gehringer_2

This is exactly one huge difference between Holmes and a long line of our previous GMs. With the Lions it used to be, sign one guy at a position and you are good. Even when they had a few good players they never had the depth to play past the NFL's inevitable injury wastage.

I wouldn't take giving a guy a spot start as implying all that much about your promotion schedule for him or that you're changing any of your system priorities. All it means is that he's a viable option for a short term need.

You can never really be too black and white one way or the other though - some kids at 18 just don't show where they will be in a couple of years because their physical development is on a slower clock. So there will always be prospects that never showed up on the radar at 18 that show up on the scene as college players. But I would agree that if you see what you think is a potential all-start bat like Riley at 18, you want them in your system as young as possible.

Yup, that was the initial report before anyone had a chance to do any message massaging. I see no reason to doubt those spontaneous on-site reports. And really it hardly makes a difference, he *was* close enough to being assassinated, the only value in the truth is the comedic aspect of seeing Trump again feeding his narcissism with fantasy invention.

Freep is owned by Gannett now. They still run the Op-Ed page to the left in counter point to the reactionary theocratic facists on Nolan Finley's Det News editorial board, but I think they maintain that more as a marketing stance than out of any kind of legacy loyalty to Knight-Ridder principles.

Sprong could be a disruptive force on O, they'll miss that, but another of many guys who didn't play enough 2-way to mesh with the Yzerplan.

True, sadly.

I guess I don't agree with the opinion that they shouldn't give him a spot start if they are short a guy before Mize gets back. Don't call him up into the rotation, just give him a spot start - shouldn't be a big deal for your top AA pitcher to make a cameo. Of course Wentz would be my candidate to drop from the 40, but I'm sure they don't want to cut an arm of any kind now.

Meh - McGonigle and Clark are no better or worse players today than yesterday because someone decided to rate them differently. In a sense it's an easy call because McGonigle has OPS'd 100 pt higher, but how much has their projectability really changed? Depends on who is projecting I suppose...

16th rounder. NBD.

The first step will be to take pictures. *IF* they don’t see anything they’ll let him try going into his weekly routine and see how it goes.

There's always torches and pitchforks.... (the pitchforks came irresistibly to mind as I've been watching my neighbor across the street dumping and spreading about 50 yds of mulch on what used to be his front lawn.....)

and the fact is that for all intents and purposes Biden was running opposed in the primaries so those votes don't really represent a positive choice as much as just an affirmation of party loyalty. Of course the ultimate irony in a situation like this with person who might be failing, is that if they retain the judgement to fully evaluate the decision to step away, they probably don't have to.... There is a bit of the liar's paradox built into such a situation.

I think the only way it works is Biden engineers Harris as the nominee, or pledges to resign for Harris after the election, they continue to campaign together. Harris pledges continuity to all the substantive priorities of the Biden admin. There has to be a solid belief there will be continuity. Harris doesn't have time or credibility to campaign on a new program. Obviously some cabinet officers always want to go do other things but you need public commitments from as many as possible to stay on for at least the 1st year.

The thing I come back to is that Biden holds all the cards because he has the pledged delegates and there is pretty much nothing anyone can do stop him from taking the nomination if he decides to. Thus, Biden can basically name his price for agreeing to move. So the real question is what can the malcontents offer Biden as their end of the deal? To me the media portrays the power dynamic exactly backwards. It's Biden who is in control of what happens, not the party insiders or the donors or the media. I believe if he were to agree to go he will exact the price of his choosing and something tells me his opponents won't like it.

LOL, that map tracks the mountains accurately but not so much the economic data. I wouldn't put Western PA or any large part of Ohio as meeting what is commonly thought of as economic Appalacia. This map is more the point.

Yup. He has either been the unluckiest guy on the staff, or he just loses focus on too many pitches. Sample sizes with relievers are so small you can lose a lot of games before you get a reliable read.

And it's actually so much more general than that - it's "True Believer Syndrome" and really, it can be about anything. Religion is one obvious place, certainly maybe the worst place, where it expresses itself and of course it's not confined to Christianity - taking orthodoxy to the extreme is a problem in Hinduism, Islam, Judiasm, pretty much you name it. But it's not even confined to religion, secular 'True Belief" is right up there - Nazism, Lenninism, Maoism, have all taken their toll, and I'd even add Putin's twisted Russian Nationalism as an expression of the same kind of human catastrophe. It's all the same - they are all examples of the human psyche falling in love with the products of it's own deduction while ignoring the empirical reality the universe has put there for us to see, learn, and get with the program.

You can tidy up a place a bit when you drop $500M on it.

I think ABS or challenge will bring a big boost to hitters.

Interesting idea, and in a perfect world that would be the way it should be done, but these Dems would be as leaky as a sieve to the media, don't see how they could possible keep any serious efforts under wraps successfully. If somebody managed that feat, they'd deserve to be President.

righthand batter almost got him.

looks like it.

I don't know if the glove might have cut it or not, but he apparently came down with the yips on his throws so that was that.

I actually like Jim Weber, but maybe Tiger management considers him too old time. Or maybe he wasn't interested.