gehringer_2

Let's have a win tonight, shall we?

can I love half the staff?

I wonder if he went to the pen he could throw a little harder. He and Wentz share that same property - they can be good when the fast ball is hot and they get good delta velo - not so much when the FB is a little lazy.

It's more than that - at least in Torkelson's case. My compliant is the Tiger approach as per the way Tork has described it more than once, gives the pitcher no credit for being able to command the strike zone. "Take a strike until you get a pitch you can drive up to strike two" then go to survival mode, is I think, a recipe for failure against any but the worst pitchers. I think the 1st strike - fine - but after strike one you have to shift to contact mode because strike two is too late. The Tigers take too many pitches that can be hit. Maybe not for HRs but that they could put in play in better shape than an emergency swing on strike two. I would even go further to say that every pregame approach to looking for a zone has to go right out the window once you see what a guy is actually throwing and what an ump is calling. If you park yourself waiting for middle in and he is painting the outside, plus the ump is calling a ball's width on top of that to the outside, and you take a thigh high fastball on the outer third not understanding that you are just going to get something further away on the next pitch, all I can say is good luck to you. I would like to the focus to move more toward covering the strike zone rather than looking for zones. Any one can do the latter, but a good development program and batting practice habits should be able to improve the former. And I still reject that more than one or two players on a roster are ever swinging at balls they know will not be strikes. That is the other place I think the mantra breaks down. Now eventually, they will sign only players that fit that mold, that already have good pitch recognition, and for them the coaching in that direction will be superfluous but the staff will look like geniuses! Anyway , it is what it is, the spitballing is mostly for entainment (at least in my case)...so YMMV.

I'm talking mostly generally here. As per Hinch - no - not so much in terms of game play - if you listen to Hinch he has said pretty much what I just wrote - that you have tendencies but as a manager he will overrule that guidance if he sees something that he thinks is tilting the game board. If I have a complaint it would go more to the way I hear guys like Torkelson (and Hinch) talk about what they are trying to do at the plate. For my money - on offense, what I hope they do is analyze their own tendencies and then go out try to confound any other team using them against them. Probably in the long run the best thing is to try not to have any clear tendencies at all. The ebb and flow about 1st strike pitches now current is a great case study in the idea of see tendency/compensate/overcompensate/reverse tendency. So 1st came the idea to work counts to get to bullpens on the theory they are weaker. That assumption may not even be a good one any more but be that as it may, in response the pitchers have said, "If you're aren't swinging, I'm just going to get ahead" and have thrown a much higher percentage of 1st pitch strikes than is actually a good idea. You never want to reach such a high strike percentage that a batter *knows* you are going to be in the zone - well unless you are Justing Verlander at 25 with a virtually unhittable FB where you can just say "here it is if you can hit it". Most guys need to maintain some uncertainty in the batter's mind to be effective - so the ideal strike % on a given pitch is probably closer to 60% than the 70+% that some guys were throwing (and being lauded for). But then the batters finally wise up a realize all the cookies going by and suddenly the hot stat is the how high OPSes are for guys swinging at 1st pitch strikes. Soon pitchers won't be trying to throw 70% 1st pitch strikes. So it sort of goes back to the driving by the rear view mirror paradigm. Using data is great but you have to stay current and you can't get caught being the last one doing the old thing when the new thing becomes where the comparative advantage is. And it's the new thing that is going to be hard to see from past data alone - but the data plus a little game sense and you have the tools to predict what may be next and get ahead of the competition - like that swinging at 1st pitches isn't such a bad idea......

the key is to have your antenna up for what is going on. The last couple of years when the shift was still in play against KC was always instructive. Late and close KC would always start going oppo and catch the Tigers still shifted. It was pretty predictable but the Tigers never took it away. But I think its maybe a bigger issue is with the way they come up with hitting recommendations. This notion of getting pitches to drive makes perfect sense, and if you look at league data for hitters most of them drive the middle in better. But once you telegraph to the pitcher that's all you are looking for, you just made his life easier and the stats you collected on the average batter in the average situation go out the window because he's not piching to you the way he might pitch to everyone else. And so you don't drive anything because he knows to just keep it away from you until 2 strikes. Sound like a familiar outcome? Your opposition are not automatons, they are perfectly capable of acting on the same data you have to confound you. The data can never get you out of having to play the real time cat-and-mouse game. And that's a good thing or it would be a very boring game.

I disagree this is correct even based on the rule book. The logical way this has to be read is that once IFFR is called, there is no out on the catch so there is no fielding 'play' - so there is no interference with a fielder making a play. Whether the SS catches the ball or not has no effect on anything - that is the whole concept of IFFR. The only interference that could come on an IFFR play would be if a runner tries to advance and someone blocked a fielder from making that play. There must be something at risk for there to have been an interference. But I'm confident the league will some find some pretzel logic to continue to defend bad umpiring.

There was or maybe still is a common layman's misinterpretation of quantum uncertainty that an observer influences an event. That isn't actually an accurate way of describing quantum uncertainty, but there is a similar thing that can happen in analytics driven baseball - which is that the application of the data to game play changes the game as it being played in the present tense, in part possibly invalidating or at least reducing the value of the data set you are working from. It's a bit similar to the complaint about the Federal Reserve. They work from collected data, but the economy has always moved past the data by the time it's gathered so people describe the fed trying the manage the money supply as like trying to drive a car only looking in the rear view mirror. Baseball analysts have to be careful not to fall in to the same kind of possible error. To me there are two pieces of the data revolution is baseball. One is in the metrics - the ability to look inside batted ball data, pitch data, catch probability on fielding plays etc. And use of statistics to normalize out noise from ballpark effects etc that make comparisons between players better today. This stuff is all pretty unalloyed gold. The other half is the is the game play tendency data. I think you have to take this part always with some humility because the game play can certainly change out from under your data. Every team today knows what their own tendencies look like and they can also determine how much their opponent tries to play to tendencies, and then decide how much to deliberately play against their tendencies. The whole thing can get very very meta....

