gehringer_2

LOL - I guess I'm like Lee, I don't really care about the playoffs if my team isn't in them, the interest is strictly academic in terms of how you organize them. It goes back to what the league's objectives are in the end. You can play an unbiased tournament and just decide you are OK with that being what it is, that it will have next to nothing to do with determined the season's best team despite what the Media guys try to hype it into. Or you can try to devise that tourney what seeds teams to reward regular season performance. When all is said and done the latter may be a fool's errand, baseball just has too many randomizing inputs in a game for any reasonable length playoff format to actually determine a 'better' team with any regularity. So to me, that all adds up that the fair thing would be for there to be some greater rewards for your regular season performance separate from a ticket to a tournament that has no real value for determining anything about its entries. Maybe institute weighted scheduling like the NFL but the other way to reward good teams? Or just a pot of money for the players? Whatever.

It's really hard to say. So one way you could look at it would be to look at the variance in a team's winning percentage over some period of time - say wins/month, between different periods - IOW how up and down the team of interest is over the course of a season. You could then look at the difference between their average winning percentage and the variance in those numbers to get a finer predictor than a simple binomial on their overall record for the odds one team will defeat the other. But the problem is that over the course of the season players get hurt, other players join and leave the team, so 'team' is always a moving concept - and probably more so in baseball than other sports because of the length of the season and the mobility of minor league players. So it might be interesting to look at whether a team's winning percentage in it's last 50 games of the season is a better predictor of success in the playoff than their overall record. But then you remember the year the Rockies came into the playoff off something like a 20 game winning streak and promptly got bounced!

we'll have to disagree here. When it's tweedle dee and tweedle dum IMO it's all the more important to suss out the marginal difference and go with it.

No kidding. I think that is the real reason they schedule back-to-backs in the NBA - so the fatigue factor injects at least a little bit of randomness into the outcome against the better teams.

yup - he doesn't seem to be playing with the pace I think he can. But I also wonder is some of this isn't the way Lalonde is using him. I wasn't watching that close but it seems he's keeping his minutes down early in the game and then keeping him out there a lot at the end. That's probably a tough assignment for a young player. I'd almost like to see Lalonde say "Moritz, I'm going to hold you to 23 (or whatever) minutes a game, so don't worry about pacing yourself for longer minutes."

Things are always same until they are not, but a thousand years of Chinese culture still argues they will exhaust every avenue to get what they want by guile and pressure before they start an international war.

Yup. That's the $64 dollar question - can Chinese industry maintain excellence in a closed repressive society and if so how long? The Russian example should frighten Chinese business people.

LOL - The first refinery I spent time at still had some units with some pre-WWII equipment and if you knocked the gunk off some of the old valves you could still make out what was left of the embossed swastikas through the scale layers. Actually I would say you're more likely to find lower quality in South American or South Asian goods than Chinese anymore. I don't think you can buy a better laptop than a Lenovo and they aren't priced at the bottom of the market either. iPhones too for that matter. That's why Biden worries today. Nobody needed to care when the Chinese could only make poor quality stuff.

I've seen Sieder force his man to the outside on a breakaway rush where all Husso had to do was handle the shot from the outside and the shooter still beat him. That's not real stellar goal tending either - so we'll see. I think the job is open to anyone that steps up to claim it.

right. the 95% goal of 2nd and long is to get to 3rd and manageable. If a 5 yrd run gets you to 3rd and 3 that was 100% a successful call- esp for a team that runs the ball well enough that the D cannot assume pass at that down and distance.

this is true, but don't underestimate the fact that is is driven by shoppers willing to drive across town to save a dime on a product. Don't mistake effect for cause. To a substantial degree, consumers in America have gotten the market they demanded. Americans by and large won't pay the increment for marginally higher quality goods, so they don't get them. The the smaller market for the higher quality product then drives up its relative price because economy of scale is lost.

