Jim Cowan

I still think that "tanking" means "pursuing a better position for draft picks". It does not mean "having a low payroll and, consequently, a lousy team". Those are two entirely separate things. And feel free to tell me why Ausmus was fired if the organization was losing on purpose.

I think that he played center until Chester Lemon arrived.

Yes and to me the most important point here is that Chris Ilitch, who took over the business in early 2017, runs a very large business and most of us don't, and so you have to ask yourself how in the world he would think that having 5 losing seasons - it isnt 5 by the way, it's 4 - would improve profitability. Clearly he would not think that. He did it for the draft picks? That's preposterous. There was never a Bryce Harper available during that 4 year period. Having 4 losing seasons makes him less profitable. Lower gate revenue, lower merch sales and, most importantly, less leverage in negotiating broadcasting rights. That's what he cares about, money, nothing else. And I don't judge him at all for that, I am just stating an obvious fact. He isn't the frustrated minor leaguer that his dad was. He wanted a more sensible approach to payroll, no more Zimmerman or Upton contracts. No more using free agency as the path to success. Put the organization on a more stable long term footing. The results weren't good. The results were bad. That was an unintended outcome of a smaller payroll. Predictable perhaps, but unintended. To suggest that Chris Ilitch wanted to deliberately lose games though is to not understand the motivation of a business owner. And finally, if Chris Ilitch wanted to lose deliberately during the 2017 season, why did he fire Brad Ausmus at the end of it. So no, the Tigers did not tank "for 5 years" for draft picks.

I don't think that that is tanking, I think that the normal usage of "tanking" implies losing on purpose to get better draft picks. Losing is the method, not the outcome - better draft picks is the outcome. If you are just saving money, losing is a byproduct, but it isn't the strategy. Saving money is its own outcome. Cheap owners often end up losing, not always but often. But in baseball they don't do it for better draft picks. They just save money to save money.

You think they lost on purpose? I don't.

And I can now use "bloviate" in a sentence.

Another reason to like the '93 team was the return of the prodigal sun, Kirk Gibson, who at age 36 still had some gas left in the tank.

Tanking for a basketball pick makes sense. Tanking for a baseball pick is stupid. That's why no one does it.

I was happy that the reporter mentioned the WMD's, that was the first thing that I thought of. That was the last time that anyone should have trusted anything from "the intelligence community" without seeing actual evidence. Everyone understands that sources need to be protected, but liars need to understand that they won't be believed without providing hard evidence. Imagine saying "the fact that I am stating it is evidence".

These guys are total assholes who in no way represent the vast majority of truck drivers.

I'm all done with people who say they are all done with Covid.

I think I always vote on a weeknight, never a weekend, at a local school or church. Longest wait in my life is probably 10 minutes. Here is something else that is weird...we don't use voting machines, even though a Canadian company supplied some of yours. I mark an X on a piece of paper. If I stay up a bit past midnight, all the votes have been counted, or at least enough to predict a winner. Russians have not yet found a way to hack an X written with a pencil on a piece of paper. So, you guys are weird. I love you, but there it is.

I bought a car in November 2020 and it now has 5,000 miles on it because I work almost exclusively from home. The price of gasoline has not affected me and I am not really aware of the changes.

Yes those towers were from a coal burning steel factory. Jimmy Kimmel had a good line, it seemed odd to put a winter sports facility beside the reason why we don't have winter anymore.

You didn't get enough credit for this.

I bet he holds the straw with 2 hands.

It is very convenient for the white nationalists who have taken over this "protest" to have the media continue to refer to them as "truckers". 90% of real truckers are vaccinated, we are only seeing the assholes who won't do it, and the co-opting of the whole process by white nationalists. Something else that is interesting...in Ontario 25% of truckers are "south Asian", predominantly Sikhs from the Punjab. How many beards and turbans do you see in that crowd? Zero. They were deliberately excluded by the organizers.

Dave Stegman looks a bit like Doug Flutie.

Yeah Dave Stegman was looking like a pretty nice center fielder. You could read a couple of Dirk Hayhurst's books to learn about the abject poverty that minor leaguers live in. A year or 2 in the majors, at league minimum, hardly makes up for that.

Slam dunk.

I think Rogers can be a number 9 hitter who gets 450 PA's, hits 20-plus home runs and has an OBP of .320, which is pretty darned good for a premier defensive catcher.

Fight for neither.

Tettleton hit the hardest ball that I ever saw, batting righthanded at the Skydome. There were 2 loud bangs, the first one was his bat hitting the ball and the second was the ball hitting the back of an empty seat about 5 rows back in the left field seats. I don't think it ever got more than 25 feet off the ground. The interval between the 2 bangs was no more than 1001, 1002, 1003.

"Added 20 pounds of muscle during the offseason"

The hospitals are in dangerous neighourhoods and people are afraid to go there!