gehringer_2

Koch pretty much sat out the last cycle, but if he actively spends the kind of money *againt* Trump he has spent in some past elections that's a big hit.

A couple of things yesterday. I posted in the game thread that twice he tried to ambush a Morton curve but popped it up. That's a good news/bad news kind of result. No - he didn't execute, but he did have the confidence to have a plan and he got the timing right, just not quite the swing path. The other is that he has hit a couple of hard shots down the RF line (one caught by the 1b of couse!) on outside breaking balls thrown by guys with 95+ fastballs. Not quite Cabrera style but maybe the same idea of going the other way with the breaking ball. If those were deliberate and not just luck and he is trying to learn to make that kind of adjustment that is a pretty high level batting skill.

you wouldn't think. But you can talk yourself into projecting almost anything you want on a 19 yr old. Sometimes you will be right.

the Times or the Athletic? At the time of the purchase Athletic was operating at a loss. and of course, there was this from the same article.

Torkelson was unusually aggressive in his last couple of AB. That seemed like a bit of shift for him. While I agree with Chasfh that in general there was too much pointless chatter from the three Amigos (Starburst anyone?) - there was one stretch when I think they had an interesting hitter/pitchers discussion. It started with Monroe saying he never cared much about the scouting report on a pitcher's tendencies because it didn't do him any good to know he threw pitch 'x', 'y' percent of the time, it's still no guarantee he'd get pitch 'x' if he looked for it on any particular pitch. That was fine, but it got better when Jones and Petry talked about how any good pitcher/catcher battery is changing their approach to each hitter based on what they are seeing from that hitter's swings in real time, Then even the further nuance that as a pitcher they knew that on occasion a top level hitter had 'set them up' by deliberatly telegraphing misdirection about his approach in an AB. The message I think being that in the flood of all the metrics we get (info from the past) don't forget to appreciate the games within the game going on present tense.

Miami was playing some out of this world on ball pressure D but no matter, Denver just kept beating them with their play off the ball and slowly adding to their lead.

Well, it's your choice to be here.....

I'll tell you the one part that did work for me. When Monroe is in the booth with Shep, most of the time he drops his voice register and does this sort of growling "I'm a dramatic voiced professional broadcaster" thing and it sounds ridiculous. Tonight sitting with Jones and Petry he spent most of his time just speaking like a normal human being and he was miles better.

third time he just decided to hit the damn FB. Good choice.

After they took it over, the NYT tried to get everyone to upgrade their subsription packages to include the Athletic, but IIRC it was a big $ bump and I mean honestly - is the NYT readership the prime demo for 'the Athletic'? So I assume that marketing effort has fallen short.

maybe sometimes you just like a guy because he's not going to hurt you if you have to play him. Too many of the guys that have come through our roster recently haven't just been not good, they've been constant disasters waiting to happen.

you know, when I was a young anti-Vietnam and thus also anti-military-industrial complex guy, I though it was sort of quaint that organizations like the USMC spent so much time in their recruiting talking about honor, loyalty, and other virtues when the core reality of their purpose was to break things and kill people. What was the point? But in today's Russia we see all too clearly what an Army unmoored from honor and fidelity brings to the world -- and though all War may be Hell, this Russian Army's brand is something else altogether.

If a Vatnik decides he can't face the oncoming Ukrainians, he better either surrender or take a loaded rifle with him as he retreats. AFU drone footage showing up of Russian rear guard troops gunning down their own retreating men. You have to hand it to an Army that knows how to build morale. Between this kind of outrage and the daily threats of execution flying back and forth between the Russian MOD and Prigozhin, no-one can have seen anything like this before.

Tigers waste a lead off double. Torkelson has twice tried to sit on and golf a Morton curve but popped it up both times.

two in, man on 2nd, still no one out in the 5th. Braves looking to put this one away. EDIT: Hill gets out of the inning without more damage. Game is still in reach at 3-0. At least for the average team on the average night.

Morton's back door breaking ball to the LH hitters looks like it's going way wide then zips right back over the plate

I don't know if this coverage is exactly what you would call good, but it's not missing Shep.

TTBDNS

So we missed a chance to see the 1st Vulcan player make the majors? A blow for intergalactic relations....

This is probably most likely. Hard to imagine the states would accept a system using only the user's representation about where they are. Then again, when it comes to law interfacing with technology, I would never underestimate any legislature's total incompetence. Then again, he could have avoided the whole thing if he had just gone out for a walk. 🚶‍♂️

He's been building his trade value in the last ....week....or so.

This is a case than any reputable lawyer would have to advise his client to plead out for the best deal he can get, but of course there is zero chance of Trump doing that, and who wants to take a case when your client isn't going to listen to your advice?

Hear that Jamison? - Next time you get a hot tip, turn off your phone's cellular service and location services, use the hotel WiFI through a VPN. Got it?

LOL - to *some* degree. There are certain bottom lines. In the majors every hitter is close to or pretty much up against the wall of the their maximum neuro-muscular-visual limit and much of the variation between players is down to pure genetic limits. If you were to get everybody to optimized approach and mechanics, you will still see a distribution in the physiological phenotypes. Or another way to put it would be that poor coaching may prevent a guy from ever reaching his max potential, but no coaching is going to get a guy past it. I don't know whether I actually read or heard him say this once, or if I just surmised it from his MO, but I think Dombrowski loved to take guys with big arms because that is the one absolutely hard certainty you can measure in a baseball draft pick, and I think that continued under Avila and maybe even moreso since now you can measure all his spin and break so you can get more 'comfortable' with a decision about a pitcher because you have all this data. By comparison projecting what a hitter can do against levels of pitching he has never faced and you don't have machines to easily measure is scary and uncertain. Of course the thing is a good team must find a way to do it and do it well, or you end up like the Tigers.

People have posted the chart for average career WAR vs draft position. The corelation is real enough near the top, but still pretty noisy even there. The baseball draft is the most problematic for the major sports because of the high level of noise in the player evaluation signals you get from intrntnl, prep and college baseball, If you look at the difference in the quality of play differential between the top of college football and the NFL, or the top level of NCAA or Euro basketball and the NBA, the comparative difference in baseball is a chasm, so draft uncertainty follows. I would not disagree at all with the premise that some teams coach well and some badly and it certainly seems inarguable that for non-pitchers at least, the Tigers system has done poorly. And in fact the Tigers success with lower draft round pitchers tends to prove the point. But their pitching development and hitting development might as well be from different planets. Plus another problem with the Tigers has just been bad internal evaluation. Adames, Martinez, Castillanos, Paredes, Suare --- In too many cases we have failed to properly value what we did have and sold too low - gutting our system depth over many years.