Delmon played parts of 2 seasons in AAA as a 19-20 yr old and hit 315, which is 25 pt better than Malloy as a 23 yr old. The difference is that Delmon never walked and Malloy does, so Malloy's OBP/OPS is higher. But as Edman pointed out, *if* walks are less available to Malloy at MLB level, then batting average may count more relatively when trying to compare across different pitching levels. It's a lot of variables, which is why performance level drops across leagues are hard to predict!

the other thing is that 15% of Russia's population is in Moscow/StP. People talk about Russia's population advantage over Ukraine, but it you are trying to exempt 15% of your population from service, they lose a chunk of that advantage, plus the general health and educational quality of recruits from the hinterlands is also lower.

its a fair point - not all MiLB OPS that are equal are equivalent. All hitters have strengths and weaknesses to some degree, but you can still do well in the minors with weaknesses that will doom you in the majors while another guy may do less well in the minors but have a lower drop off on promotion because he is less exploitable by higher level pitching. Maton cannot hit offspeed, C. Stewart couldn't catch up to MLB velo, etc. This is the kind of thing that the good evaluators in successful orgs were able to recognize even before they had all the metrics. And then there are some guys that drop off when they are called up and you get the impression it's more that they have more trouble getting over their rookie nerves. I'd guess Paredes was an example of that - but he got over it. Maybe Torkelson was in that class as well. In '22 it always seemed to me that his biggest problem was that he had to get over being tentative. I think he got better mostly as he began to trust himself to grip it and rip it. Makes you wonder how many guys maybe had a good hitter in there somewhere but never got the rope to get there in the majors. You can't blame the teams that much, you can't wait on a guy forever, but you still wonder.

Jordan has no policy chops (Ryan), he hasn't spent years raising money for his conference (McCarthy, Scalise), has no tact or grace with people (Boehner), and has zero skill as a legislator. I have to believe that every day that goes by before he wins the job, the more the reservations of his opponents will harden.

If a guy hits it changes a lot of possibilities. Now it's certainly granted that the bat we were seeing at the end of 2023 may not show up again next Spring. That's a better than even money chance with any minor leaguer who had a hot streak. But if it does you never want to say never.

I think this is true generally -- that hitting is much less well understood than pitching. From an analysis standpoint, pitching is 100% mechanics. If the pitcher holds the ball a certain way and uses certain muscles to apply certain forces, the result is 100% predictable/reproducible in terms of the result. So while the task may be hard to accomplish, you at least know exactly what it is: get the hand and arm to go from points A to points B. The Tiger coaching staff seems to have this stuff down. But mechanics is only one piece of hitting, which also includes a set of perceptual and reflex issues that fall under the general heading of 'pitch recognition' that are no better understood than most of what the brain does. You may be able to help a hitter change his swing to increase bat speed or shorten his path to the ball, but the level of certainty that any change in swing mechanics improves hitting performance or even effects it in the right way for any particular hitter isn't very good. It's a time problem. Time is no constraint for a pitcher, he does everything he does on his own schedule. But time dominates all considerations for a hitter. He has no control over it and can only react to it and that part of his problem is not one that coaches have many tools to help with.

Two Tigers combine for a 7-2 W. Jobe 4 IP 5H 2R 1ER 2BB 4K HR Flores 3IP 4H 0R, BB 2K

LOL - I'm plenty happy they won, but I'd be happier still if they started looking more like a potential playoff team. They are at the point where they are much more fun to watch than 2-3 years ago, but that just means the expectations have been whetted. This team still needs a lot of work. Other than Larkin's line they looked slow - the rest of them will need to skate (read "work") harder to keep up with all the teams that skate as well or better than Tampa. And I think folks that have bought the company line that the D has been upgraded in a major way are going to be disappointed. I expect it won't be the same 7 on the roster by mid-season.

Drinking game around how many times Boras says "no-hitter"?

Wings still way too soft closing out points in their own end, and I'd love to know Lalonde's thinking on Veleno being out their on the 6 on 5. He was making it look more like 6 on 4...... Petry could have cost them the game twice late but the refs swallowed their whistle for him. Lalonde says the D is now 7 deep. I'd say so far it's more like 7 middle of the pool.

Everybody gets a pass on one bad game, but Williams hasn't looked like much through the 1st 3 Qs.

Part of it was they never asked Brady to do too much - whether that was because they didn't see the capability or because it wasn't there yet is a question lost in time. Rick Leach was never a great QB. He was a good runner and he was Bo's boy and was going to play no matter how well he did or didn't or could or couldn't do. To the point that Bo insisted on playing him through the end of his last season when his shoulder was so torn up he literally could not throw the ball 10 yds. But that just meant Bo had all the more reason not to call any passes!

Hard to know if the the service time angling by both sides is going to produce long term rancor or if both side just accept it as playing the CBA correctly for each. Could certainly go either way. We might also get a little insight into how harshly the team takes it when players push their prerogatives with how fast ERod does or doesn't end up with a different team.....😇😖

I haven't watched Williams so I won't argue how good he may be, but JJ is at least the best all around QB we've seen at UM since maybe Harbaugh himself. And that Brady may be the NFL GOAT doesn't count as he never showed that at UM.