gehringer_2

Greene interview by Kane exhibit B on how bad the Bally broadcast is. Try thinking up a question or two before you start an interview JK.

Tigers owe Isbel a Bally Short One. Completely bailed out a Lange that couldn't have thrown him a called strike. But we'll take it.

CMo is terrible. Two things bother me about Shepherd. 1st, he's just not that good an announcer - mangles sentences, starts phrases without knowing where he is going etc. But I could live with that if he would just finally claim his competence as a baseball guy instead of constantly, repeatedly, endlessless refusing to express a baseball take of his own without asking his color guy a question like wet behind the ears schoolboy. It makes for a constantly stilted broadcast. By now he should know enough baseball to be able to express an opinion and just have a normal conversation with his colorman. He doesn't need to constantly act like he's a total baseball moron.

Parker 2/3 HR. K rate for July <25%. It's time.

Javy trying to bank an out for the 9th.

Yup. The first time I saw it the Biden campaign had put up a link to C-Span or some source with her whole commentary - then Lincoln project took it from there.

some confirmation that the Tigers' Bally broadcast are indeed, bad. https://www.blessyouboys.com/2023/7/19/23800246/detroit-tigers-broadcast-rankings-bally-sports-matt-shepard-craig-monroe

Trades were absolutely the worst. They lost so much roster value in the teardown that they needed to have converted to viable youth and instead just squandered.

They keep giving him ABs hoping the switch flips, which is pretty much what they did with Schoop for over a year before finally giving up. I suppose if you give enough slumping guys enough time sooner or later one of them will start to hit again for you, and Haase did finish last season with a hot bat so he's not been cold anywhere near as long as Schoop had been. But it's easy to get pessimistic that a guy who took until 28 to reach the majors will recover from a 1/2 season slump at almost 31 years old. And Hinch has been scrupulously fair about giving Haase and Rogers equal time against LHP, but the result is that Haase's OPS platoon split against LHP is 421, while Rogers' is 960.

I've had family and close friends in SoCal for 30 yrs and have spent a fair amount of time there. My overall impression is that if you had moved there with the Dodgers in 1958 it was probably pretty close to paradise. It would still be an amazingly nice place to live if only half the people that are there weren't.

Right, the problem for the Tigers is they didn't find many good hitters to throw that money at. My question would be how do we re-evaluate Avila if his last three top hitters taken, Torkelson, Greene and Jung, all make the majors? Did he finally actually have a decent scouting staff in place just in time to get himself canned?

yeah - pretty close comp. Torkelson's HR rate is trending higher, esp if you discount his poor April, and somewhat better walk rates - also higher K rate. I think AZTF has him right. His ability to pull the ball and then shoot the 1B line is going to mean lots of doubles and the HR stroke is pretty classic, combine the XBH with the good walk rate you have a player that should generate a good a OPS. But at least as of now, he's not very good at extending ABs when he gets behind, which is fairly often, so it's hard to see the makings of a high BA player - at least yet.

4 + 1 = 3.5 Subtraction by addition!

Brilliant Pat. Glad you found your way to BR game logs.

IDK - I think a lot comes from pitchers always complimenting their catchers in post games - but it's become almost more of an insult by ommision than a meaningful compliment. It could also be that Rogers has a little less 'patience' with his pitchers. You do see him fire a heater back at one sometimes after he makes a bad pitch. Of course whether a pitcher likes having his catcher 'on his case' is a different question than whether it's better or worse for his results!

Just read a piece today that the whole system may be an example of unintended consequence. The slot system supposedly ended abused like no-one being willing to pick up Porcello because he had made it plain he wanted big money, and also on the theory that it prevented big market teams from outspending the small. But in reality, drafted players cost so much less than FA acquisitions/retentions that a team can easily overspend the average on the draft and still be a very low cost operator - draft player acquisition is just not a big part of team's potential total spending toward the (non)cap. What increases the value of the draft for a team is more money spent on scouting players, and even that is more a matter of effort than dollars when compared to a potential $200M+ player payroll. So Maybe the old system where a small market team could overpay and attract players that the big market teams hadn't bothered to look hard enough to find actually supported the ability for small market teams to rebuild effectively than the current system..

