gehringer_2

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.

The problem is that you get what you measure. The political system is conditioned to look at GDP, and things like QE can keep GDP churning up, but GDP is a crappy measure of the nation's economic well being because all the money flowing to the 1% (more like 0.1% even in the case of QE) drive aggregate numbers up while the majority of the population is losing ground. That's been pretty much the story since Reagan and took a turn even worse after the 2008 crash. Biden is the 1st admin since 1980 that actually has people trying to formulate policy differently, and he's trying to do it in the context of a gridlocked Congress - so they're stuck mostly doing infrastructure and tinkering at the margins on issues like non-compete agreements, etc.,

Another game with a stupid huge strike zone. Really ready for ABS.

The was a column in the NYT today about the Fed's efforts to unwind QE. It's going to take years to do without messing up markets. And it was pretty much a failure anyway. It bid up equity prices in a big way, and contributed hugely to the growth of house flipping and income disparity, so if that's all you measured success by the financial types can say it was roses....didn't do squat for the majority of the country.

Clarinet?

the Hicks testimony is probably won or lost with the jury based on which side avoided having her in tears. Defense loses.

"Don't you feel repression just Closing in around? No, the campus here is very, very free..." --Robert Lamm

They need to add "All the women leave Texas" to SNL's Washington's dream.

hard to imagine what Silver is thinking - how do you not suspend a guy for throwing a ball at the fans? Shouldn't even be a discussion.

Have my doubts. Malloy is kind of a one-trick pony. He has this fabulous MiLB walk rate that inflates his OPS, but he is only 280 minor league hitter striking out nearly 35% of the time so far. Once you take away the walks that he won't get form MLB pitchers, and find some place to hide is D, I'm not sure you have a valuable Major Leaguer. Hard to know what Perez will look like in another 100 AB, but for now he is a better bat to ball hitter and plays some D. That said, I do think Malloy's MLB prospects would increase materially if they brought the challenge system to MLB and his good zone judgement weren't so subject to being foiled by the typical MLB umpire's daily strike zone eccentricities.

another example of grifters seeking each other out. At this point if you are a reputable firm, do you want Trump as a client?

Meadows is the candidate to go down. He needs to get K's under control and fix his swing path to get the ball down. Those are good MiLB assignments - at least for as long as Perez can hold onto a gig. If Perez falls off, then you evaluate which of he and Meadows is doing better at that point. Keith is also scuffling horribly - 2/45. But his K rate is under control - his xBA is 245 and his BaBIP 190 so he has had some pretty terrible luck. I think he is less in need of some obvious fix that needs space to work on the way Parker is. The question with Keith is whether he pulls out of it before his confidence goes into the death spiral.