gehringer_2

25 minutes ago, buddha said:

the only angle i can possibly convince myself will work is the "vancouver retains a ton of salary" and "the swedish guys bring out the best in him."

i can almost talk myself into it at that point.  but then i still go back to him basically crying in a corner because jt miller was bullying him.  the last time the canucks were in the playoffs he was a complete no show.  he signed that huge deal and fell off a cliff.  is that who i want?

do i really need a perennial lady byng candidate to lead my team?

otoh, he wouldnt be the leader of the team.  he could fade into the background and produce on line 2 or 3.  but if that's who youre trading for, do you really want to pay that guy 11 million per year for the next SEVEN years?

i dont.  if you wanted to mortgage the future for a "star" then you should have ponied up for hughes.  if you want to take on a distressed asset, then find one who doesnt make 11 million per year.  

I don't care about the money, it's not that big an increment, the only question is whether he can turn his career around away from Vancouver. The team was clearly banking on that happening when they moved Miller, so that argues no. OTOH, that locker room may have been so polarized by the time they moved Miller that it wasn't going to make any real difference to his alienation from the team. McLellan seems to be a pretty good coach, but if you're are going to turn around EP you probably need a Scotty Bowman. This team is close enough I don't think you need to take such a big risk of lousing things up. I'd pass based on knowing the little amount we do, but the front office does get paid to know more about the sub rosa than we do.

14 minutes ago, buddha said:

war has always overly benefitted starting pitchers who accumulate innings.

the fact that park effects can change year to year without any physical change to the park itself or change to the general weather patterns tells me that players who play in the park have as much or more influence on the "park effect" that season than the modelers would have you believe.

two comments on that: 

Weather is local, changes from year to year, and is what drives some of the park effect anomalies you see. The year Target opened we were in MnStP, everyone was paranoid by August that the park was playing way too huge. It was just a really weird year in Mineapolis - lots and lots of cool nights in a place where summer is usually really hot. It's never played that big again.

I agree there does seem to be something to a team effect on park factors. COPA definitely seems to play big when the Tigers are bad, more average when the team is average to good. I'd guess that when the home team is lousy, visitors with a lead just feel less pressure to score more so I believe in some cases you do get a certain amount of cross correlation that you don't want to be there.

11 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Both Iwakuma and Sale had better ERA+ and K/BB than Scherzer and Scherzer was surely penalized for playing in a pitcher friendly park.  

I suppose if they wanted to make things more transparent, they could publish how the park factor correction was for each player. They can be pretty big, esp for pitchers.

48 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

Agree.   If Skubal's 1st choice was to stay in Detroit it seems there would have been at least minimal good faith negotiations Boras or not.   The lack of any contact tells me he's mentally out the door, another reason why I think a trade is the best course here.

That aspect doesn't worry me so much. Even if he is disconnecting mentally from a *future* with Detroit,  if he is angling for a record setting deal, he is going to be driven to perform in the '26 *present* to get it.

7 hours ago, chasfh said:

I could see where, if Skubal loses the arb case and gets the $19 million the Tigers imply he’s worth, and then they turn around and bring in Chris Bassitt for something more, Tarik might be at least a little annoyed.

If it's true that Skubal/Boras didn't even make a pre-arb counter offer to the Tigers, to me that means they already look at any contractural relationship with the. Tigers as being in the rear view mirror.

5 hours ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

Come on, **** off New England. They have a 15 year, multi-Super Bowl run with Tom Brady and now they're likely going back in less than a decade. Meanwhile, we're sitting at home not even in the playoffs yet again. Some fans have it sooooooooooo good. Unbelievable.

yeah - Pretty good when your old management takes Brady, then a generation later it turns over and your new management  picks Maye, another big drop back passer who is already at top of the stat sheets in his 2nd yr.

One of Elmer's stronger games tonight - not only mixing up a little to defend his mates, but a good number of take-aways.

Reimer not going to keep his new gig very long if he keeps dropping low enough for guys to shoot over his shoulder like the Wings did.

