gehringer_2

Zach having a very interesting day. Every which way but loose but he makes that catch.

Carpenter only hitting greased baseballs today.

Tork Ks looking for another perfect pitch.

Israel has always said that if you kill our people, there is nothing we care about you hiding behind that will stop us from coming after you. This is a basic premise of the position they take in a hostile neighborhood. It's a piece of their deterrence posture, just like a Trident submarine is for us. We can express our own scruples about it but we shouldn't be surprised by it or think it represents any change in long standing Israeli policy.

I think the the guys in the booth have decided they'd just rather not cover this game.

Meadows with better ABs today but no cigar.

Casey still fights it with men on base. Doesn't like pitching from the stretch?

Mostly GBs. Rangers just putting the ball in play and letting good things happen.

TIgers 1, McKinstry 1

Tigers trying hard to give the run back.

McKinstry is not Javy

what was the predicted BA for that one? about .950?

LOL - baseball. Tork and Carpenter crush the baseball. Team gets nothing. Walk, ground ball and misplay and they are on the board.

and the year before - and that is where the bite is. In a randomly distributed world, half the teams in any given year should come out of the chute doing a little better than their long term average. Make some allowance for weather and all that but I'm waiting for the team to proves we are seeing noise and not trend.

And I give him props for playing hard and not complaining, but yeah, the trade was a desperation shot that fell way short. The rest of the team was still too far away for Blake to get them anywhere meaningful.

OK OK! I admit it, this has been the most enjoyable Wings team to watch since Dats and Z. 🙆‍♂️ Looking back the 'tease' was Lyon playing out of his mind for about a month that let us start believing the team was better than it is. I admit I got sucked into higher expectations even after posting in late Jan or Feb that they were way too dependent on what Lyon was doing and that he couldn't possible keep it up.

I don't argue that a certain set of protocols have existed in the Western World about things that 'weren't done' because of a longer term realization that as bad as war is, things could be worse with no rules at all. The problem is that the your garden variety Islamic radical has already thrown all those rules out the window with the use of civilian terror, civilian hostages, non-uniformed combatants, human shield warfare, drilling military capability into civilian infrastructure, etc, etc. There is a paradigm in game theory where the best course is to hold to the rules when your adversary first violates them, but if the behavior continues, you win by meeting fire with fire. The US has pretty much always followed that course in wartime, so we are in no position to criticize Israel for doing the same.

TBF, not only this spring. Greene, Tork, Rogers, and even Meadows were productive last season once they got on track. So there has been regression from a bar set last season, not just in ST. You can always chalk up a little bit to the transition from FLA to cooler weather - but it's pretty nice today - so we'll see.

I think this is what they were thinking - some of the ballistics would get through and maybe Iran even thought the Israel would try to minimize that as it would be seen as Iron Dome failure. But I disagree that the embassy actually crossed any practical line in the light of Oct 7. It was basically a similar scenario to that we went to all out war in Afghanistan over. Oct 7 couldn't have happened without Iran. So from Israel's standpoint, they are already as much at war with Iran as they they could get. And the fact is that in terms of proportionality in this series, Israel remains the more restrained party. The embassy attack killed two civilians, the rest were military officers in an armed service actively engaged against Israel. Oct 7 casualties were mass and civilian, and the missile attack casualties would have been mass. Again, no moral or diplomatic credit to Iran for failing.

Or it could go like it did with the Wings when Ilitch brought back Yzerman. There was a show of solidarity with Holland but Kenny pretty immediately made his own exit. The difference being that Holland still had enough credibility in the league to land another gig. Does Weaver?

Each was an escalation. Iran attacks Israel via proxies maintaining a level of removal. Israel attacks an Iranian embassy - technically sovereign territory, but still with a level of practical removal. Iran responds with a direct attack on Israel at a level that certainly would normally elicit a formal declaration of war by classic international law rules. The missile attack was easily as large as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I don't give Iran any credit for it being a tactical failure -- even if a significant degree of tactical failure may be been a strategic intent.

However, I think we are fast getting to the point where the first assumption for all images, video, and soon voice, that comes over web is that they are inauthentic. The goose that laid the golden egg will have been plucked and cooked, and we will be back to word of mouth from people you trust as the only source of believable data, available possibly along with a few signed encrypted sources vetted over long experience.

If we follow that logic do we arrive at the conclusion that they are not actually protestors but provocateurs? Maybe the distinction can be subtle, but I'd argue it exists.

The whole concept behind conventional protest is turned upside down in the digital age. A protest can do one of two things - it can raise the visibility of an issue, or it can demonstrate there are powerful numbers behind a movement that TPTB need to reckon with. In the digital age, protesting for visibility is almost defunct - all issues are visible today. The people that want to support you can find you and your issue without you being on the street. That part is nearly superfluous today. The mass demonstration movement still has power, but it's only very rare issues/movements can bring the hundreds of thousands-> millions of people out (a la MLK in DC '63) that will actually move a needle in US politics. So I would agree, small numbers of people being obstructive on the street are mostly doing it to satisfy their own need to virtue signal, they aren't actually accomplishing anything.

It was interesting to hear Carlos Pena say he believed you drew MORE walks by being more aggressive swinging at strikes. Carlos talked about young players "looking over their shoulders, worried about having too quick ABs". I have thought in general that under the Hinch regime, the young Tigers hitters are too reluctant to swing at strikes early in the count, esp the 1st pitch, if they are not perfect - thus getting themselves into a hole they never get out of in the AB. The Tiger mantra seems to be that you are going to get your pitch in every AB if you wait for it. No, you are not. MLB pitchers are better than that, and if you are waiting for perfect you are just going to end up 0-2 a lot and BAs from 0-2 are pretty dismal, which is pretty much what we are seeing. Hitters have to resign themselves to hunting pitches that are les than ideal when the pitcher has shown his ability to throw the ball where he wants to. The other idea was to drive pitch counts, but so many teams have deep strong bullpens today that chasing starters doesn't even get you much advantage. Now in point of fact, I think they were more aggressive early last night against Lorenzen, but to Casimir's point, they couldn't barrel much up.