I absolutely think this is true - but the degree does depend on the pitcher and how he gets people out. Take Skubal: he relies mostly on change of speed and throws FB/Change to hitters from both sides. He doesn't have to change what he does much depending on the batter. Or a lefty with a really good slider who can throw it to right and left hand batters effectively (like a yound Liriano). On the other side take your gargen variety RH sinker/slider pitcher - he likely throws two seam FB/Slider to righties and maybe 4seamFB/Change to the lefties so he does have to keep moving back and forth between different pitch sets (EDIT: I see TM just noted Petry say this). He may walk or get behind more guys facing batters from both sides whereas If you let him get into a grove with two, it's going to be to his advantage.

I think it's clear in the last few cycles it's much more about turnout than changing people's minds. In 2020 Trump got 12M more votes than in 2016 and lost because the Dems turned out 16M more. That the swing of 28M more voters staying home or not dwarfs how many change their minds. Which is why for my money - all the campaign advice to Biden about trying to swing the average Fox voter is advice to waste energy. Everything you do has to be aimed at energizing your own voters. That's the one thing Trumps has learned perfectly, which is why he doesn't care a whit about how outrageous he seems to the Dems, he doesn't care what they think - his only objective to rile up his own voters with enough fear and anger to make sure they don't stay home.

For all the excitement about Williams the fact that he couldn't elevate his team more than he did was a question mark for me. You can say his overall team wasn't so great, but a great college QB often overcomes that anyway - i.e. Goff at Cal.

there is another issue I've wondered about, and have even heard a couple of analysts question, and this is whether the constant effort to gain platoon advantage in the short term doesn't eventually hurt a team long term by increasing their players' platoon splits. You would end up with a team that is easier to shut down with a pitching change given that rosters are too short to replace that many players and with starters going fewer innings you are likely to face more than one pitching change anyway. It would be a good study to look at how the platoon split for hitters shifts as they face higher and lower percentage of opposite side pitchers over their careers or even per season. Even with all the platooning a huge number of high leverage ABs still fall to guys having to face same side pitchers.

no they won't, but when the base rate in your conference is 20mil, the money you raise on the outside will have much less relative leverage. Put it this way - before NIL, if the base was just a student's stipend, then the booster money of a few $M could dwarf that. Then NIL made it worse as some schools raised 7 figures and some almost nothing. With the 22% diversion fund, If UM starts at $20M+, even if OSU's boosters kick in $5M more than UM's do so you end up with say $30M vs $35M, that difference is a much smaller % difference in total cash available than the old system with clean(er) teams and dirt(ier) teams. which is why I phrased it as the outside money no longer being the main show.

the whole framing thing is dumb anyway - it didn't exist at all for the 1st ..oh..100 years of baseball and the game did fine without it. If you could talk to an Ump from before about 1990 he'd probably tell you he would never give a strike to a catcher that didn't *stay still*. The umps let the whole framing thing get out of hand for no good reason - it adds nothing to the game play. A contest between the catcher and the umpire is nowhere given as an objective in the game of baseball and serves zero purpose therein. Getting rid of framing is one of my primary reasons to want ABS.

I don't know how much it's changed but traditionally the polling said there few true independents - if by that is meant people who have voted for candidates in both parties in any recent history. There were a lot of people who were pretty reliable for one party or the other but just wanted not to be considered affiliated. I would guess for a lot of people it's a way to they have kept their options open even if that's only in their own mind and there isn't much probability they will ever cross the line to the other side. I would also guess that polarization has increased even with those folks. They still don't want to be 'tied down' to a party ID but are even more solidly in one cultural camp or the other.

6 OATP in 50 games not is not something we want to be leading the league in? Who knew?

If/when they quit, it will not be because of Lange, it will either be because they have lost trust that the way the team is run is helping them win and/or that the situation in the clubhouse has become so joyless that no-one wants to come to work.

What can't go on usually doesn't. This looks to me like the end of NIL - at least as the main show. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5510354/2024/05/23/house-v-ncaa-settlement-votes/ The revenue sharing would be an optional model for power-conference programs, potentially as soon as next year, in which 22 percent of those schools’ average annual revenue — or roughly $20 million a year — would be distributable directly to athletes.

I think he changed the name just so people couldn't call him the chief Twit any more. But we all know in our hearts he will always be.

If Hinch stands up in the post game and says "It took a perfect throw" I'm going to be hard pressed not to throw something at the screen. That's what Keirmaier does.

That was truly stupid. You d.o.n.o.t.r.u.n on Keirmaier let alone from that shallow. Seriously, does Cora not even know MLB outfielders?

and they have good reason

Catchers that can hit would certainly be a disaster for baseball.

It's been noted before, but remains the case that when it comes to the Pistons, Gores is not serious people.

Smith was another guy with a sterling pedigree (like Avila). The thing with owning a sport franchise is you know you can't run it yourself, so you try to find someone to run it who is good at it and you get out of their way - because you learned that micromanaging was never a good idea in any of your other businesses. The difference is that you give a guy a year or two, or maybe even just a couple of quarters, in most of the normal business world, and you may already have a pretty good idea whether your hire was a mistake or not. It takes so long to turn over an MLB roster and get players through a a long development pipeline that you are not going to know that Randy Smith was a big mistake or even that DD was going to deplete your farm system, for way more years than you or the fans like.