gehringer_2

Only 6 assists. Slacker....

Stat of the day: 8 of the last 15 AL CY's have been won by either current or former Tiger pitchers.

I think what seems weak to me, is that it is easy enough to define an average, or alternately a replacement level (the difference is just a matter of picking a baseline) hitter because fundamentally every player is the is in the same situation when he steps in the batter's and every PA by every player has the same potential to influence the game in the same ways. But this isn't true on the defensive side, so I guess I might argue that there really isn't such thing a replacement level defensive player *in general* as there is for hitters, there is only replacement level defense at a given position. When your 1st baseman goes out on the field, he does not have the potential to influence the game the same way SS does no matter what he does. So there is fundamental difference to conceptualizing a replacement hitter vs a replacement defender. That's what produces the strangeness for me. And maybe the other aspect is as you note, the positional adjustment are correct (assumedly -) for looking a players total contribution value. But adding WAR totals is also a way to look at teams, and again, I think there is an oddness there which comes back to my point that you can't play nine SSs in the field. The win contribution to the team makes more sense to me in terms of the total differential value from replacement taken position by position. Now maybe that all comes out in wash as a matter of non-linearly independent sets/redundant differentials, but if so the way it works still seems intuitively awkward for defense.

I think a lot of guys who wash out early in a career probably do it because of unhealed/unfixable physical deficits that don't get talked about a lot because it's just accepted that's the way it is. It's not like they forget how to do the things that got them to the big leagues, but wear and tear (or worse) happen to where they just can't get back to where they were.

guess the docs didn't manage to fix him

well, it's not like Harris has made a secret of the things he says he look for in a player, so it's not that much of jump to say a certain guy fits the profile he professes to prefer more than another guy. But issue is that all that idealized preference stuff has a tendency to get pushed to the side when faced with what you actually need vs who you can actually get. Or it's 50/50 at best. Gleyber is the kind of hitter Harris says he likes, though he did not have any rep as a good fielder (another supposed Harris priority) when he signed him.

as noted, FLA and Tx among MLB states have no IT. So that's an edge for them, but among the rest that do, MI at a flat 4.25% is one of the better ones for high earners. Funny thing is that business taxes in MI used to be higher than a lot places, and when the GOP was in power in the ~90s or so a lot of taxes got cut. Of course, I'm also old enough to remember when we had good schools and good roads in MI. We have neither now. I'm just guessing there might be a connection.

but it will be the obvious explanation when they come to describing how the American experiment ended.

I'm generally not a huge fan of CS Lewis, but I remember in one of his novels he very aptly describes the person who has every understanding and opportunity to save himself but is just so habituated in his mind set, that even if he takes no real joy in his current state, he can't - wont' move himself out of it. (in Lewis's case of course he's talking religion, but the personality description fits a wider spectrum)

yeah - you don't want to get the perfect fit for 4 yrs ago.

excellent point. It could be a Pyrrhic victory for the state.

it's the paradox of QBs. For most athletes, physical ability is the bottom line. NFL QB is one where the mental part of the game is just as important, and you can't see it on field like you can a great throw or scramble for a 1st. It only shows up in the score at the end. Goff has plenty of arm and excellent accuracy, but otherwise he is not an exciting athlete to watch, so he just has be satisfied with winning.

prop taxes are high in MI, but sales and income taxes are moderate, so overall MI is not a high tax state, but property taxes are a bitch. That said, there are safety valves for lower income people and retirees that have been in their houses for a long time to help prevent them getting taxed out of their homes. As long as you are in the same home, your prop taxes can't increase faster the lesser of 5% or the inflation rate, regardless of assessments, and there are other circuit breakers for lower income homeowners. If somebody bought my house today, they'd pay ~40 more in prop taxes than I do now as we have been here a longggggg time and assessments in A^2 have risen faster than inflation. None of which is relevant to ballplayers -🙄- but that's the context.

