gehringer_2

When Torkeson got back to Toledo, his OPS was 630 over his first 70 AB. In his last 50 there it was 916. Should this be telling us something about the effectiveness of the coaching he was getting in Detroit? It took basically one month with the Hens to turn him back around. Tigers had a charmed season last year and sure it's fair to say Hinch may have had something to do with that, but the evidence has built up that there something wrong with what they are doing with the hitters this season. I wouldn't say it's proof, but it's strong enough to make me question what Hinch is doing either in terms of his leadership, his approach to data/analytics information flow, or his coaching staff selections.

no doubt you want to have another answer before you cut a guy adrift - no argument you don't want to leave yourself with nothing, but that's what Ilitch is supposed to hire someone to do. One way to look at it is there are two levels of decision. The first is the decision that you want to move on from a player, then the second becomes, can you? If you find the answer to the 2nd question is "no" you may need to delay your execution of the 1st decision, but that doesn't mean you haven't committed to that course of action - at least internally even if not publicly. When we talk here on the forum, the issue of finding a player's replacement can be filled with too many imponderables to make much of a discussion. That's not always true, sometimes the choices do crystallize like they did around SS last off-season. But I think in the main our discussions primarily end up revolving around the 1st question - should we make the decision to move on - eventually, even granted that it may turn out not to be practical to accomplish in a given off season.

what a waste of a season. Lose 3 starting pitchers to surgery. No big breakthrough from Tork or Baddoo, Greene loses half a season, Barnhart a bust, Baez a not quite but close to a bust, ERod goes AWOL, and Austin Meadows self immolates. They should have just stayed in a cave somewhere in Florida and sent the Mudhens to play out their schedule.

yeah - sounds like something personal beside just the downturn at BBB. Closing 20% of your stores is almost SOP for retail nowadays - not that much the kind of thing you jump out a window over.

I understand the angle about not caring what the owner spends, and I don't, at least wrt how it impacts ownership. But the reality is that as a fan, I also know that this owner has a budget, and if I want to see a good team, then I have to hope that the owner spends his budget effectively, because for most owners, and almost certainly this one, the budget is the budget, win or lose. And I'd rather have win.

Ended 3/5. Almost hope he cools off a little so we can see where he really is going to settle. He's now at a 970 OPS since August 1st - it doesn't seem likely that is really his new "normal"!!

yup. It will be 1B by committee for the Hens for a bit.

the problem is arb $. We are going to have to cut him loose to get out from under that and maybe someone offers him something before the Tigers do, but that's a risk I'd be happy to take. He isn't worth what an arbitrator is going to give him. Spend those $ somewhere else if some one else signs him.

we seem to be having another Manning meltdown.

RIght, but Tettleton and Phillips were exceptions over a long period. Cuyler/Kreuter weren't regulars so I'm not really counting them. Just as snapshots, the 68 championship team had none starting, likewise the 72 Divisional winner, 84 had one in Howard Baker who already had one foot out the door with Sparky (). 2006 was the first winning team I remember where SH played any major role, Guillen, Young, Santiago (N. Perez was a SH but I can't justify calling his time with the Tigers a 'role'!). But then by the 2012 WS team had only Ramon, and his role was minor. The recent stretch with W. Castro, Grossman, Reyes, Candelario, Barnhart, Niko, is really unusual, for any team really. I think it points the to fact that Avila did not just take SH as they came along but had to be making an effort to pursue them to have collected so many contemporaneously.

Good luck. Public figure exemption. Someday we will have a SCOTUS that will toss that whole concept. When absolutely anyone can be 'world famous' within 10 minutes on the net, the distinction means nothing anyway, and it has been one the most destructive legal concepts to the quality of political speech (public speech in general) in the US that has ever happened.

LOL - exactly. I would guess that any grammar MS Word can't catch, isn't caught.

sure - this depends a lot on the level of unionization for example. OTOH, a union shop is more likely to have benefits, but OTOH, there also will be less variation of benefits based on any kind of worker classification system - union benefits tend to very uniform across a shop. So these things can cut both ways.

If you mean with Candelario - I don't think Candelario is even a very good 1b. He for sure doesn't play 1st as well as he plays 3rd and we are dumping pretty hard on his 3b play!

This would certainly be the case if the new GM is anywhere near as fixed on SH as Avila was. I believe Avila put more SH on the Tiger roster than all the GMs in the entire history of my watching the Tigers. He clearly had it bad for SH, even if they couldn't SH worth a damn. But given that we hope the new GM will not be an Avila clone, my guess is anyone new is going to be less fixed on SH than Al was.

used to be you needed 43 days service time to get the 1st pension increment but so many things have been reworked since COVID I don't know if this site is up to date... https://awmcap.com/blog/mlb-service-time#:~:text=The full pension consists of,valued at %245%2C750 per quarter.

seems pretty obvious doesn't it?

In honor of Chasfh nailing an ambiguity in the peeve thread this morning, I have to ask: are you wagering 7 different Tigers will each K at least once, or that the team will have at least 7 K? 🤔

you just have to hope that at least one of them is really more than just a legend in his own mind.

well nailed ambiguity! Not incorrect usage per se, but sloppy. That's the thing with English - you can get away with a lot of sloppy syntax since so much is inferrable from context. But just because you can.....

JJ has to prove he can play mistake free (or at least mistake free enough) under pressure - i.e. against a good 'D' and I'm not sure this audition theater Harbaugh has set up in the cupcake schedule is enough to sort it all out. OTOH, McNamara's cockiness is beginning to reach pathological range. A kid going public to more or less complain he's a better judge of his performance than his coaches has also got 'problems' to sort out!

4th quarter usually belongs to better talent....

His, or the team's?

This one sounds more interesting. I could see something like this actually bringing defense back to the NBA......

I don't know how easy it always is to separate things. Your mental state can be driven by your physical. Lets say (purely hypothetical of course) he has some kind of vague chronic fatigue or just enough brain fog that he can't focus on the fastball well enough to hit it. Give a pro athlete an even barely discernible and hard to identify dose of that kind of post infection effect and you might have an effective driver for a full blown case of clinical depression. I think it's probably accurate to think of a lot of kinds of sports pros as more 'resilient' than the average person, and I think a guy like an NFL interior lineman probably is. But what a hitter does exists so much on the very edge of the limit of human physiology and neurology, that you could see it from the opposite side, they have very little if any resilience in the face of what might be fairly trivial deficits for other kinds of athletes. I could see that making your mental state more precarious than what many people have to face daily. Of course on the other hand, the very fact you make the majors in the face of those realities probably self-selects for people who are not easily knocked off stride. Never having sniffed that kind of talent I can only guess!