gehringer_2

IIRC, Sparky wouldn't play and quickly unloaded Howard Johnson because pretty much because he didn't like his conduct. If Hinch had simply benched say - Correa - or who ever the player leader was, I think he would have gotten the other players' attention. The one unassailable power a manager has is turning in the lineup card. He could have put Cora at 1b or 3b where he couldn't be part of it in the dugout. And if the GM tells him to play a guy and you tell your GM "either I control this team or you can fire me and I will blow the franchise up when they ask me why" Or even just fire me and you can have your cheating. But if he's fired from a successful team he is pretty well protected in term of getting another gig - owners don't hold each other's caprice against the guys that it falls on. Sure that would still take a lot of balls, but it's not beyond what a man *could* do if felt up against the wall. Granted it's a lot to ask of a guy who is old enough not to want to have to have start over and ambitious enough to try to navigate through.

You know just because this one had 41 men reach in 9 innings no-one would be able to score in extras. 🤣 But otherwise, fair point,

OTOH, If Torkelson is suddenly hot with the bat, you don't want to take his bat out of a game that could to extras. When you have really bad bats in the lineup all your options are bad, just like when you have a bunch of bad relief pitchers.

true. But I will say that having Baez as next hitter with a DP in order should get consideration as a mitigating factor. If he has a well above normal probability of hitting into a DP compared to the average player, and Perez had a high probability of bunting successfully, it does moves the calculation. But both those things need to be true.

different Cora. We have the older brother now (Joe). Alex has also landed on his feet, managing the Red Sox now

right - and I made an edit above - that would still assume that the bunt can be gotten down with 100% efficiency so you can get from 1 on no out to man on 2nd one out at 100% efficiency- which is far far from true with the modern player.

but overall those two numbers are so close that are likely to be lost in the noise variance of the particular match ups. I'm still OK with my chances this particular case if I reduce the chance of Javy in particular at the plate with one out and man on 1st, which is going to be something on the order of 68% if Wenceel just swings away. The other local variables is how good a bunter Wenceel is from the left side compared to that, which I have no idea..... aside from run probability It's just much harder to put a bunt down against modern era pitching, so most of the time it's just throwing away an out - swinging away down two strikes after failing to bunt ( the most common modern outcome) is giving away half an AB. You've cut down your chance of the 1st batter succeeding from maybe 32% to something like 20% or less and thus accomplished nothing but increase your odds of getting to man on 1st one out. EDIT: I would also note that since 41.6 and 39.7 are so close, the probability of getting the bunt down needs to be close to 100% to even consider bunting, while OTOH, Javy is such so far below average a hitter that the Tigers probabilities are going to be lower across the board.

it's true he didn't have many good options. He can quit and stay silent, and no-one is going to hire him unless the tells them why he walked away, he can quit and go public and he will be hailed as baseball's new Diogenes, and then still not be hired by anyone again. Or play it as it lies and hope to survive the levee break.

but Baez is behind him with very low OBP and a fairly high GB rate, so if Wenceel doesn't move him odds are about 50% Javy ends the inning on a DP (javy with a 47% GB rate). Plus Javy does seem to bear down with RISP (though it didn't happen here). Global stats are just that, global. The Tigers have a lot of players that are nowhere near median, so that weakens the predictive value of global expectancies. It comes down to what narrowing assumptions you want to make in mentally recalculating run expectancy for the options of the particular situation - hitters and pitcher. So on the other side you have that Romano is not a huge GB pitcher either. I know Hinch would still not have bunted, but I have less issue with it. Sometimes just the confidence level that a guy does or does not have in what he can do counts too.

there is a definite contrast between baseball and football on one hand and hockey and basketball on the other in terms how the games change in the playoffs. In baseball and football, if you build a team to win the most regular season games, you have probably built a playoff winner. Not nearly as true in basketball and hockey.

Alex Cora apparently being a ring leader it had to undercut Hinch as he didn't even have his staff presenting a unified stance. But of course then the question is why didn't he fire Cora? Maybe management wouldn't let him? Which maybe makes it ironic that Hinch has hired Joey Cora.

Another take away from Garko was him talking about 'in-zone swing and miss" as an increased focus when looking at pitching prospects. This is something that is generally missed in the media hype around prep/college pitchers which looks at outcomes without delving deeper. You could say it's exactly the kind of thing that would make the org today a little more skeptical of a Casey Mize in the draft. A good pitcher continues to get OOZ swing and miss even in the majors, but the amount available decreases at every level as a pitcher moves up, and the difference between in zone and out of zone swing and miss become more important at each step up. That was good stuff to hear.

