gehringer_2

1 minute ago, chasfh said:

OK, let’s jack a quick bomb and go home!

sounds good to me

LOL - this game could be over in 1:50 if someone had scored.

45 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

There are multiple Twitter feeds devoted to nothing but missed umpire calls.  It’s crazy looking at how many different umps get highlighted nightly.  It’s not just a few guys that are the problem.  It’s almost all of them.  It’s gotten so bad that only a few guys aren’t missing multiple big calls every time they get behind the plate.  

the thing is, the league is completely aware - all the data goes to the league, so you have to believe this is what the league wants. I can't imagine why, but it is what it is. If the Umps were being rung up for these zones in their internal evals, they wouldn't be calling them out there. And the give away is that it's not just misses at random, it's giving away the outside pitch in particular, so I don't believe it's general incompetence, though there is plenty of that. We are getting somebody's idea what they want.

another game with an ump calling strikes half a foot outside and nobody can score. Batters have no chance. These guys are pitching well but I'd wager with ABS this would not be a  scoreless. game.

42 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

I agree it shouldn’t matter but look at the video above as well this one from last month below.  Lots of terrible misses on the outside.    These catchers have gotten so good at framing that it’s hard to see them move the glove.  It happens in a blink of an eye and the ump is easily misled. 
 

 

I'm sure some are more than others - which is the problem. But you also see umps not give away the outside and it's the same catchers behind the dish, so there is certainly an ability level to not being conned.

18 minutes ago, romad1 said:

The bottom line is they make their money on wordl

Newspapers used to make their money on want-ads, which had nothing to do with the news either, so maybe appropriate.

Haberman has not been the NYTs finest hour - but if IRCC, she started out as a freelancer - another symptom of a system making choices without money to back them.

I'm fine with people lobbying the Times to change their coverage - I think a lot it has been silly, breathless, vapid, but people do have to remember that the bottom line matters there as much as at Fox, they write what sells to their readership. If you are selling writing that is always the bottom line.

1 hour ago, Hongbit said:

I wonder if they need to think about making catchers framing the ball illegal.    

Framing may matter at the the top/bottom of the zone, but any umpire worth his salt should not be influenced by where the mitt ends up inside/outside - he should have the line of the pitch judged before it's in the glove and it's mostly the outside pitch that umps are giving away - so I don't really think it's framing. I agree framing probably makes life harder for the ump, and when they first started doing it I remember saying the umps should tell the catcher that if he has to move the ball after catching it I'm just assuming it must have been a ball. That would have put an end to framing before it ever got off the ground. Water under the proverbial bridge today....

1 minute ago, chasfh said:

So the complaint by Bill Kristol is that the thing he thinks should have been page one news didn't make page one? Maybe he should campaign for editorship of the Times so he can make those decisions going forward, then.

I don't know whether the problem is so much the Times is totally in the bag for Trump, which I guess is Kristol's conclusion, than it is that Trump continuously unleashes such a firehose of nonsense all day every day nonstop that it would look unhinged of the Times to put all of it on page one every day.

 

I guess the Times can view itself as having certain public service obligations - but they also have to stay afloat in a business whose economic model has pretty much collapsed in a generation. At 50,000 ft it's a little unfair to say newpapers have some greater obligation to political outcomes in a system that won't even make websites pay them for their content. The NYT has a reader base that knows they aren't going to vote for Trump, don't really care about him, have already dismissed him and the need to know anything more about him than they already do. If those are the people paying your monthly bills, those are the people you are writing for. And it's a false premise anyway. The low information voter, when they finally do start paying whatever attention they decide they should before they vote, is most definitely not going to be subscribeing to the NYT in any part of that effort.

2 hours ago, Tigerbomb13 said:

I just don’t get how someone can immediately fall off that quickly and steeply,  at the age of 30. Is he just unwilling to make changes? Did his vision go bad? It’s not like pitchers wouldn’t know that he could just get himself out on low and away breaking pitch and very single time until the last few years. 
 

How long do the Tigers wait before they eat tens of millions? It definitely looks like a sunken cost at this point. 

It's quite possible that the Tigers approach to hitting can't work for Javy and on the wrong side of 30 he can't change - so he's is caught between trying to be a good trooper and do what his coaches want him to do because they think it will help him, and the fact that he's a pure reaction hitter and has to just clear his head and swing away. Plus the reality that with that long swing he may have been doomed at 30 anyway as soon as he lost a few milliseconds off his reaction time, whether he wants to change or not.

2 hours ago, casimir said:

Of course he's frustrated.  I have no doubt about that.  I just wonder if the frustration has been mounting upon the problem and making things worse for himself.

I don't know Hinch's dynamics in a this kind of situation. From my observation over the years, most players end up coming down on the Magglio side - you have to ease back and stop pressing - stop trying to "do too much" to break a slump, but Hinch has a level of subliminal intensity about him - which in most cases is probably a big virtue for him, but that make me wonder if doesn't put more pressure a young guy like Tork playing for him, even if he doesn't mean it to. For instance, does he have that gift for getting guys to loosen up that Leyland had - which can help when a player is slumping.

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

Sometimes Americans will fantasize about Russian mothers by the hundreds of thousands protesting their boys dying and forcing Putin to end the war to save their lives. That would be a cultural 180 for those people, and I promise you, we will never see that.

