and it will bind peoples hearts and minds together for generations, and when they talk about it and share that moment their voices will quiver with emotion. And that’s better than fantasizing about “playoffs.“

Only one thing can save Cracker Barrel now

My advice after 40 years of being a big enough fan to care about such things.... don't root for or against any team in the playoffs in terms of a matchup. You will get burned.

3 1/2 years of this ****.... What happens when they order the secret service to arrest Barack Obama? Seriously. What procedures are there in place to stop that from happening? You don't think it can happen? Or he just issues an order or they smuggle a law through that says former POTUS don't get protection anymore. Nothing is off the table anymore and podcasts won't save our country.

You ain't old enough. 🙂

I think this nails it....The Supreme Court is allowing Trump and company to play CalvinBall.

Yeah, this looks like it may be an uphill battle tonight

because Sommer is a lefty and Lange is the righty at the end of the depth chart right now. Next series against a more RHH team they'll swap again. Plus Lange needs to keep working and since he wasn't all that sharp in this 1st outing Hinch probably isn't willing to use him in a whole lot of situations.

Clark is back in the lineup tonight!

I'm pretty sure that by the time this happens, they won't need to present ****. The people will have been conditioned to the unsubstantiated arrests of opposition officials before they get up to Obama, Hillary, the remains of Biden, and the rest of them.

I added apple for their last game. Some interesting series on the channel so I kept it.

To me the fixation of the US viewing public on superhero movies is another bad reflection on the way this society views itself - which is basically as impotent bystanders constantly waiting to be rescued by someone or something else. In a way I find them to be very 'un-American' narratives.

All it says on the injury and transaction page is that he underwent tests on his right wrist. It hasn't been updated since the 19th (he was undergoing the tests on the 20th)

Note those are not ex-players. To me that was Shep's hang-up/downfall. There were a few times when Shep worked a Tiger game with another media person and he was way better - acted like a real person with a real brain. But put him with an ex-player and he always went all lap-dog. It's just not a good broadcast to listen to someone doing that.

By the way, the “pregame“ on Apple TV begins at 6:30 PM.

The Avs have no defense and are soft and we own Patrick Roy... bring 'em on.

I tried to get into it, but it didn’t intrigue me enough, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend that much time in an alternate reality which would detract from my immersion in the alternate reality of the Detroit Tigers which is more immediate and real, and to which I have a long-standing connection.

So true. I was glad the Lions got to play the Commanders as my preferred matchup in this year’s playoffs. I was glad the Mets were upset by the Cardinals in the ‘06 NLCS. I was glad the New Jersey Devils knocked out the higher-ranked Flyers to reach the ‘95 SCF and clear the path for a Red Wings championship.

'Don’t be surprised': Conservative George Conway warns of drastic Trump move 'tonight' - Raw Story

For All Mankind WAS great, for the first couple of seasons. Then it went completely off-the-rails into soap opera land. I think I'm two seasons behind now, and don't care to catch up.

For some reason the Apple shows are a black hole for us, other than Severance. Everybody I know and who's opinions I trust tell me great things about all of them, especially For All Mankind, the alternate space history where the Russians win the moon race. But yeah.. Severance is good. After about 45 minutes into the first episode I almost gave up thinking it was a Kubrick knock off but then I got the point. I would have dreams about the show.

I watched S3 E7 of Foundation on Apple TV just last night. The Studio was really great too. So since I already have access to it, I don’t have any complaints. I’m constantly being told Slow Horses is incredible as well as Severance, but I don’t know how much more time I can spend watching a screen and not living a real life.

Colorado traing their young players;

Bunch of teams before 1900 had more but Boston in 1932 had -345.

Maybe the Epstein files are at Bolton’s house.

Just your typical retribution shindig.….. but also, I think something to do with the Epstein files is supposed to happen today, and so ~~~~~~ SQUIRREL! 👀👀🐿️🐿️ 👀👀

That may be the bottom line. Pairings matter, the PBP guy may be adequate but a poor "color commentator" could actually bring down a broadcast. Monroe was bad both on TV and the few radio broadcasts I listened to. Unfortunately Gibson's health contributed to his ability to perform up to even his own standards (I listened to the old Locker Room on WXYT with Gibson, Gary Danielson and Eli Zaret) plus his early TV Tigers stuff. Shep isn't strong enough to enhance a sidekick

Over his "handling of classified info" of all things.

Beautifully put Bert!

I always use my parents as the stereotypical "casual fan", they will watch the games once in awhile but I'm usually the one to keep them up to date on things and after they ask if they are doing well or not it's always followed with "Are they going to the playoffs?", they never ask about their place in the division. I wonder if others are like that or not, if they are then that is even more reason to do away with the small divisions.

He came across as an empty suit with an announcer voice.

This is great.

