gehringer_2

the tiger self professed approach to hitting has always seemed to me to be optimized for hitting bad pitching. So you get it and you clean up and struggle the rest of the time. The DBacks pitchers didn't ever have the sense to pitch Baez outside.

good to see those stern words from AJ have settled Lange down..... 😰

will we ever see a hitter come to the Tigers and have better than his average year?

score two, give'em right back

Carpenter had some decent pitches to hit, couldn't barrel any up. But he kept the line moving.

his little hot streak has pretty much petered out. He just swung under a middle middle batting practice change-up, not as bad as not running it out, but close!

Witt showed you the difference between controlling the strike zone and defending the strike zone.

As Jim Price would say, this team has its daubers down.

there again is what is wrong with the tiger approach. tork took two fastballs for called strike looking for something better, but then ends up topping a change-up because he has to protect with two strikes. Especially with all the umps in the league calling pitches outside for strikes, it's just too suicidal to just hope for mistakes.

And that is exactly one of the things that has obsoleted the idea of forcing guys to throw more pitches to get teams to their bullpens - bullpens are pretty damn good today, and deep enough that no-one has to go twice through the order. Maybe if you are lucky in three games you tire out a BP for your opposition's next series - great victory there.

I have no problem with the way they moved him up to AAA. You really can't do much coaching when a guy is at 900+ OPS, which is where Tork was through AA. But they let him out of AAA just based on his power without him ever proving himself as a more rounded hitter (he hit only 234 in AAA) and that probably was a mistake. You may have great power but if your bat to ball skill isn't better than 234 in AAA you are going to have some struggles in the majors. Which has been amply proved. (I would note that in the transition to statistics like OPS and RC, that are better measures of a hitters *productivity*, it should be lost that plain old BA is still the measure of bat to ball skill.)

That was Hinch's view at one point last year (as per a recorded interview available somewhere for someone ambitious enough to find it, which wouldn't be me. 😉 ) That could well be. But I believe a couple of things which probably run against the grain to the general view: The first is that I don't think hitters pay all that much attention to coaching if it's not coaching they sought out because it happened to make sense - or 'click' for them. Examples would be JD, Carpenter. Every hitter knows what a fine balance it is that allows him to succeed at all and I think they are all (very rightly) reluctant to change much. But what they can decide -apart from the actual mechanics of hitting, is what kind of hitter they want to be. Cabrera is a case in point. When he was still a great hitter, he always made a conscious decision to play for the RBI with RISC. That was a choice, and it led to him consistently being near the top in RBI% in baseball. He could have swung for the fences all the time and put up bigger OPS and HR numbers in a career, but HE thought getting those guys in from 2B was more important to his team. That is the kind of thing is not really coach driven, it's not a matter of hitting mechanics, it's a matter of your sense of game awareness and playing for your team. I cite this because IMHO, right now this is Tork's biggest problem. He is too worried about crushing the ball 500 feet and not about those one at a time base runners and RBI that would be the difference in those 1 run games. Now it's possible that that is the vibe he get from management - if so they should stop. But I don't know if that's true or if it's just Tork himself who can't bring himself to play the best game for his team instead of for himself. Now, all that said, he took the ball to RF twice last night, and if that is the beginning of a shift in his approach, I'll take everything above back. But we'll see if it continues or not.

no question - and probably no different with writers today.

What can you say? He was an easy guy to dislike.

IDK, given the wastage rate for pitchers you do have to pick a lot of them to keep up. It also goes to the central question of projection accuracy. I think the Tiger philosophy going back to Dombrowski was that young pitcher measurables are better and more reliable than those available for young hitters, so your chances of hitting with an 20 yr pitcher who throws upper 90s are better than with a 20 yr old hitter putting up a 900 OPS against 20 yr old pitchers who are miles from MLB quality. I don't know if in the end that's a supportable theory or not, but the Tigers have built a pretty good pitching staff, though it's fair to say they may have gone overboard and left themselves poorly balanced. And I guess you could say that conversely, their skill at picking hitters was poor enough that maybe they shouldn't have spent any more draft capital there!.....

there was nothing wrong with giving him a shot there given that his college coaches thought he was a good fielder, but the Tigers sure oversold it and that is probably part of why.

LOL - and Ovechkin - your active scoring leader is a "Euro" who is hardly some kind of dainty player.

and Max with a HR in that game. 8 RBI between the two of them.

TBF Mize has a 97 mph FB and at least once in a while shows signs of being able to spin it. But that's why I did say only for a while. This summer is put up or shut up time for Mize to prove he has a future. He needs innings to redevelop command, and an occasional misstep is maybe to be expected, but he has to start showing steady progress and turning in more good starts than bad - and in 6 of 9 outings he's given up 2 ER or less - so while tonight was a fail, it's too soon to panic about him.

When I'm as depressed about the team as I am now I'll follow gameday instead of watching live. You actually get more detailed data and the extra level of remove eases the frustration. They all get DVR'd so if there is miracle comeback I haven't missed it.

well, Al Avila 'considered' for 3rd, and his ASU coaches did claim he could/would have played 3rd but that Gage Workman was playing 3rd who was already a SS level fielder - so they didn't and we'll never know if he might have been able to master it while still young enough for the change to be easier. So in 2020 he was a 3b in some people's minds, but not so much ever in reality.

In defense of Mize, the other choice for a team looking for a pitcher that year was Brady Singer. If the Tigers had taken him they'd be ahead of where they are with Mize, but I think you can still argue Mize has more total career potential - at least for a little while longer.....

Riley with 2 ~100mph EVs. Also nothing to show but good sign.

lost cause and he has nothing to show for it but Tork is going to RF tonight and hitting it hard. If he'd keep that up in just moderate doses I have to believe it will help him turn his season around. He'll get pitches to turn on when hits some of the ones he can't the other way.

That is the risk of taking a college pitcher on the strength of game results achieved with breaking stuff. Major league hitters are not going to swing at most of the breaking ball out pitches a guy gets in college. When Casey got tothe MLB that great split turned into a just a ball that hitters spit on most of the time. And suddenly the mediocrity of the FB is revealed as a problem. But he does have plenty of arm, and if any coachinig staff can help him get good shape on his pitches it is this one.