gehringer_2

there is that.

I'd agree it made more sense when the divisions were larger so 50% of your games were in division. You could better argue that the team that won the division pretty much had to be the better team regardless of it non-div record because it was hard to win your division without beating the other teams in it head to head. There are now only 6 divisional games out of a 17 game schedule to that shifts the logic IMV. But you still have an issue with strength of schedule variation in the NFL being so large. Maybe the 'best' way would be some formula where SOS was a factor, but if the NCAA experience is any precedent, the fans would end up hating it.

I think it is certainly true that today, with every athlete trained to their physical limit and coached to play even beyond that, injuries are pretty much the major determinant for any successful team. The thing is, we feel cursed now, but that is because you tend not to notice how good your luck was when nothing bad happens. In 2006 we had 4 pitchers make 30 starts. That was incredible good fortune, and exactly what got us to the WS. Today any fool can see that in MLB, the first team to figure out how to keep their pitchers healthy and throwing hard will be on their way to being the next dynasty.

The fun part was it looked he didn't know either.

I have a hard time figuring why Chris is constantly tagged as the problem when he has been willing to spend on MiLB and training facilities (which his father wasn't) and ponied up substantial cash last year. I don't believe the issue is resource. If that is what was holding them back Avila would still be here doing what the owner who didn't want to spend money wanted him to (given that theory). A problem right now is that other than the stupid money contracts being handed out, which almost every baseball observer here concurs are foolish for the teams offering them, there is precious little available mid-tier where the Tigers have the scope to operate and could theoretically be making upgrades to the team. Teams are keeping young mid-teir players in the fold more than ever because teams know they are the undervalued commodity in the game. I won't bother relinking the dead horse GIF but the Tigers' problem is coming up with enough players of their own to get to within striking distance of what you can do in free agency. Fans who constantly grouse about them not spending Mets level money need to find a different team to root for or accustom themselves to being disappointed because the Tigers, along with more than half the other teams in MLB, can't and will never play in that money league. Mid teir managements have to win with smarts and working harder - that's just the way it is.

the other half of the joke being that supposedly they pulled Tork from 3rd because his arm is not major league, and then happily gave Harold-noodle-arm-Castro 25 games there.

Yeah - Hosmer is not a bad baseball player, he's just not the player SD paid to get. At 32 ie might have a year or two left to bridge a gap. But the Tigers have left themselves in a box by not maintaining Tork's flexibility to at least fill in at 3rd and Cabrera stuck at DH. If you had some flexibility to swing Tork to third maybe once a week against a heavy LHH team, and DH was open, you could carry an insurance policy like Hosmer, but right now, you are in a situation where if Torkelson starts to hit, you have no place to give a Hosmer ABs at all.

especially since Al Avila said so many of those same things and then didn't deliver.

So what might happen if you had wide outs that aren't very good at beating NFL quality corners but just maybe you have an inside receiver that really good at getting open? Just asking for a friend. 🤔

correct, the theory is that with surgery he should be good to go next year.

Adam Dunn got 4/56M, they let Sale go, Abreu was 3/50M and then they let him walk.

Obama's legacy will the 2 big things: The first Black Pres and the nomalization of health care as part of the social contract. Those are two pretty huge things and history should never underestimate them and how much those two things limited the rest of his scope of action. But he did have plenty of faults as well - he was naive, or at least lacked sufficient depth of perspective on many foreign policy issues, ignored the health of his political party, was too conventional, even conservative in his economics - leading to the red party getting the best of him on too many economic issues. Still, he was one of few presidents to actually move the country on a major policy issue, and for that he can be forgiven a lot. And maybe, hopely, in the end the country ends up better for having to look in the mirror over the backlash his presidency unleashed.

yeah I guess. Always seemed about two levels of indirection too many.

just did a quick search - apparently healing time without intervention is usually successful but can take up to 12 months. Adding some kind of plate or banding can cut it to 12 weeks.

I've still never gotten the connection to the horse's head.

I remember Obama couldn't get to 1st base with you after his inept special olympics attempt at humor so any drift wasn't helped there!

LOL - classic strawman spin rhetoric though. Set up a non-relevant or marginally relevant piece you can shoot down and call it a day.

I'm hoping Lipcius turns out the be a late bloomer/sleeper out of that draft. At the end of '21 he was probably off any list anyone wanted to make, but got better instead of disappearing - so maybe he can keep finding more untapped upside.

I suppose you could call a coffin a small cell. 🤔

I'm sure in Trump's inflated self-image religious grifting is too far down the Grift Hierachy for someone who's had so much prior success with the more upscale political girft.

Tiger stadium was basically a square field, when the Lions played there it was pretty much a mile to the the seats along either sideline. Hard to imagine that in its early days the the NFL was such a poor sister that a lot of teams played a lot years in terrible venues.

Aren't there some consent decress attached to Twitters conduct? Given his increasingly illogical behavior, the other possibiliby that I suppose has to be broached is that Twitter, now being both private, which means much less financial disclosure, and under serious financial pressure, that you have exactly the kind of situation that the Russians might have decided to drop a few billion into in order buy some Western social chaos.

reality bites.

It's a different coaching philosophy. I don't know if there is a right or wrong to it, McVay won his SB but what if he could not have dealt for Stafford? If you only want guys for your system then that is one more hurdle you've created for yourself before you can win. But if you do find those guys you might also end up looking like a genius.

It'a also not like Stafford never had a decent offensive cast around him in any of his good Det years either. In 2011 he had a HOF receiver, TE with more than 80 catches, they could run it a little (1500 yds as team) and maybe most notable for the Lions, that year the O-line more or less held together - between the 5 starters there was only one one missed start all season I think anyone would stipulate that Stafford has more arm talent than Goff, in fact more than most QBs playing, but there is more to playing QB that just that, though granted it's the most important for "wow" factor.