gehringer_2

And you already have another bat to play in front of Parker in Perez. If/when Perez cools down and Parker would be in line to gain back more AB, then you have more of an issue to visit for Baddoo. But Vierling isn't doing too bad against RHP so he is also a candidate to pick up Parker's PT if he is sent down.

the problem is that these guys who are not performing in the majors have by and large already outperformed the guys in the minors folks are clamoring to bring up. The gulf from AAA to the majors is massive. I don't see anyone at Toledo right now that I think is any kind of lock to hit 225 in the majors. Maybe Baddoo if the brain trust believes he has materially improved since the last time he flamed out in Det. (and you don't want to replace Canha/Greene/Carp/Perez right now anyway - Meadows might as well go down if he is going to sit but you still don't need another OF because you have 5 with Vierling who goes back to mostly OF when Urshella returns ) The problems are around the IF and catcher, and neither Malloy or Baddoo help you there. I'm not against a move per se, I just don't see any particularly compelling candidates. There is certainly no 2023 Colt Keith there.

This. Tell him his only objective is to not make outs - nothing more. Everything that can follow will follow if he starts doing that. Start at the beginning. He can't be a power hitter until he's a hitter.

well, there is that.

What exactly does it mean to be offered in trade? I assume that is different from being made available on waivers but how do you enforce that it's real mobility? The Tigers have to take the best offer no matter what it is?

well, that's fair. Honestly - who expected anything from Perez when they called him up? He mostly got the call because he was a switch hitter and they wanted to cut Parker's AB, not because anyone expected anything. 50 AB is nothing. I like that so far he's been tough to K - K rates usually don't take a huge sample size to get meaningful, but that's about all we have so far.

Don't see it with Malloy but I'm willing to be wrong.

Weaver clearly has had no clue what kind of players he needed to build around Cade, but that can probably be generalized to "Weaver has no idea how build a winning team in today's NBA" and it's probably still true.

Today his approach was actually better. He swung at some 1st pitch strikes, and the final DP ball was smoked. What will probably happen is that he will start figuring it out just as patience runs out and he is sent to Toledo - where he will hit a ton and be called back and everyone will say Toledo straightened him out when it will have had nothing to do with it.

Didn't we call that the "Black Hole" theory.

The low K rate so far is encouraging. If you can get around on velo and aren't fooled enough to be striking out much, you've got a shot at hitting in the majors. The other knock on Wenceel coming up was that he hasn't shown any power, so whether the 3 HR he's hit so far are projectable is a big question.

well, just to play Debbie Downer, I'd note that Chris Shelton hit 35 HR in about 220 games and was never seen nor heard from again...... I still think Torkelson has a ton of talent as a hitter but he needs to break himself down and start over with his mental approach and he doesn't seem capable of doing it under this coaching staff. It happens.

This is basically the human condition. If you never see a person different from yourself, pretty soon what is different from yourself stops registering as a person, and it becomes hard to avoid falling into bigotry land. If you demand to live where you never see person different from yourself, you are pretty much already there.....

He did in the previous AB also- and missed a cutter. Still, I'd rather see him swinging at most strikes than taking them. If a pitcher make a perfect pitch on a bottom corner, sure, tip you hat and watch it go by, but I'm a firm believer hitters have to compete against most strikes.

Wenceel did finish pretty strong last season - if he's actually making a breakthrough it would be completely out of the blue, but it's still not very likely he's a 900 OPS major leaguer!

Not only short term numbers, but there is a lot of batter vs pitcher in the Tigers mix. I suppose you could look at a guy's week to week or month to month (whatever you pick) OPS variance over a year get some idea of how consistent he is. If he's a really solid same every day guy, you maybe don't change your expectation over any short stretch. Maybe another guys is more streaky (Candelario?) and you want to move hin up when it looks like he going on a tear. Right now the Tigers have a lot of guys with short track records, so you don't have the depth of data, and even if you do, when you start slicing and dicing to finer sets of conditions sample sizes get down to where they lose significance. So even if you call yourself %100 quantitative, you are still make meta level judgements about how to use your data.

LOL - make that 3K in 25 AB for Wenceel.

and what do you do with Perez? The odds are he comes back to earth at some point and it may a crash. You just sort of have to guess where to put him and for how long. Lineups are a lot of semi-guided guesswork. BTW, Wenceel was struck out twice in his last 24 AB!

right. Or think about Cabrera in his prime. Without looking - I'll take a guess that his OPS - or at least his ISO, in his good years with RISC might actually have been lower, because he became a singles hitter with a man at 2nd. But his RBI percentage was always one of of highest in the league - so numbers might tell a more complex story than the simplest view of them.

He was over anxious at 2-0 and swung at ball 3 and 4, but recovered to get the run in.

Maybe you dive deeper into the def of "best hitter". If I have two 850 OPS guys and one has a 20% walk rate and and a low ISO and the other doesn't walk but has a high ISO, I don't think you treat them the same in the order.

what on gods green earth was Tork looking for? 93 mph middle middle and you get rung up?

Yeah - this used to be SOP, but it's not in Hinch's playbook. Apparently out of fashion, but the force at home is sooo much easier for a catcher than a tag play. I wonder how much the difficulty of the latter leaks into thinking about playing for the former. And of course turning the 5/2/3 DP is not beyond the defensive talents of either of the Tiger catchers.

James Houston?

Context: This was not the general graduation event - which is tomorrow at the Big House. Many schools/colleges within the U hold their own because they want the smaller ceremony. Today at Hill would either have been the Grad school ceremony (AM) or school of music(PM), which were both scheduled for Hill today. It will be interesting to how far things do or don't get tomorrow.