gehringer_2

9 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Hmmm ... and the box scores from all seven games from April 8 to May 8 call bull**** on your box score.

LOL and the the beauty for Wentz on Sunday is that he only got charged with one run.  Reliever performance evaluation is interesting because getting lit up once can skew a relievers numbers for months, when as a manager you might well prefer a guy who is lights out 9 days and gets lit up on the 10th to a guy that lets in one inherited runner every time out but has better seasonal numbers.....

15 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Maybe they don't want to put a better product on the field. Maybe they want to lose instead. 😒

I don't doubt for a second that there are teams who have decided: "Better to take whatever record comes at  ~$100 million spent and turn a profit, than win with a >$250M payroll and lose money"  Baseball has moved toward some revenue sharing, but the winning incentives are still very non-uniform for baseball teams as compared to NFL teams.

3 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I am shocked that Trump would agree to that

Maybe Haley's continuing 20%s have him nervous.

18 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Don't look now, but our best reliever is Joey Wentz, which serves me right for agitating for his release for a couple of years now. 😁

In 14-2/3 innings, he's striking out 28.4% of hitters, getting more ground balls while limiting fly balls, getting swings outside the zone and misses on most of them, hammering hitters with strike one, and limiting barrels. This has resulted in a sterling 1.23 ERA, good for a 32 ERA- that's not entirely luck, since his FIP- is 60, which is in the 88th percentile for qualifying relievers.

tl;dr: Wentz good.

Hmm- The box score from Sunday just called to say "Liars, dammed liars, and statisticians!"   

3 minutes ago, slothfacekilla said:

 

 

which raises a question: Is Elmer still on the radar or is the view that he has plateaued short of the NHL?

13 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

Not sure how showing a little respect to a Vet attending a sporting event (Chas's example) turned into invading Iraq. So when the frail old Vietnam Vet stands to be recognized at an event be sure to turn your back or better yet spit on them. I say spit because when my Dad flew back in 69 he was met by "protesters" who spit on him and called him a baby killer. Helluva welcome home party! 

I guess thats what makes America great we can defend our opinions or disagree with others and still respect each other. My kid wants to join the Marines when he turns 18 that will make him the 5th generation of our family to be potentially sent to a war zone. No one in my family has graduated college (Daughter is college Jr so almost there!) or paid their homes off before they died. White lower middle class and dang proud!

 

But I do have a problem with people like reactionary  NFL owners wrapping themselves in the flag by fawning over vets in their venues to try to polish their 1%er PR while being generally destructive political forces towards the general welfare and even those Vets. That's not the Vets' fault of course, but it makes me cringe at a sporting event when it happens because of the subtext of what is really going on.

2 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I'm wondering what such a debate will even look like. Trump has no incentive to follow any rules, so what kinds of controls will be in place to stop him from simply yammering over Biden and shouting him down? How do they get Trump to agree to any decorum? Because if he acts out and gets completely out of control, and moderators can't or won't enforce any sanctions on him in the moment, then what's Biden's recourse? Shout back at Trump? Get in a fistfight with him? Walk off the stage? I feel as though any response along these lines would hurt Biden far more than Trump. I assume they've already game-planned this out enough that they can make the offer in the first place, but I'm having trouble seeing how the inevitable breakdown during the debate will benefit Biden.

I'm skeptical any debates will happen.

and MSM reported remains ridiculous. Huge headline in WaPo this morning from W.VA that GOP chances of holding the Senate "SKYROCKET!" with the Jim Justice win. Sorry, no, the probability of the Dems holding W.Va didn't change at all last night, they changed the day Manchin announced his retirement and nothing last night changed anything at all. The Justice win was a completely foregone conclusion.

34 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Sometimes I do wonder whether, if Mike Pence were murdered by that mob, would it have broken the MAGA fever that still grips this country? Would it have been a bridge too far for 80% or 90% of the people who are still MAGA today? Or would the Trump cabal have successfully muddied who did the murdering, pinning it on Antifa and BLM (or “BLT” as some Washington Journal might have called them), and caused more chaos than we have seen since? I think that might have gone either way 50-50.

In all likelihood the detail would be just murky enough that it would have changed nothing   - a scenario where he went down the stairwell head first and one side maintains he was pushed/murdered and the other than he just tripped and fell so the prosecution is a which hunt....etc., etc.,,,,,,,

49 minutes ago, pfife said:

NPR this morning was talking about how they maynot have fully linked it to trump sufficiently yet.   Made me concerned when I heard it.

IDK - The link to Trump seems the most solid thing in the case. The weakest link in the case is proving the payments can't be construed as something other than a campaign expense.  The financial records are only fraudulent if the money was spent "for the campaign." If a juror thinks he would have spent the money to suppress the story for personal reasons anyway rather than campaign reasons, the premise of the case collapses. That seems like most effective appeal to make to the jury: That to Trump the money was small potatoes and he would have done it anyway even if he weren't running for office.