I’ve come around on Perez. He came into the year with more good weight and he’s shown improvement all the way around. Can never be certain of future trajectory, but the trend has been good

NPR reports: “KYIV, Ukraine — Two Russian cruise missiles slammed into an American electronics factory in a remote corner of far western Ukraine before dawn Thursday, causing extensive damage and more than a dozen injuries, according to Ukrainian officials.” ============================= If you’re not recognizing that this is Putin giving a giant “F U” to the orange genius and his minions that he trotted out in Alaska, and also to the European leaders that supported Zelensky at his US meeting, …… then you’re not paying attention.

I'm old, and used to be a baseball fanatic. I played for around 15 years until my body wouldn't allow me to play anymore. Then I got into coaching. From little league to high school. Because I loved the game. Finally got out in 1995 after I started playing around 1965. So maybe 30 years of my life was baseball. During this time the game changed. Strikes, lock-outs, the roid era, the rule changes, the ups and downs. One thing that was always a constant was gambling. Anyone that played understood. It wasn't questioned - it was evil and not in any way should be part of the game. I slowly got away from the game due to all the crap, and eventually turned it off altogether. I didn't miss it one bit. Once in a while I would watch a game and not get through it. Made me mad. Great athletes for sure. Great baseball players, I'm not so sure. Different game, played different, rules different. So much has changed, and so much I didn't like. Then last year I was rejuvenated. My beloved Tigers had a chance to make the playoffs - a shocking development to me at the time - so I started watching again. Finished the last part of last season, and then a month or so ago I got on the bandwagon again. But it's tough. It's no longer the game I knew and loved. Too much has changed. And now this gambling ****. Want to watch? Buy though a gambling site. Get peppered (pepper used to be a baseball drill) with gambling adds all game long. No thanks. Hear about guys getting suspended for gambling violations. Really? What's next? What have they done to what was once the greatest game on planet earth? And most of all WHY? A truly sad affair. <SPIT>

I like these Jeff Seidel articles Detroit Tigers' off-the-field fun as important as on-the-field success As much as I know i'm eating pure sugar ... i like them.

Jason's conversations sound a bit like mine and my son's when we go to a game. Used to drive my wife a bit crazy then. She's actually come around from the days when she managed the teams' radio networks and really wasn't into sports

PBP is mostly background/white noise to me. I'm usually doing a couple of other things at the time. I like Jason, Mario was like eating Vanilla ice cream. Jason is Mint Chocolate Chip with vanilla wafers on the side

I really like the fact that Benetti is from a world outside of SE Michigan and has tastes and appetites of the Ann Arbor/Mike Tirico set and not the Madison Heights/Mario Impemba set.

Agree. Dan clearly knew more than the public in that regard. A lot of "what isn't true" adjudication comes from a very aggressive PR effort by Bauer's camp to muddy the waters. Yes, some of the allegations have been thrown out, but not all of them. There is clearly some there there.

the Tigers are tied for 7 most runs scored in baseball and most of the teams ahead of them play in small ballparks. Most nights we are sending 8 of 9 batters to the plate with OPS+ >100 (and Javy is at 95). This set of players is also +30 R(drs) I wouldn't be so quick to try to jettison the pieces of this lineup for 'the grass is greener'. Other than injuries, the Tigers have the luxury of pretty much requiring the next crop of guys to have to force their way onto the line-up.

Ah yes, who doesn't get nostalgic for the days of Shep demanding that opposing players be electrocuted after striking out?

I finally got around to going to the theater and watching Marvel’s new film The Fantastic Four: First Steps. It didn’t really move me to any significant degree. I was a latecomer to the Iron Man films and only watched them because of my son - who is 50 years younger than me - but I felt in those films the characters were developed superbly and they were people I could care about. I didn’t have to do any homework or be a part of any subculture to get what was going on all the way through Endgame even if many characters already existed in comic books With the new F-4 I couldn’t care less about anybody. I think it was just assumed you were a nerd plugged into layers of subtext from previous film and comic book iterations so they didn’t have to bother. It struck me as lazy. I liked the retro 50s – 60s sci-fi view of the future, but got used to it in about five minutes. I’ve enjoyed all sorts of these types of movies, but they’re starting to get boring. It’s all empty hopeless posturing. And just in the larger, sociopolitical, cultural context, I think, relying on superheroes to save you from the hard work of creating a just and livable society is objectively reactionary, and it keeps people in a state of dependence and childlike fascination with the powerful. I make an exception for Deadpool because Deadpool isn’t full of itself and imagining that it’s transmitting an elevated message. It’s dumb fun often very clever and I’m totally cool with that.

The thing is, his playfullness isn't forced. I think he's just a well read pop culture guy who's mind works that way. He could have had a career in morning radio back when that was a big thing. The drops. The quick cuts to something related to the subject. His makes his references too fast for me to think they are planned or scripted. It's just what pops in his head.