There was a lot of public push back over Afghanistan, but hard times after the Soviet collapse and 20 yrs of Putin have created a different Russia from that one. But that is not to say Putin cannot drive Russia to collapse. The problem for the West is that total collapse will not be a good outcome, you want the regime to collapse before the country does - not so easy to see the path to that. The West's strategy is based on the Russian army collapsing eventually - and any armed service will eventually, but of course that requires Ukraine not to collapse first. It's purely a political economics question. Modern warfare is foremost an economic battle and the West's resources dwarf Russia's, but Russia (well at least Putin) balances that by being willing to put all their resources into the fight while the West wants to win on the minimum required investment. Missing on that calculation is where disaster lurks for Ukraine.

2 hours ago, mtutiger said:

As bad as the hitting has been to start the year, there was always a glass-half-full view where Tork (and Keith) weren't likely to continue to be as bad at the dish as they have been to date. 

I need to see more, trust but verify, but even before the homer on Sunday, both with the bat and the glove, it's been apparent that Tork has been playing better. Just need to see more consistency 

this bothered me though:

Quote

"We preach, less than two strikes, if it's not a damage pitch, it's not really worth it to swing at it," Torkelson said, "and then when you get to two strikes, you just battle and try to maybe maneuver it the other way, but you give the pitcher credit if he can do three in a row in that same spot. Odds say that he won't, but if he does, it's the big leagues, and they get paid to do that."

this was Tork, quoted by Petzold last week. I don't think you can give away any AB where a pitcher can hit his spot 3 times. That's a solid recipe for only winning games against the worst pitchers. Sure, you hunt zone when you are ahead in the count, but you have to start adjusting your approach from 0-1, at two strikes you've given the pitcher too many ways to get you out. And if you watch the Tigers, they seem to fail on an inordinate number of AB where they are up 2-0, because they are looking for perfect and pretty soon they are 2-2 and then out of the AB. Your BA when you get to 2-0 should be huge. 

And it's especially dumb for Tork, because he has the power to "do damage" just fine on an outer third FB (IIRC, 6 opposite field HR last season) if he sat on one at 0-1 when he *knows* that is where he is going to be pitched. But so far he won't. The 'approach' doesn't even give himself enough credit. 

 Everything you do in a AB has to be directed at not getting to two strikes, esp 0-2. All the numbers tell you that. If the Tiger's are willing to go to 0-2 to swing the bat at a strike, that is why they are an inept offense. 

43 minutes ago, Toddwert said:

but I thought it was only the Tigers getting bad calls ... because everyone hates them

I have to think the wide zone is driving down scoring. I don't think is was any accident that in the Yankees series there were almost no runs scored in the two games where the K zone was 30" wide while the one game with a normal zone generated a dozen runs.

1 minute ago, romad1 said:

So, they fired Shoigu and hired another guy with no military experience to be their MOD.  And this happened right after

I wonder if new guy is trying to impress the boss. 

is the sclerotic nature of Russian command and control going to be able to adjust to improving resourcing of the opposition, or are they in effect going to get rope-a-doped - committed to a set of objectives that will become untenable?

1 minute ago, Motor City Sonics said:

I know,  I fully expect that bubble to burst.     Like - he doesn't know anything yet - he has no reason to think yet and I feel like the second he does he'll be toast. 

one would like to think an international kid who's been a pro pretty much since he was 16 would have a better chance of holding steady mentally. The thing is, even if he has his head on right - that doesn't mean he may not have holes in his swing and if he does MLB pitchers will find them. The second hundred PA will tell.

8 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Meada isn't hurt, he's got that respiratory virus. He'll be back in 10 days or so. Lucky us...

apparently Foley has been rejuvenated as well.

and Wenceel keeps hitting.

30 minutes ago, kdog said:

Foley's velo and location was back in form.

yeah - that was good to see. Maybe just a little 'dead arm' syndrome he worked through.

58 minutes ago, The Ronz said:

I would be stunned if Trump was found guilty.

Absolutely stunned.

There is already precedence for this - John Edwards - who was found not guilty due to a hung jury/mistrial.

I expect this case to go exactly that way. 

Not that Trump isn't guilty. He was first charged for a crime in 1973 - that was over 50 years ago - and he beat that charge and every charge since.

 

you never know, but one difference is that despite the way Edwards treated his wife, he was a more appealing personality than Trump. I think the other aspect is that in the Edwards case the prosecution spent too much time on the affair - trying make Edwards seem like jerk I guess - instead of providing the evidence that he actually broke the law.. This prosecution has a lot of good black and white evidence - does not appear to be making that mistake.

36 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

The wealthy don't want that and they always get what they want.   We live in a world designed by the weathy for the benefit of the wealthy.  

this is the functional shift in approach that Biden is attempting. They recognize that the political difficulty of raising taxes for new transfer payments is pretty close to impossible. It's going to be a big enough lift just to increase the FICA cap to put Social Security back on a better footing in the near future. So instead do everything you can to push wages for the lower half of the economy. It's easier to build winning political coalitions for those things. Even if it is somewhat inflationary, increasing economic equity is simply more important to holding togeher the fraying social cohesion in the US than another 0.5% on the inflation rate.

Maeda, now Miller. Seems Foley is likely to be next. Were we talking about trading pitching for bats in another thread? Silly us.

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

 

 'burned' is a the correct term here, not 'wasted', that is unless you are a Minny fan...

19 minutes ago, smr-nj said:

What??

How f’ing DARE he! This infuriates me.

remember how quaint it was when they made the effort and paid professional writers like William Safire to compose sophisticated dog whistle rhetoric?   Good Times......

1 hour ago, Jim Cowan said:

He looks like a hitter, from what little highlight reel I have seen of him

The two RBI walks he worked were impressive - he doesn't easily lose his nerve.