gehringer_2

The Shade of Dan Petry would prefer you phrase that: "Was Chet the most recent 84 Tiger to pass"?

isn't every shortstop in the Tigers system just an AJ Hinch nod away from being a CF?

Nice work Chas. I guess the Mexican ID card thing is probably along the lines of the 'enhanced' drivers license in MI that allows you to cross in Canada without your Passport. Pre Trump there had been occasional, usually halting, efforts to 're-normalize' US/Canada/Mexico travel at least a little bit toward the pre 9/11 freedom of motion - so the Mexican card program fits that.

For some reason, it's seems of all the major sports, Baseball is the one where the media get most attached to narratives about well know players and forget to let go of them when the players are no longer relevant. I think that underlying paradigm feeds into the ease of generating malcontent interest. A great example has been ESPN commentary about Correa. Carlos is a player who is getting old fast (30), hasn't had a plus hitting or fielding year in three seasons and they are talking about him like getting him is going to win Houston another WS. The odds right now, today, of him being a difference maker for a team are certainly objectively less than say - Zack McKinstry. But Baseball writers just can't let go of the narrative about guys on the downside, so when teams like the Tigers have sense enough to understand that it's a young man's game, they get hammered for it.

You picked a good time to miss. Some very nondescript teams.

Last season his walk rate was the highest and his K rate the lowest of his career. If anything he was trending toward that Harris profile. This season it's going down the crapper. Sometime a player just makes the wrong decisions for his off-season work and doesn't find out until it's too late that he went the wrong route. The other possibility is that he isn't 100%. He was actually fine right up until the Washington series DH when he hit the 2 HR in the first game. His K rate was up, but not drastically. But he hasn't been the same player since that day. Either the 2 HR got in his head (which seems unlikely for a guy with as many AB under his belt as Riley - you'd think he wouldn't be swayed to change his approach by one game) or he tweaked something in the OF that day and has kept it under his hat and tried to play through it. I could see Riley not wanting to take another trip to the IL.

Except that it's not really a "wide swing in the numbers" The new jobs stats are a tiny difference between huge numbers, (total US employment is ~160,000,000. New jobs in a month are about 0.1% of that). It's impressive that they get as close as they do reporting practically in real time.

Kane is not untalented, but I don't get where all the giggling comes from when he does baseball. It's like there is a bottle of nitrous oxide at the ballpark with his name on it.

yup - our 1975 outfield for the next 10 years lasted exactly one. Roberts gone after one season and Meyer after only two.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The teams and players are worth billions, the business of covering all the millionaires can't afford people who speak in complete sentences.

I like this deeper pitching staff. Now if Riley could just get a clue of what he is swinging at. He's really lost right now. It's looking to me like he is trying to level out the swing some, but as we know, doing that on the fly during the season is no easy task. Also am realizing how much more I enjoy the games with Dirks. Petry is a great guy, I just gotten to where I don't like listening to him do a broadcast any more.

This is true. The only hook I think Ernie did use a lot was where the fan that caught the ball was from. He was pretty sparing with all the rest of them, so you were always surprised and reminded at the same time.

Sanchez an outlier also!

So which countries would be significant tourist sources but also visa overstays? Mexico certainly. That and it would be the Central and South American upper/middle classes that would be hit I would suppose. I don't think there are many visa overstays from Western Europe or Japan. Is there PRC tourism on the West Coast?

If he turns this into the Lions GD forum I think I'm out of here.

the guy has two 100+ EVs good for 2/4 against one of the best pitchers in the league and he's the one you are complaining about?

Duran's FB is ridiculous

can we PH for Riley?

damn - pretty good pitch to K Tork. He might have handled it if he had been looking to go the other way, but only maybe.

OTOH, when you have a petty, vindictive meddling President and a merger before the FTC, you've got a pretty good basis to presume he had something to do with this one.

He was a moderately successful starter before he blew out his elbow.

I don't think the situation here is particularly unique to Detroit, but it is a big city phenomenon in the sense that the big daily papers in the major pro sports cities had all built these impressive stables of deeply experienced sports reporters - in Detroit it was Jerry Green, Pete Waldemeir, Joe Falls, Watson Spoelstra and then the last of the local line, the late great Tom Kowalski. They were a kind of sports royalty in the 'golden age' years. But with the general collapse of the newspaper business, that is all gone. So fine, times change - but the guys at the papers now still want to bask in the afterglow of an institution that's gone. They don't have the experience, the access, or the institutional support to do what they still pretend to be able to do.

My sister worked as a bank teller in the early 70's and they were responsible for shortages in their till at the end of day also.

At least with Valenti, he doesn't really try to hide that he's not trying to be right, he's trying to be entertaining/engaging, because on the radio that's his job. I suppose a print reporter can make the same argument to some extent, but there is still a vestigial set of 'traditional' expectations for things that call themselves newspapers, though admittedly they're fading fast.

He's been slightly better the last couple of days - he managed three consecutive games without a K before wiffing once yesterday. What's looking really alarming though is he has exactly 1 walk in his last 88 PA. Riley has never walked all that much, but at 1% over nearly a month, there is definitely something amiss in his approach.