gehringer_2

Malloy is/has been, needs to stop being, a one trick pony, which is his walks supporting too much of his OPS, Keith is more of your normal kind of hitter.

not directly related to the war short term, but huge news out Israel that the Supreme Court has ruled the ultra-orthodox cannot be exempted from military service. This has big short and long term implications. Short term it further fractures Netanyahu's coalition, and long term is it going to seriously undercut recruitment of young men into the ultra-orthodox community. If this holds, I think for Israeli politics this is the equivalent of the SCOTUS reversing Citizen's United.

Not any particular Panthers fan, but I love the way they attack so fearlessly on defense, all pressure all the time, never conceding an inch of ice anywhere. Of course you have to have the speed to do it, but they've built the team for it.

the thing is, if you are going to build a lineup with speed and contact skills, it can't have terrible holes in it, you need everyone to to at least average OBP so you have a decent chance of stringing things together once in a while. If you score using a lot of power, that's less important. If you look at the Tigers now, you see Keith and Perez with low K, potential for decent averages, if they develop a little more walk skill they could play on a team like that. And if Parker could hit for a little more average, his walk rate is usually decent and he has speed so there is another guy that moves you in that direction - if he can hit enough.

Kreidler and Malloy have yet to give us any reason for optimism. Perez and Keith are doing enough to keep hope for them alive.

LOL - worst looking 6 on 5 you'll see in a long time.

Call it time served I guess.

Panthers did a phenomenal job of denying Edmonton any shots from inside the circles in the 2nd despite the Oilers commanding possession.

It's hard to tell from start to start whether to be encouraged or depressed by Mize's starts. It's really been a mized bag of good and bad pitches.

He even stopped and looked, and still decided to come home. You can’t make it up.

What's with the goofy schedule where the Tigers keep playing on Monday anyway? I hate it when they get blown out on a Monday and there aren't even any MiLB gamedays to follow.

I have no idea why, but ever since Mize came to the majors, he has had the problem that he can throw a sinker right at the bottom edge of the zone, which for most pitchers is a good pitch, but Casey gets hammered. Happens all the time. He has to keep to the inside/outside or his stuff low in the zone doesn't play.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

I don't like the position coaches being off limits. At this point he's been here long enough that everything Hinch says is response tested boilerplate, It would be a lot more interesting to hear what the coaches are working on with players, but that appears to be verboten under this regime.

We had some kick ass schools in Detroit once.

209 at AA? Harris might as well buy his ticket to the land failed GMs. That’s a NYC centric proposal if I ever heard one.

then again, Malloy's joy may also be short lived...

This. I think Piston fans are much too sanguine about Cade re-upping. Sure it may cost him a little money to win his freedom sooner, but I find it hard to believe a quality player with the option isn't looking hard at getting out of the worst org and owner in the league as fast as he can.

Probalby what keeps them going against the general exodus of their educated young people are businesses that keep restocking the pipeline of reasonably high performing people by transferring operations there to capture low wage costs.

I was completely crushed when they traded Bunning. It was one of first traumatic experiences of my childhood where the adults in my life failed me. And WTF good was a greek goddess supposed to do for a baseball team?

I'm not sure how you could ever do any kind of double blind study with validity. We do know that almost every left hander that does hit LHP tells a story of having drilled against it to a degree beyond what appeared to be any reason at the time so I think you can say with some confidence that you won't succeed if you don' try, but proving that trying improves the odds of succeeding across a wide cohort would not be easy. You could do the inverse - track whether guys that got put into platoon service got even worse against LHP when they when back to playing everyday, but I'm not sure that's the quite the same question as the developmental one.

Yup - that's what pitchers do. If they never flashed all-start stuff at all, they'd have never been on anyones radar to begin with. I think that's true more often then not for a pro athlete. The difference often is not the highest level they can achieve when everything is right, it's how high the lowest level they fall to is when everything is wrong. A lot of guys can be great occasionally, very few can be consistently great. We see the former and hope they turn into the later, but if they always did it would be too easy, right?.....🌈🦃

Looked through the gamecast. Pretty much everything he threw got hit, but mostly his FB, which started out with decent velo (~95) but by the fifth when he was lifted was down to ~92. The kid does not seem to be developing the endurance to go deep into games (though we can probably say that about Skubal as well, but less so). Sometimes Manning has enough life on his FB to be able to throw it without spotting it well, but not today - he threw a lot over the middle and a lot got hit.

Sure - bit everything tells you something. K rate can also be deceptive if taken too simply. As I noted yesterday, Riley has a higher K rate than most of the current Tigers roster but makes a lot more useful contact.

I agree that BA has been replaced by better measures of a hitter's *productivity* but BA still measures an important skill, especially for a young player who has not grown into his full power potential. Contact skill is still fundamental to every other productive thing that happens on offense. So to me a young hittter's ability to maintain a good average is still important. And I think that is born out by what we are seeing in Malloy. In the minors his excellent walk rate pumped up his projection by higher level measures, but his inability to put the bat on good pitches in the zone is a problem for him against MLB pitching.