gehringer_2

You pay MLB staff big bucks because just like the players, they are supposed to be the best in the world at what they do. It may be a hard task, but that's the portfolio. Pro sport is not an excuses business - figure it out or get people who can.

Obviously we don't know what goes on that we don't see. Hinch claims Torkelson is a tireless worker, which you can believe based on his improvements with the glove, but the question is *what* is he working on with the bat? It's very hard at this point to accept the premise that Tiger coaching is helping Torkelson and that leads to the conclusion that one of two things is true, either a) he is too stubborn to change a failing approach he is over committed too, or b)whatever it is the Tigers are advising him is just not the right answer for him. I suppose at this point whichever is true, maybe Toledo is in order because in case a) it should get his attention, or in case B, he'll get a different perspective from different coaches (hopefully). Even the guys in the booth are putting out there that Tork has to be more aggressive early in the count. Given the Tiger media ecosystem that tends to make me believe they are getting that direct from Hinch, but that is just a guess. But now it's looking like even more than than now - he has to improve his plate coverage as well, and maybe that is going to take some swing retooling - IDK.....He's a messed up puppy right now.

It’s the old axiom: When you know there’s a con, and you don’t see the mark, you are the mark.

the hate is manufactured to draw the peons into the movement.

And just to finish the thought, Hinch constantly talks about Torkelson swinging at better pitches, but to me that's exactly backward for Tork. He is already too selective. Tork has to stop looking for 'his pitch' and decide that more balls in the strike zone are going to be 'his pitch' and go get them. You can't give pitchers 70% of the zone and hit with any success in the majors.

No, that's just exactly it, they love nothing but themselves, their own wealth, their own prerogatives. They're people for whom enough is never enough, and whether the world burns bothers them not as long as it's burning somewhere they don't have a beach house. The parallels to the French Ancien Regime would be apt. And with any luck their fates will be similar, at least metaphorically if not physically.

Fouled off a middle-middle slider in that AB. From a mechanics standpoint, I would suggest he needs to become more comfortable hitting across more of the zone. If you look at Torkelson's heat map what jumps out is how small a zone he is doing damage in this season, even smaller than last season which was not large to begin with. By comparison his hot zone is about 1/2 the size of Carpenter's. So maybe it's chicken and egg, but he has to get more aggressive in more of the strike zone and he has to be able to hit strikes in more of the strike zone. He's not doing either.

Pretty good argument for why Hamas has to be completely defanged before anything positive can happen. The problem remains the insane level of tribalism inside Muslim/arab cultures. The public knows that Hamas is destroying theirs lives, but the public at large will still not sell out Hamas to Israel. Pretty much just like someUS Repubs.

I still don't get why people think fans of college football are going to stay interested when the players are all mercenaries with whatever little connection was still left to the University communities of their teams now completely severed. It's going to be minor league pro-football where the teams just happen to be named for US colleges. I suppose they'll find a way to make it fly but I sure don't have any interest left in it. Or lets put it this way - the base of support of college teams was once students and alums and the university community. If whatever it is you want to call what we have now thrives, it will be because it's embraced by the general (or possibly betting) public - I don't see school sponsored pro sport retaining all that much traction from inside the schools - at least most schools - that it grew up with.

Another bad day for Torkelson. Ahead 3-0 in that AB, took a pitch he should have swung at, got multiple additional fastballs reasonably center cut, couldn't barrel up any, then had to swing at a pitchers pitch low and it and made a weak out. In the 2nd AB he was immediately down 0-1 (at least it was on a good pitch) and was fooled on a low change up. In the 1st AB, he took the best pitch of the AB for a strike on the 1st pitch. Whatever process he is trusting, he needs to figure out that it is broken, quickly. His claims his matra is only swing at what you can drive, but he consistent takes better pitches than he swings at. It's his whole problem in a nutshell. Don't see how the brain trust can watch what he is doing right now and not see the issue, or more likely they do, how they are not fed up with him not responding to coaching enough to send him down.

Of all people, the other day Ted Cruz was talking about legislation to create new ground rules (apparently he played college ball?).

that should do it for this one. You shouldn't be out of a game at Fenway down 4, but this team is.

Love this. I'm sure a lot more people in MAGA land listen to CC than read the NYT.

I'd guess he tweaked in the first game against Boston on 1st to 3d run when he was really motoring. I remember thinking to myself that running like that was probably tough for a guy that was 35.

The one beauty here is that throughout his career Trump has leveraged the slow movement of the Judicial system to defeat and frustrate his victims, but this case it's going to work against him. Now that he is convicted, he will remain convicted for the foreseeable future, and there is nothing he will be able to do before Nov to change that, even if he were to find some issue with merit to appeal over.

He did make it work when he had Lidstrom, Zetts and Datsyuk though.....

Interesting distinction here. Jesus was only 'convicted' by Jewish religious authorities in a religious tribunal. Pilate (the state) told them he saw no ground for any secular criminal charge, but to keep peace he threw up his hands and gave into the noise of the rabble. Jesus was not convicted of anything by State authority. So not so good an analogy in actual fact. If anything, the State of NY's refusal to give in to Trumps rabble is quite the opposite.

Penn is a really bright guy - a little off in the head maybe, but he's got a lot going on up there.

Kwame seemed like a break from a failed past of the prior generations of leadership in Det. In retrospect it may have been good that he won even if he turned out to be crook because it made that break.

Kenny's failure in Det was mostly only one aspect of the job - the accumulation of too many years of bad drafting.

Sadly, that is no joke. Syphilis up 80% in the US in the last 5 yrs. https://www.cdc.gov/std/statistics/2022/default.htm#:~:text=Overall%2C in 2022%2C more than,in the past five years.

Isn't this pretty much what Stafford had once - IIRC he is still playing NFL football, so lets not write Kerry off just yet.

I have ebbed and flowed party-wise. Of course, coming of age during Vietnam, I hated Nixon, but one couldn't hold VN against the GOP per se since the Dems had started it. I knew Reagan didn't know what he was talking about most of the time, but he did have some incredibly competent people around him (Shultz, Baker etc) and Carter, who may have grown into a great soul today, was a feckless president the economy probably wouldn't have survived for another 4 yrs. I was a fan of GHWB; a competent President, but hopelessly inept politician. I was bitterly disappointed (as noted here often) that the Dems backed Clinton after he lied under oath - I still take that as one the original sins of today's US politics. Thus I was seriously down on the Dems institutionally in 2000. I think Shrub was actually the better con man than Trump because he came in pretty much promising to be his father but in actuality was the executive model for Trump - built an admin full of hacks, then was able to get re-elected by wrapping himself in 9/11. Then just for toppers he normalized using the levers of the State to lie to the public in support of foreign policy to start a large war, then had no clue how to get out of any of the messes he had made, plus left us with us a parting gift in Alito - who is turning out to be an even worse hack than Thomas, hard as that is to believe. But Shrub's presidency was no outlier to the GOP the way you could at least argue Nixon's rouge behavior was. By Bush II that was the GOP, so if you couldn't walk away from the GOP by 2008 I'd tell you that you weren't/aren't really paying close enough attention.

Right - being settled precedent in NY state, Trump would have to almost have get to SCOTUS with the hope Alito and Thomas would lead the charge to throw out the NY statute.

Yup