gehringer_2

And maybe the whole thing could have been avoided if Harris says: "Eduardo, have you spoken to your wife?" Now sure, that's pure invention, but there is a kernel of truth in the fact that part of successful leadership is to think for your subordinates of the things they could be forgeting.

no shutout tonight

So Eduardo not only doesn't talk to the team to let them know what he is doing, he apparently doesn't talk to his wife either? Could be how he got into that situation last year....😱

Whether it involves an extension or just a buy out, the only way to preserve roster value with ERod now is some kind of deal to keep him from opting out. I don't have any objection on baseball grounds, he's a reasonable piece of a rotation and it's hard to escape the feeling that the apparent pitching depth we see right now is going to evaporate into career ending (re)injuries.

Seriously? His detachment is Henning's critique? What could be less relevant? I couldn't give a rat's asz about the GM's emotional involvement if he puts a winning team on the field. Does he think Dombrowski wasn't 'clinical'? i'll take a cold blooded executioner in that job more than a fan any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Ha - you are correct, those are older numbers - that's the 5 yr average from 2013 to 2017 from ESPN. But maybe the disconnect is you are looking at HR and I'm looking at scoring? They seem to be uncoupled at Dodger stadium. On statcast just now it looks like in the last 25 yrs Didger stadium has only played in the red for RUNS 3 times, though two were recent. ergo --> pitcher's park. (They did cut down on the foul territory in 2005 but looking at the chart it doesn't look to have have made an obvious difference.) Interestingly, HR are way up recently, ergo --> hitter's park. Take your pick! https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-venue?venueId=22

THUD

Correct. An incitement case based on the speech was always going to be a bridge too far. The SS saved his butt by not letting him go to the Hill. If he had, he would have gone down for insurrection just like his ~500 best friends.

No doubt because the House adjuorned without doing any appropriations work.

one more down.

If the question is "must" the answer is "none"

0.894 for scoring. Good for 28th place this year. Day games not so much but night games in SoCal will be cooler than most other places in mid-summer. CA does get a lot of El Nino effect, so it's going to get less predictable as climate cycles get more erratic.

Have the Yankee make any moves. Possible east coast team in play.

sure - definite possibility.

And LA is a great pitchers ball park. I don't know how stuck he would be. Even if he doesn't pitch well, he can still opt out and sign a one year deal with an East Coast team and rebuild his trade value - if the geopgraphy means that much to him. The Tigers are probably going to be terrible the rest of the way, he's not likely to add to his opt out value by staying here.

except that it's late in the day (1 hr left) to do any negotiating. It was a better plan for a deal doing down yesterday. If you're the Dodgers you might not have much appetite to try to have a detailed discussion with a guy you've got no history with when you're in the middle of trying to swing deadline deals in 60 min - you're likely just going to walk away if you have reasonable plan B without the loose ends.

"Tigers have discussed......" Breaking - "Sky is blue! Story at 11!"

The wildcard is always a player's physical condition. Probably even by the time they first make it as a pro athlete they have already accumlated a whole menu of more and less serious injuries, bumps, strains, wear and tear, that may or may not go on to to heal completely or alternately nag at them later. I would guess a large percentage of 'bad' years have something to do with a player not feeling 100%. Will it go away? Will he find a different training regime that solves the issue? Will it get worse? Will it worry him enough he's hesitant to go 100%? These are all factors that have a big impact on performance but do not correlate in any way to whatever past performance was - so there is nothing in history to help you know/predict what the future will be. Maybe the most obvious example would be Cabrera. Over the last 3-4 yrs, the condition of his knee would be the single far better estimator of his near term performance than anything you could project from his 20 yrs of accumulated performance record. He's maybe a case in the extreme limit, but that is what it is. I'd bet that if the Tigers thought they would get the actual 2023 Candelario in 2023, they would have not have blinked at $7M, but for reasons we can only speculate about, they didn't think that. Candi's history of wrist issues were something even the fan's know about. Maybe there were other things they saw over the year that made them doubt his comeback potential. Whatever, it turns out they may have been wrong about about the internal scouting of their own player. Maybe his comeback should have been predictable, but OTOH maybe it's a black swan. We don't know what info they looked at to get to their decision. All you can really go by judging an org is whether they get it right more than wrong over time, and Harris is yet to build enough record to do that.

well, it's true the projections would weight it, but whether that weighting reflects anything supportable is questionable. Nobody knows why a good player has a bad year or what the probability of a player making a comebacl or not is going to be. It's unwritten history and it just isn't in the existing data to tease out no matter what you do. You can make an assumption that a certain proportion of players do X after having a year like Y, but every player is such an individual story that it's still not much more than a guess when applied to the specific player. Things like individual slumps and comebacks are beyond the reach of what statisitical method can tell you very much about. Well, I'll amend this to the degree that a player may have an 'apparent slump' - for instance a year of vary bad BaBIP luck, but he was actually the 'same' player, in which case the prediction that will pass would be a sound one. One strenght of advanced analytics is the ability to detect that. But if the player actually played the game at a lower skill level across a season, or has an injury that may or may not heal 100% (common issue), then not so much.

The other reason this would be good is because making sure Christie's criticism of Trump gets media oxygen is a way to help insure Democratic GE turnout.

yes. We had weak teams without 'everyday' players under Leyland, Ausmus and Gardenhire, but my strong impression is that Hinch still makes a lot more lineup, PH, and field subsitutions than his predecessors. I think he has a more 'interventionist' mindset that just 'let the boys play'. Logically you would have to if you are big into analytics. They don't do you any good if you don't make the active moves to implement what they suggest. And take his views on relief pitching. He is sold on the idea of using relievers in patterns based on varying their stuff and delivery as an active way to make the bullpen more effective in aggregate. That's not something we've seen here before. And I'm not knocking it at all - it seems to work - but it betrays the strength of his mindset that says "detailed in game management makes a difference"

to tie this to may last post, if LHH hitters do end up getting more ABs in aggregate since the shift is banned, then more plays will go to 2B.

I made the argument the other day that maybe with the shift banned we may see more LH bats getting to be everday players again. I'll stand by wanting to see how that plays out.

To push back on that some, I do think Hinch does have a passion for having buttons to push. Whether he would get over that should he have a team where he doesn't need to is definitely the question.

Surprisingly for 3B though, he was a pretty poor 1B. Never seemed to get the footwork down.