37 minutes ago, Stormin said:

I am sure the Tigers could get good prospects, but probably not a team's #1 prospect.  The Tigers went down this path on the JV trade when the Astros declared their #1 prospect untouchable (Kyle Tucker) and the Tigers settled for Franklin Perez. 

Right. The actual comparison is 6-7 War from Skubal in '26 plus whatever the comp pick turns into in the future, vs the value of 2 or 3 other prospects, which  in total still have an excellent chance of giving you less than 6-7 total over any future. If you were a bad team where 6-7 isn't going to get you anything in '26, then take future, but if you are a good enough team that the 6-7 wins gets you to the playoffs and thus a shot at the WS, take the wins and the pick and let the future further out sort itself out.

24 minutes ago, chasfh said:

We’ve are at capacity with our electrical panel and I went to ChatGPT for some guidance on approach, and I mean, this really helped a guy, who knows practically nothing about it, a lot.

https://chatgpt.com/share/696d29c4-59e4-8004-8d42-bc005e8e18b1

I don't know how I could trust it for things when about which I didn't already have a feel for whether it was right or wrong.

One thing I have to get used to is that it seems to assume people don't ask questions accurately, because even when you give specific multiple criteria with conjunction ('and'), it seems to ignore that on the first pass and you have go back and repeat, that you want do want a list of things with X AND Y properties, not a list of things with X OR Y properties. 

56 minutes ago, lordstanley said:

 

that's gonna hurt.

45 minutes ago, Tigerbomb13 said:

Florida elects some special people

I think they should just close all the airports in FLA right away.

(assuming Edman has a car to get out.......😉)

1 hour ago, lordstanley said:

Last night Montreal was down 2 with 5 minutes to go and beat Ottawa, the Leafs were down 2 in the 3rd and beat Winnipeg, and the Bruins were down 2 going into the 2nd period and beat Chicago. 

 

Are we seeing not enough 'game management'...... or too much? 🤔

41 minutes ago, casimir said:

Ha!  Maybe that’s his major?

That degree is 'Communications' to you, buddy.

Just now, Tiger337 said:

It's not different from other jobs in that respect.  It's just that there is a lot more money involved and the results are public.  

right - and also the ratios involved are so huge. If you are working for Amalgamated Widget, and the guy in the next cubicle doing a similar job gets a bigger raise then you do, it's not likely to be to 30x what you are making like it is between a future HOF player in his rookie yr versus a washed up unproductive player that got lucky like Cobb.

On 1/16/2026 at 7:57 PM, Tiger337 said:

Flaherty and Cobb both made more than Skubal last year.  

any player in the MLB who is worried about himself or other guys being paid what they are actually worth in the years they are worth it is going to be having a very hard time emotionally. I'm sure any pro baseball player who hasn't already lost his mind over it has made his peace with the fact that what guys are being paid at any given time in MLB has almost nothing to do with how much they are contributing to the team or whether the guys he sees when he looks down the dugout bench are being paid for more or less 'value' to the club than he is.

43 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I'm not sure how you want to fix that.  Do you want to get rid of positional adjustments and ignore position in evalualting a player or do you think that the positional adjustment for first basemen in particular is too harsh?  I can't really justify the former, but the latter is possible.  

I suppose there is no need to 'fix' as long as one understands what it's actually telling you (nor not telling you! ;))

24 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

 

at least the reason he isn't going to class is a good one.

9 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Im already not watching CBS. Except for sports. 

too big a loophole. They are out of my channel selector.

9 minutes ago, smr-nj said:

If these media/network companies acquiesce because it’s easier to do than pushing back, it becomes every viewer’s responsibility to boycott every damn product that is advertised on that network.

This means me. This means you.

yeah - he absolutely no authority to do this. And I would guess the networks will push back, not out of principle, but because they know no-body wants to watch Army-Navy and they don't want to lose the revenue.

13 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

He was strictly a DH with the Tigers.  He played a little 1B after he left the Tigers.  He didn't play enough there for me to have an opinion on how good he was, but his career didn't last as long as it did for his defensive skills.  Early in his career, he was a decent right fielder.  