Tigers aren't listless, they're just down in the count too often. I listened to Garko on the podcast. On the hitting side they have all kinds of facility for analyzing swings, balance, mechanics etc., very impressive. But I was still sort of put off by the way he seems to assume guys have perfect choice about whether they are swinging at strikes. Nothing he talked about related to pitch recognition other than just 'do it'. The other thing was watching the Jays and Guerrero Jr, and thinking about Sr, and watching Vierling homer on a pitch that was 6" inside, it made me wonder: There are players who are perfectly capable of hitting pitches outside the K zone - there is nothing magic about the K zone box in terms of whether a guy can reach and do damage on pitches outside it. Most guys can hit the ball best in a zone that parallels the bat path, so up and in in the zone is actually harder to hit than outside at the hips. Some guys can turn on pitches way inside like Vierling did in the 6th. Some guys can slap pitches well off the plate outside to the opposite field, some guys have great success dropping the bat head and golfing pitches at their ankles - especially in the center zone - often in to the stands (Mize has given up a lot of these). Should Vierling really not have swung at the pitch he homered on? I think maybe you want hitters to swing at what they can hit, and protect against what they can't, because that has to be more important than getting one more ball in the count, and their hot region is not necessarily going to line up with what the K zone is or particularly with what an ump is calling, so the uber focus on the zone still leaves me questioning. Again, it's clear that going forward they are not going to be interested in obtaining a player like Vlad Sr., who granted, was an outlier, so they are are going to force that it won't be an question in the org anymore, but there is always some cost in excluding potentially good players from consideration just because they do it differently. Of course the hope is what you gain in a system is greater than any costs it imposes.

One of the beat reporters said that Hinch in the post game said Perez bunted on his own. Hinch never bunts...

I don't think because fans question a manager's decisions in hindsight that means much - hell manager's question their own decisions in hindsight. The huge level of random drivers in baseball guarantee that close to half your close decisions will turn out wrong. You want a guy gone when he gets to where what he does is more than occasionally comes out wrong and moves into the region of impossible to explain (Ausmus) and/or he's obviously losing the team (Tram). AJ has strengths and weaknesses like any guy in any job. Just to hear him talk you can tell he loves managing pitching, the coaching of the pitchers and managing game time use. He shows very little of that excitement when he talks about hitting, so I hope he has other people on the staff that have the energy around hitting that AJ clearly does with pitching. But it is one of AJ's peculiarities that I guess he frowns on his coaches talking to the press (wants everything to go through him?) because we never hear much from any the Tigers coaches. This is a departure from a guy like Leyland -- where McClendon or Jeff Jones would often talk to reporters.

anyone can be wrong. How many people have had their lives saved because they didn't accept the diagnosis of their doc and got a 2nd opinion? 😱 (you may have guessed I just read the weekly missed diagnosis story in the paper....)

Lakeland wins 4-0 McGonigle 1/2, single + 2BB. Kreidler(as DH) 2/2 Clark - DNP

I suppose. Are there still enough 'believers' left in Russia 80yr later? The men who ran WWII for the CCCP were born before the revolution. Maybe they didn't like Stalin but they still thought they were building/defending something. How much is Russia today a world of grey men by comparison? If Putin can whip up WWII kinds of motivation to serve the Rodina, maybe he deserves more credit. Granted he certainly tries to in evoke the WWII mythos at every turn.

Purges may cut down on the graft -though if Putin just replaces the guys going out with more of his BFFs the new guys won't be any more honest, but graft aside, purges won't make them better, they will just freeze the org as everyone works harder to keep their head down and make sure they can't be blamed for anything. A low initiative org will asymtoptically approach a zero initiate one.

I had to break away from this game about midway, but if Marquez's K zone stayed the way it was in the early innings, that's a big piece of explaining this game. His K zone was a complete outlier on the tight side compared to what we've been seeing recently. It probably didn't affect mize all that much because he was missing badly with his offspeed stuff, but for the rest of the pitchers acclimated to getting an additional 6" on the wide side it must have been quite the shock.

only for one team?

Well, no real question is was time to go get Mize, what we get from Wentz remains in doubt.

Mize finally throws a slider for a strike - givesup a hit anyway.

Tigers can't get complacent though - if Marquez's strike zone stays like this Mize will give some up also.

shouldn't be true but with most umps you get more close calls when you miss badly less. Marquez not giving Kikuchi much outside either. Small zone - maybe a high scoring game before were done.