they can't square that circle though, you can't be a closed society and be merchant to the world, the contradiction in that won't fly. Xi may want it both ways but no-one has made that combination work. If he closes China, he is going to kill it's economy and technical progress. China may have enough momentum built up that it may take a while, but it will happen. What Xi wants to do is make the Chinese want the leadership model he wants to run. That's a big component of what his COVID strategy was about, prove that his model saved more lives. In the West we tended to miss this aspect and only see that he was 'being repressive' because that's our model of him. But to a large extent he was trying to sell his system by providing a result he could market as a better mousetrap. That's why it was so easy for him to turn on a dime and walk away. He was not dumping an ideologically driven program, he was marketing his management as a product and it was time go with V2.0 of the product. And the other problem is that the cult of personality leadership system has this problem of dying with the leader. The Chinese are supposedly the world's longest term thinkers. On that premise there have to be other constituencies interesting in the future of China on a time frame longer than the rest of Xi's natural life that know better than to like getting on the cult of personality train (again). What I think Xi wants is a society open for business, education and technology, but politically repressed/passive by choice. He wants the Chinese to view Western style politics as 'disharmonious' and thus counter to deep cultural preferences. And who knows, maybe he can pull it off, it is a different place with 3000 yrs of diverged cultural DNA from ours. Of course Putin/Russia has achieved the passivity with a repressive program, but it's the passivity of the dead, and comes only at the cost of gutting every other aspect of the nation.

So when MX was proposed, being young and impressionable still in full Vietnam anti-war reaction mode, I wrote Carl Levin to oppose it. Got back sort of form lettter kind of thing. But I almost fell off my Lazy-Boy when a number of years later, after all the deals had been done with the proper assignments to the ash bins of history, I got another letter from Levin, unsoliticited - that basically said, "See, this was the plan all along, I really am a peacenik at heart!"

🙏 👍

Not to underestimate the importance of Taiwan in the current US/China chill, but even given that, I have to wonder if the US foreign policy establishment isn't ratcheting things with China more than just a little bit deliberately. My thesis would be that since we operated under the "wealth and markets would reform China organically" paradigm for so long, we were willing to pretty much give away the store in 30 yr of the previous relationship. With the realization that the paradigm was faulty, the US finds itself with no bargaining chips left - so what to do other than create some new ones. I think this is why the hardeneing toward China has been so bi-partisan. I don't think we really need much of what the last two admins have been hitting China with for our own purposes, but we do need to establish a bank of concessions to make in order to re-establish a more balanced negotiating status with it. And of course the howling from China must be at least in part because they see what has been basically a free lunch in previous negotiations with the West coming to an end. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but I were a US President, it is precisely what I would be doing. Much like the way Reagan drove the Soviets to the table by increasing pressure with things like the MX, that were in the end, created expressly to be bargained away.

The fans, as usual, misdirect their anger. Javy in the lightening rod becase of the contract, but that's sunk cost, forget about it. A SS with a great glove is the one place a team can afford to carry a non-productive bat. The Tigers real issue is the line-up is too short overall, particularly at 3B, OF, an C. Greene, Torkelson, Rogers (who doesn't play enough), Carpenter, Vierling, and I suppose Cabrera, just is not enough hitters - period. It would be nice if SS was another big bat, but there are other positions they need to put better bats into where there is a better probability of finding one, and a better glove at 3B would be nice as well. I even get the impression the team is fine with Baez being the focus of frustration because it diverts attentions from the other deficiencies.

China is rolling out renewables and EVs at a pace the US can only dream about matching so the MAGA can save their glee. The problem with China is not that that they aren't moving faster than pretty much anyone on renewables, it's that their development aims have been so expansive that they are still rolling out new fossil at the same time as well -- we aren't going to change their mind on that, but it is also a transient situation, the former is going to overtake the latter. Barking at China about global warming is wasted energy, they are already more committed than we are by any objective measure, but Xi is going to act difficult and confrontational because that is his general stance to the US. He's not going to give any US admin any kind of positive PR. I'm sure given the relative volume of renewable power the two countries have rolled out this is another case of the Chinese viewing Americans as both presumptuous and uninformed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China India is where things need to change.

The MLB Draft is hard: So far Spencer has more career HR than the rest of the top 30 draft picks from 2020 in their combined MLB careers. Actually only 4 other position players from the top 30 picks have made the majors that I could find: Nick Gonzales(7) - who's played only 20 MLB games but is starting at 2b now for the Pirates. Patrick Bailey(13) - now the Giants starting catcher, 44 games total-all this year. He's got the job because Joey Bart has been sent to AAA Garrett Mitchell(20) - Brewers catcher. He was called up last year, apparently won the job this year but promptly messed up his shoulder after 16 games and may be out for the season. Also 44 career games. Jordan Walker(21) is a starting OF for the Cards called up this year 55 games. 781 OPS so far.

After all the unmade plays in LF in this one make you pine just a little bit more for Parker Meadows - who hit another double tonight.

the only question about this one is why Hinch left Skubal in so long. It wasn't like KC was having BaBIP luck - Tarik couldn't throw a breaking ball for a strike and could hardly get his FB in the zone. In hindsight, if he had gone and gotten him a run or two sooner...... You assume that if they were still in a playoff chase he would have managed differently..... ...wait, what?