IIRC, Rusty couldn't run a lick.

3 hours ago, chasfh said:

He has over 2,000 plate appearances across four seasons in the majors and has barely cracked 2 WAR for his whole career

WAR is sort of cruel to 1Bs. He was over 2 OWar in '23 and '25 but got pulled down by DWar numbers, which we've talked about a lot for 1Bs. It's just a place where in my view the stat is detached from reality. Torkelson's play at 1B is does not cost the Tigers wins or negate his offense. He is simply not a bad 1B and whatever his dWAR thinks it  is capturing, I don't care about it (e.g I'm not asking him to play SS!)  and I'm willing to bet the analysis the Tigers use internally doesn't either.

41 minutes ago, 4hzglory said:

The NFL does have a firm cap.  It can be manipulated via signing bonuses, but there is a cap teams cannot go over.

signing bonuses are the end around non-guaranteed contracts, they are still counted as salary in cap calcs. Teams can move money around and into different years (and into the future were the cap is higher) to make room for players short term, but the same total eventually gets paid to players collectively. If anything, what people regard as teams cheating or using loopholes, is actually a strength in the way the system allows teams to have some roster flexibility, and still pay the correct amount of total salaries for a given year. And it's the players that are largely in control when it comes to restructuring. And it's mostly worked, you don't hear either side in football worrying about a future strike.

6 hours ago, chasfh said:

Ever hear of the cube root rule?

What is the Cube Root Rule in politics?

The Cube Root Rule in politics is a principle that suggests the optimal size of a country’s legislative body (e.g., parliament or congress) should be roughly the cube root of the country’s population. This rule is often used as a guideline to help determine the appropriate number of representatives in a legislature to ensure effective representation and governance.

How the Cube Root Rule Works:

• Calculation: According to the rule, if a country’s population is PPP, the ideal size of its legislative body SSS should be approximately S=P^1/3. For instance, if a country has a population of 27 million, the optimal legislative body size would be about 300 members, as 27,000,000^1/3 = 300

Rationale Behind the Cube Root Rule:

• Balance of Representation: The rule aims to strike a balance between having enough representatives to provide effective representation for citizens and not having so many that the legislative process becomes inefficient.
• Historical Observation: The rule is based on empirical observation of various countries, where many legislative bodies approximate the cube root of their populations.
• Scalability: It provides a scalable approach, meaning as populations grow, legislatures should expand at a manageable rate, avoiding the extremes of overrepresentation or underrepresentation.

Cube Root Rule in practice in the US:

 

I don't know about 700 (which is what the cube root would give for 350M, but the US House should be expanded to at least 500 - and that requires nothing but an act of Congress. But the real problem with representation is the Senate and that's a tougher nut to crack.

25 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I doubt it.  I believe they would be more likely to reduce pitchers to 12 max.  Manfred is not happy about the increasingly shorter starts and there has been talk about incentivizing longer starts.  They'll probably do something stupid, but I don't think more pitchers will be the answer.  

If you 'incentivize' longer starts, you'll just destroy more arms. It's not the players, it's the game.

The NFL doesn't really have a cap, it has a budget the teams must spend on players, if they end up under budget on salaries, they have to make it up in payments to the NLFPA but they have to be within about 90% in direct player payments. So on every team, the players get the the negotiated cut of the team revenue. It's not really a cap or a floor, it's the player piece of team revenue. That is pretty close to an ideal construct for a sports league.

MLB can't get anywhere near there for dozens of reasons, but the 1st prerequisite to moving toward balanced team salary is balanced team revenue. Taking about caps and floors seems pretty pointless to me when it doesn't address the fundamental issue, which is team income inequality. Only movement in that direction, even if incremental, begins to rationalize the MLB system.

As Buddha pointed out, a cap added to any thing like the current system (i.e.absent real structural revenue reform) simply benefits the richest teams even more.

I suppose you could say that if they institute a meaningful floor, that means they have to institute some additional revenue sharing, otherwise a meaningful floor is an impossibility. But that is exactly why a meaningful floor is really unlikely!