33 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Young fans don't like baseball because it's boring compared to sports like basketball and football.  There is no way to make it as exciting as other sports without ****ing it up so much the fans they already have won't like it anymore.  I think this is why they have always tried appeal to older fans by stressing history and tradition.  You can't please everyone.  

right - as a spectator sport it has never provided the drama or football or the speed of hockey and that's why to me it comes down to the experience. I enjoy basketball as a spectator sport though I never played it at all.  I have a hard time imagining I would ever watch a baseball game if I hadn't played at it so much. The appeal (to me) is watching a SS snare a liner and knowing exactly what that felt like, or knowing the  unique feeling when you have hit the ball dead on. I can't bring that level of 'intimacy' to watching any other sport - so the bar for those sports to be interesting to me as a spectator is higher, and they provide that in a way that baseball really didn't have to for it's 1st 100 years or so. Or maybe another analogy would be that I think musicians themselves are the core group of jazz fans - because they are better able to experience what an improv player is doing at more levels, while the rest of us can only hear it.

38 minutes ago, buddha said:

the thing i like about you is that you have an opinion on everything!  lol.  🙂

what else is a message board for than to swap opinions/speculation? 🤷‍♂️

I do think about baseball more than any other sport though because to me the way baseball has changed and evolved is such a marker for how the larger society has changed. I think it is - at least was, more significant than other sports in that regard because it was so much a part of the culture. Some played football, some basketball, a few hockey, but up to and including the boomers everyone played baseball (and/or their girlfriends came and watched). So it was more a common point of shared experience than almost anything else. But that pretty much ended with the boomers and maybe a few Gen Xers, since we were the last cohort to grow up in that sand-lot youth culture that had existed for maybe 80 yrs prior. Everything changes, that's given, but as it happens to things you are so close to it is hard to look away.

33 minutes ago, 1984Echoes said:

Clark 1-4, 1 BB, .250 BA, .693 OPS

Hit and walk seems to be Max's day at the office.

25 minutes ago, gkelly said:

Baseball has done a horrible job of trying to gain younger children to be fans.  I grew up in the 90s and played ball in high school but I had zero desire to watch MLB.  It probably had a lot to do with Mike Ilitch trotting out the worst team in the league for 15 straight years.  The last few years feel like the beginning of Mike Ilitch's reign as the owner (15 years of a garbage product) and it's going to end up having the same effect on the younger audience.  

there are a lot things killing baseball for youth but the biggest is just that they don't play it, and that I think, is due largely to factors way beyond anyone in the sports control - namely low suburban housing density and small families. You need a bunch of kids closely matched in age to have any chance at a sand lot baseball culture - and it just doesn't exist in many places in the US today. I grew up in a city with lots of 4 kids to a household houses on 1/8 acre lots. We could raise 15 to 20 kids across only a couple of grades to play ball everyday after school. We had 4 diamonds at our Jr high, and 3 more within 1/2 mile of there. There were all full most days. Then we all grew up and played intramural and city league softball. That's where MLBs current fanbase came from. And I doubt that is ever coming back. So all they are left with is trying to make the game more of a spectacle (ie. the HR), to make it entertaining for people who don't have the experience based vicarious identification to what is happening on the field. But it will be a different kind of fan with a different kind of relation to what they are watching.

Just now, Toddwert said:

we all now he sucks but the trump card is always going to be how much they owe him

did you see the attendance? Pathetic. There is money to be made by facing up to sunk costs and putting a better product on the field.

9 minutes ago, kdog said:

"Bad results, good process."

I call oxymoron. There is no such thing as good process that produces consistently bad results. In pro sports the process can have no intrinsic value apart from its results.

9 minutes ago, SoCalTiger said:

That's good point. Wishful thinking gone ugly. Having said that it's hard to understand just how terrible he has become.

I think the single most needful mindset in a sports general manager is the ability to see his own players objectively. There was no good reason to believe that a 30 yr old hitter with a sub 600 OPS, poor pitch recognition and a long swing who was not injured, was likely to be a better hitter on his return a year older - he put the evidence in front the Tigers over 550 PA  and they pretty much decided to ignore it. The Mets were ancient history by last October.

6 minutes ago, Dtrain72 said:

This is why I'm out on Scott Harris...a GM with any standards and integrity would tell ownership that he's gonna fire Harvy out of cannon...and if ownership doesnt like it, than said GM with standards and integrity says "whelp, it's either him or me...Scott's just going along to get along and cashing a paycheck.  It's neat that the Tiger are now the Chris Illitch version of the William Clay Ford Lions.

Problem is Harris didn't find a SS to fill the hole even knowing that the single most probable outcome of Javy's terrible 2023 would be a terrible 2024. Management by wishful thinking? And don't bother mentioning Kreidler, whose most probable outcome based on his history would be right were he is, the DL.

The best HR hitters go about 1 HR in 15 AB. A decent hitter carries a better than 250 BA, which is one in 4. If you are playing for more than a single to get Riley in and extend the game you are playing to lose. This is not an intelligent batting team - whether it's the players or the management, something needs to change.

2 minutes ago, SoCalTiger said:

took really needed to get Greene to third

yup. Hinch is channeling his inner Earl Weaver - he apparently wants the guys playing for the long ball all the time. Problem is he doesn't have a HR hitting team.

Wenceel for hero tonight?

this isn't going to last long.

walk the man and set up the force. But Hinch won't

Riley on a 1 for 24

the umps taketh away, the ump giveth back. Total gift to Canha