gehringer_2

boyd comes back with a couple of clean innings

except he's not holding down the hot corner in RF. Credit where credit is due, McKinstrey looks like a nice player. Jury definitely still out of Maton, Malloy, Vierling and Nevin.

another XBH for the old dude. Cabrera on a mini-streak

Wentz needs more change in velo. He can certainly work on pitch repertoire at AAA more reasonably than Detroit. It's true guys can get stuck were they don't work on what they need to in the minor because they're having success there, but if your MiLB coaches can't get them past that you need new coaches. In Faedo's case he needs to pitch more - period. That can happen wherever it's appropriate. But he's only thrown something like 100 ip over the 4 previous yrs. When guys are out that much that long 100 IP is not unusual to get command/consistency back, then see what you may have. He's a little over 40 for this season to far. Not to mention that Toledo needs some guys who can be successful there right now!

LOL - so could most of the numbers we talk about here most of the time.

you can't trade draft picks in baseball, but you can 'buy' additional prospects in trades by picking up salary burden for teams that need that. Of course if you don't have the capability to evaluate players in another team's system as well or better than they do themselves, it still won't get you far.

a couple of good starts by Faedo and Wentz made it seem less bad than it was but both of those guys need to be in MiLB developing more repertoire before either has hope of having consistent MLB success. Englert had come up and pitched over his head as well, which also probably wasn't sustainable. It's totally schizophrenic how every move this team make on the pitching side yields more than we have right to expect while everything they touch on the hitting side other than Greene seems to just die.....

In the BP we are seeing a little bit of normal regression to the mean - Lange is fine but I think he was pitching over his head there for a while. I would like to see one more power arm in the pen to pair with Foley. That was supposed to be Cisnero, but it appears Jose's stuff is going downhill.

Torkelson was better in May (783 OPS) than in April(575) but then went 0 for Philly. If he gets back to his May pace we'll be having less of this discussion. And I like this. Torkelson only swings at the 1st pitch in 30% of his PA - compared to the fact the almost any decent MLB pitcher is throwing more than 50% strikes on the 1st pitch. But the better part is that when he does swing at the 1st pitch, his K rate is 13%, When he takes it, it's 27%. That's not a skill problem, it's a tendency, and I if were him, I'd think about mving away from it. Now granted, taking the 1st pitch worked for Joe Mauer and he won a couple of batting championships, but not everybody is Joe Mauer.

While I was quite peeved that they shipped out Paredes without ever giving him a fair audition, I admit that I am one who had no problem with them letting Candelario go - I thought that was an up and down year kind of player and preferred a more consistent performer, but of course I assumed that Harris, being new Wunderkind, would prove up the task of finding a competent replacement. To be quite frank, his first effort to refill a position on the field has been a failure. None of the major league guys Harris acquired have shown ability to fill the position at replacement level and the minor league player that was supposed to be the possible future there appears not to have the needed glove even if he may yet have the bat to get to the majors at some position.

TBF - that's a pretty good starting point.

figures the Tigers would lose the game when they finally score 6.

2/3 BB. Maybe if we run down Torkelson enough we may end up with a real ballplayer.

yeah this. Rule one is don't insult potential voters, even if they deserve it. That's what surrogates are for.

Jung, Bigbie and Serretti all hitting the ball for WM..

decent play by Tork there goes for naught.

so tell me again why the Tiger brain trust is constantly preaching "use the big part of the field" to our hitters?

Tigers struggle to get one to tie the game, DBacks come back with multiple extra base hits.

and TBF, at his age he can still improve some at 1st as well. But for all this stuff, sooner would be a lot more fun than later!

Middle-middle FB at 93. That is what you are supposed to do with it! Unfortunately Lorenzen threw pretty much the same pitch to Carroll and he hit his even better.

Surprised I haven't seen him moved to the 60, he's already been on short term IL for 60+ days. Team is a disaster and they don't even have a player they'd like to add to the roster to help?

Funny how his play has gone downhill since Riley went down. Either Riley is a better coach for Tork than anyone the TIgers have hired, or maybe with Riley out he's pressing - that latter is not unlikely I suppose.

Ya Think? Boris Epshteyn has probably been on Moscow's payroll since before he even attached himself to Trump.

So I don't mind so much if a guy takes the first pitch in his 1st AB - for timing and all that. But yeah - with that exception you've got to be ready to hit strike one to give yourself a chance.

I think the idea that you can ever trade your way to being a better team is a little mythical. No-one is going to give you back better than you give up on a regular enough basis to lead to any great overall team improvement. When trading does add to a team's value (value as measured as win potential) is when a team has more resources than it needs in one area that it can trade to improve resource in another - IOW blocked players. You get better because you have talent in your org but you can't use it - trade it for talent you can use. All of this depends on having the talent in your system to begin with. Where do the Tigers? They have nothing to trade that they don't already need desperately (ie. a player like Greene). You can't gain ground that way. You can make some headway by giving up young players for older ones, but that is the Dombrowski dead end. Been there, done that, got the "I've Now Got an Empty System AND a REALLY Terrible Rebuild Ahead of Me" tee-shirt. Now MAYBE - if all the pitching depth comes back healthy, then the Tigers will have some excess value they can't utililize to trade for value they can, but with starting pitching, even that is not easy to do because you can't play a starting pitcher part time to showcase him. A guy like Mize will have to come back and be in the rotation to build up any trade value, but that means some guy like Wentz who is also part of that depth (just speaking hypothetically) that might be building trade value in the majors has been sent to the minors where he can't build trade value as effectively. So before you can trade you have to either spend (you are dead on correct there) to buy more talent, or draft/develop enough talent to have a tradeabe excess. Then you can trade to balance a team for better overall performance. I don't see how anyone can build a team by trading good players until they have the depth to fill behind them so those trades are "adds" instead of just "replaces"