Or just apply positional value metrics after a players O-War and D-War are rated against the actual replacement player at the position - People could still have the post positional adjusted shorthand number but also get a more realistic take on the player by just stepping a single level deeper into the data. With the positional adjustment put in before the calc of dWar, it makes the data more opaque (and counter-intuitive) than it needs to be -- IMHO

I have two career (20yr+) vets in the immediate fam - one USN, one USAF. One is pretty conservative by ordinary stds. Another BIL did 6 in the Marines. They all hate Trump.

looking around.... the 68 Tigers had a fairly large core of regulars - 6 guys >550 PA. SS was the only position that didn't have an almost every day regular, but of course they did have 4 'regular' OFs in Kaline, Northrup, Horton and Stanley. '61 Yankees had also had 6 over 550 PA. So to compare the 2025 Tigers had three, Tork, Greene and Gleyber. One aspect that is a little less of a fair comparison is that Dingler was an 'every day' catcher by the modern standard, but most teams won't work a catcher to 500 PA any more even if he is considered a regular. So you could give the Tigers credit for having 4 regulars. On the other hand, 68 Tigers and 61 Yankees had no DH, that was 6 regulars out of 8, today's team was 4 (including Dingler) out of 9. And DH's are always likely platoon candidates as they have no defensive value to support playing their bat against the tougher side pitcher.

just curious were you get that one. Michigan state taxes rank below average and the income tax in Detroit for a suburbanite is all of 1.2%. Not FLA or Tx but cheaper than a lot of places.

the last two points are the relevant ones. If you don't like the rule work the process, you don't just ignore it. The full warranty would be the only real value to the consumer in all this. And of course the dealer story here only parses to the consumer's advantage if the incentives are greater than the market discount for a demo. In the absence of being able to prove the negative, we can still wonder if in the absence of SOS attention the practice would actually go away when incentives shrink or end. You'll just have to bear with the fact that after a lifetime of experience, there is no business sector in the world I have less predisposition to give the benefit of the doubt than car dealers. 🤷‍♂️

He should be perfect for Sean McVay after Stafford hangs them up. 🤔

There has always been a system of discounts for buying 'demos' off the lot, which is any car never titled but over the 'new car' mileage limit, which at least used to 30 miles. If these cars were sold 'as new' without disclosures that there were demo/rentals, with a couple of hundred miles on them, that is a violation. It doesn't really matter what FoMoCo or GM or Toyota thinks, they don't make the rules. It sounds like what is happening here is that the dealers aren't willing to discount demo cars enough to meet the price of new car incentives so that becomes the motivator to sell them as new. But those aren't the rules. And in the end, it's just the dealers trying to save themselves money. The right way to do it is put a few cars into a into a dealer owned loaner pool for a year and take the depreciation in their value on sale. Instead they are trying to get their loaners for free by running a lot of new cars a little and selling them as new.

so will BLS issue the missed reports or just pass until the next one is due?

The difference is the media and endorsement opportunities, and there are some players for whom that is important. Even aside from the market size or Hollywood aspect, if you are a Hispanic player and are interested in building a media brand you want to be in LA, SD or NYC instead of the mid-lands. But there are plenty of players who have no interest in doing that kind of thing.

They've made some advances in the helmet tech - I don't know if that will be enough to make a big change or not. Between that and the rules my impression is we are seeing fewer guys going to the concussion tent than when they first put them up.

I think you answered it here: I understand the number have to do what the numbers have to do in the model, but I think the terminology used creates some odd implications - i.e.that all 1Bs are bad fielders *at-their-position*. To your answer about 1b vs SS OPS, does it seem to you that there is a general compression taking place across the league? Or maybe it's a covergence? SSs are certainly getting bigger, so their power potential is up, and maybe pitching is so hard to hit that the big guys who used to play 1B/3B have lost some of the power advantage they used to have because hitting has to be done at so much higher reaction speed where brute strength is less determinative?