gehringer_2

LOL - they can try to talk him up all they like, it's not likely going to change how other MLB GMs evaluate Mize. If we trade him now we'll be selling pretty much at rock bottom. They'd have to be really done with him - and maybe they are. I think I've already posted before that my doubts about Mize at this point are as much about whether he can master the mental aspects of being a winning pitcher as his arm. Ditto for Manning FTM.

I wonder how this plays in MAGA land? It would sort of be the test of whether the appeal is the man or the movement.

There are enough professional training operations out there with spin capable hitting machines that I imagine a guy can get in a lot of off season hitting work today without going to winter ball. Whether it's as useful as live pitching with sequencing under game stress is always debatable - though players probably don't take winter ball outcomes all that seriously anyway. A lot has been made of Torkelson's supposed resistance to coaching, but he looked to me to be swinging at a lot more pitches early after his return than before he was sent down, not to mention that the Tigers would never have brought him back up if he not gotten with the program. Hinch and Co. have been very clear that promotions are rewards for doing what you have been tasked.

the question bears on whether pinch-hitting is any easier than it used to be as more stadium have more facilities available for players to prep.

are players not currently in the game allowed to use clubhouse facilities like the indoor cage?

Arenado looks like he's been giving up swinging for power to keep up his OBP, HR's are on a 3 yr decline along with his OPS. It's 'only' $64M but if his decline continues along the same line you will be paying it to a <90 OPS+. Older guys are such a crap shoot. Bregman is 3 yrs younger but his OPS+ has also declined in each of the last 3 yrs though by less. In fairness hitting was down across the league this season.

They don't have to, they already have what's left of his devolving intellect well under control (evidence his new found commitments to major administration roles for Elon etc.) But if it this noise does get people a little more focused on what a bad outcome President Vance would be, all for the better.

I thought Harris' discussion about the tension in Torkelson's approach between 'covering shapes' (basically not taking called strikes) and driving the ball (hunting middle middle mistakes) was interesting and spot on - and then tied directly to Hinch talking about Meadows changing approach against Boyd to stop trying to pull. And it reminds me that almost all of hitting goes back to what Kaline used to talk about - that the first thing for the hitter is to understand is what the pitcher is trying to do.

i wonder if it isn't much harder for a player to have a Whitakerish career arc anymore though. You pretty much have to have Bill James 'old man' skills, namely power, to get to the big leagues even as a young man. I'm not sure orgs have the patience anymore to bring low power contact guys like Whitaker - and Trammel for that matter - along hoping they eventually become the power hitters those two did.

You're always happy to have been wearing something snug when that happens because seeing your limb with a 90deg angle where it shouldn't be is bad enough without actually seeing the bones sticking out. (been there) It looked to me like Hutch made no attempt to move the leg. That was the smart thing to do. You can only do more damage trying act the hero.

I think at this point both sides are playing games with the polling. I'll tell you what my biggest complaint is though. It's when pollsters claim the margin of error on their political polls based on their sample size. Now it's absolutely mathematically valid, that if you draw an *unbiased* sample of size N from a population that the math does tell you exactly what the confidence interval for your result is. But when you are getting less than a 1% response rate on your contact attempts and/or augmenting them with internet surveys that are 100% self-selected, and then applying correction factors to balance your sample according to your *theory* of how your sample relates to the true population, at that point you have no more justification for claiming the unbiased sample confidence interval for your result than the man in the moon.

Do you remember the one year he actually did lose a fair amount of weight, started the season slow and then claimed he needed to put the weight back on for his power? Clearly he had had plenty of power when he was younger and thinner!. To me that was the 2nd most disappointing action of his career because you knew then that he had just signed on for his success to end earlier than it had to.

Hopefully a clean break they can just set Surgery and fixation more likely if it's a spiral or there are fragments or maybe just to shorten recovery time. Small comfort but 100% recovery prognosis for a long bone fracture probably still better than ligament damage.

I'm old enough to remember when casual racism was pretty much the norm in the whole country. My read is that what happened through the civil rights era is that most/much of white America realized that was a habit they needed/wanted to break, and when that happened, that casual public racism ended and the majority culture changed, but there was still a big minority who never accepted that culture change privately, they just took it under ground because their views were no longer acceptable in public. Then 40 years of poor national economic management added enough people with economic disenfranchisement grievances to the racial dead enders that Trump has been been able to build nearly a majority by combining them but he's gone a step further in trying to consolidate that support by being first national figure we've had whose been just plain evil enough give the bigots validation to come back out into the open.

Austin Jackson.

With hitters though you have two different 'ageing' effects to track. Some guys are simply going to break down but retain the hand/eye/reflex ability to hit - they just become physically unable - Prince obviously but also less extreme cases like Joe Mauer, who was still a good hitter when it just got to where he couldn't play. But there are also guys who lose their bat while still physically in decent shape - which you commonly see in guys that fall out of the league in their very early 30's. So if you could you'd want to be able to identify/predict both kinds early career ends....

if they could get him for 6 I'd bite.

ach - forgot that.

With or without unnatural intervention I doubt Trump or Biden are going to be with us by the 2028 election.

Of course he does. Does anyone seriously think that either Vance or the people that put him where he is like Thiel don't see Vance as the real target for the White House given Trump's rate of decline? If Trump does win he better watch his back before he starts down any staircase because Vance and Co. will be more than happy to see his early end. This is the elephant in the corner that for whatever reason the Dems have chosen not to make an issue but it's just another example of how clueless Trump himself is that he doesn't see that Vance is actually a stealth missile targeted at him by the new GOP oligarchy.

that will be their dilemma with Malloy. If his bat starts becoming valuable for him to stick, which it showed some signs of doing, then he's pretty much going to monopolize up the DH spot, which I think the Tigers were hoping to avoid, though a team can have a lot worse problems than that.

Agree that has definitely been his his issue and I imagine that he was sent to Toledo with the mandate to learn to take fewer strikes. I would have liked to see Torkelson go to winter ball.

9IP at WM, a very quick promotion to AA Erie where spent most of the season. He threw 73.2 there plus his DL stint, then promotion to AAA for a mere 9 IP, before being called to Det where he got into 2 games for a total of 4IP.

Now to be fair, he was a AAA player when they called him up!

Torkelson was 348 OBP/781 OPS after his return and played solid D, improving his Rdrs from -10 last season to +3 this season. I don't think the Tigers are as down on him as many fans who only see his season stats that include his terrible early trouble.