gehringer_2

If Jung has been sent down for Baddoo that may change again.

I haven't seen Akil play in a while so I don't know if he's changed anything. Torkelson said he *slowed down* his swing as part of his adjustments to make more contact - you wonder if that might not be something Baddoo should think about - he always had such a blindingly fast swing, but it didn't find the ball very often.

Exhale. Cody says Jung's locker is gone - which is usually pretty solid tea-leaf reading. If so then it was all about Jung needing a reset and nothing involving other players.

they said yesterday that Malloy wasn't going to see much playing time in the next two weeks with all RH pitching in the offing so maybe they decided to swap him for a LH bat with occasional (very) power. Either that or Riley hurt himself on a dive again.

very JS Bach-ish. ++

To me the tragedy is that I think Shep could have been very good. I've heard him be better in different circumstances. He just refused to be his best self. I can't figure why. Could he not get over being starstruck sitting next to a personal hero? Was he hung up on the idea that you can't know as much about the game as a player if you didn't play? That's nonsense, You may know different things but would Shep seriously argue a Bob Costas doesn't know more baseball than most players? Maybe he was afraid to fail being himself so he was comfortable hiding behind being strictly the PBP guy and leaving all the rest to his color man. But if that's your take, you really shouldn't be there. And that's where it ended.

well, Langford is 4 WAR LF and we have a 5 WAR LF, so he has to go to RF, which displaces Carpenter and/or Vierling (~3 WAR). So maybe you trade a player, but corner OF is not where the Tigers have much weakness that Langford would have been a big marginal upgrade. OTOH, Max Clark is three yrs younger and should a big piece of the pipeline as we start losing current players to cost/FA. Assuming Max turns into a good pro. If you are in "all in" win once ASAP you definitely take Langford. If you don't want to be the Orioles and have your window close before you ever got through it, maybe you take Clark.

and if the gov is going to be responsible for picking private sector managers, the grift potential is off the charts. That's why the Dems have been shooting down repeated GOP proposals for privately managed gov investment vehicles since Reagan.

I was at 5th 3rd the night he threw 12K in 6 IP. You never know how much of that will translate against MLB hitters, but they definitely want to find out.

One thing I do like about Benetti is that he's willing to toss an allusion out there that might not work, and just let it be. When Riley hit the single that Abreu botched, his line was (as close as I remember) "Last year the Tigers went to Williamsport and now the Red Sox have brought Williamsport to Comerica." That's a brilliant baseball line even though most(?) of the audience probably missed it. And then even better, a few minutes later when Sweeney hit his home run, Dirk's picked up the thread with "Riley hit a Little League HR, now Sweeney hits a big boy HR", which probably turned the light on for a lot of the people who missed the initial reference without ever making any belabored explanation. That's awesome, subtle, clever teamwork.

Not so much here. Her delivery is OK, but her remotes are too wordy, the form too repetitious (I talked to......), the information imparted generally too trivially obvious, and too long. A remote needs to insert in a pause in the action, not trample two or three consecutive plays - not that they care much about that anyway with the other in-game interviews they do. That said - she's better than Johnny-I've-got-the-giggles-Kane.

As the team gets better, the ratings expectation on the broadcast rise with them and if the guys in the booth aren't cutting it, they are not going to get the kind of long leashes they got when the team was losing 100 games and no-one expected much. I think it's pretty clear from his rapid rise to the top of the heap that Dirks has been the ratings star of the group. He can get a little OT, but he gets down into the weeds of how the game is played better than anyone we've heard in a while.

Agree the wrap around programming is terrible. I would guess its all about capturing advertising revenue bump from the game audience even if most people are tuned out and just waiting for Hinch's postgame. But RE:Shep - no he was another level of bad. At least Benetti participates in occasional intelligent conversation about baseball instead of acting like a moron the way Shep did. Of course Shep does know baseball, you would just never know it listening to his broadcast. But he choose to do it that way - why? Who knows? He still thinks it was the right way to do his broadcast despite that it cost him the job. Carlos Monarez even wrote a column defending Shep where he talked about his decision to act dumb even in the face of the fact that the biggest complaint about the broadcast was that all he ever did was 'interview' his color man instead of having a conversation with him. Carlos apparently doesn't understand good game coverage either. Two people both bringing insight to the broadcast are always better than one.

MCS commented in the game thread about Baltimore's rebuild flaming out. That's the advice they didn't take. The one thing I worry about with Harris is that he may not as draft centric enough for pitchers.

It's only fitting in that it matches the stupidity of the voters that elected him believing his policies would be good for them.

Best news for the week. Tigers are going to need starting pitching depth before this season is over.

LOL - American Management: I worked for a fortune 100 that was horizontal integration of a bunch of very successful subsids. The divisions all had tons of long standing market cred and goodwill tied up in their names. The mothership in Houston couldn't wait to homogenize it all under their own logo - to prove how smart they were I guess. Company ended being partially dismembered and sold at least twice after that brilliance.

Hindsight being 20/20, using Chapman in regulation instead of extras was a waste because you need those K's a lot more starting with a man on 2b.

does this refer to all rebuilding, or just rebuilding that accompanied by a zoning change request? The City of LA normally processes tens of thousands of ordinary building permits in a year.

three teams in the Central have better records than the Yankees. Love it.

It's a thumb guard. They are actually fairly common around the league once you start to notice them.

they should have tried the last one.....

Humid air is less dense.

Andy says Boston has one more BP arm.

Just thinking - don't let down after getting the two tough bats - and bang.