gehringer_2

yup. I'm really beginning to wonder if Avila and Hinch are even on the same page together at this point. Bringing Baddoo up to sit is just making no sense at all.

OK - just checking....

Are we really debating whether Willi is a good OF? 🤔

Miggy should have swung at that 3-0

yeah - I don't remember "Javy needs a great 1B" being in the scouting reports we read before he came here. Serious omission!

LOL- if the wind blew it back at him or it knuckled, it was a great catch, if he had to reach back because he just overran it, not so much!

I don't think that many young players ever want to be traded. Sure, you absolutely do see it in vets who see the end and want a shot at a championship, but I think the ideal of most young players is to be part of team that grows into winning a championship together.

The difference with graphite is that there is no natural resource or geographic limitation. It can be made anywhere, starting with cheap petroleum coke. You just have to make the capital investment.

It's not all bad for everyone. If you are a young homeowner with a low fixed interest rate mortgage, inflation is going to be a big boost to your wealth accumulation because you are going to get to pay off that mortgage with dollars that are worth a lot less in the out years. One of the reasons a lot of boomers are sitting on more wealth than the succeeding generations is exactly that. A lot of us were in our first houses before inflation hit and ended up owning our homes essentially for half price or less.

Norris with 2 no hit innings in his 1st Mudhen appearance. Remember when Norris, Boyd and Fulmer were the future starting staff for the Tiger's return to relevance? Good times.

I'm waiting to see what the fast chargers do the the battery cycle life. I've been working with Li chemistry batteries for a good number of years and in general, there is no free lunch. If you do things that heat them up or stress them it's going to have an effect. There are so many 'little' design details in terms of heat management, dimensional stability and cell management that are not likely to be fully optimized in the 1st couple of design/manufacturing generations. I'm fairly confident they are going to get it right, just not necessarily in the 1st couple of go 'rounds. And it's definitely true that for most people, after handling flashlight batteries for a lifetime, there is a little cognitive dissonance in understanding that a 100kWh Li battery is every bit as dangerous as a 15 gallon tank of gasoline. Again, no free lunch. If you store a huge amount of energy in a small volume, the potential damage from a uncontrolled release is an inevitable part of the equation.

I believe Tork was the 1st position player in his draft class to start in the Majors, so he was fast tracked. But the lost year hurt Tork's draft class a lot. He should have come into this season with 450 more AB. I hope it's just a matter of him learning that he has to try to do less. Even guys who have hit as well and as easily as Tork all their lives may have to adjust their ambitions when facing MLB pitchers.

only because Singer dropped so low (again, pointing out the marginal value of the prognosticators). He has a reasonable shot at a 3.5-4 WAR season pitching for a poor team. He's not challenging anyone for a Cy Young but he's looking like a reasonable mid-rotation guy. After a slow start the Royals have won 5 of his last 8 starts, which isn't bad for the Royals.

Not to worry Sue, I'm sure Chuck and Joe have learned their lesson and it won't happen again.

Over the many years I've bought cars the math has led me from new to used and back to new and now it sounds like maybe back to used! That's going to be a shift as EV's take significant a piece of the market. You can buy an IC car in good condition 2-4 yrs old and for all intents and purposed plan on being able to drive it as long as you could care to keep a new car. But if you are looking at at huge battery replacement cost at 7-10 yrs out, that's going mean much higher depreciation rates on E-vehicles to figure into their true ownership cost. There are a lot of ideas and proposals for recovering value from automotive battery packs that still have a lot of functional life but not enough to keep in the car (~75%) but so far not much concrete.

True enough. But that was only because Singer, who was equally consensus a few months earlier had gotten himself a little twisted around. Not to harp on Singer in particular but just to point out the ephemeral nature of prospect draft rankings. I think maybe the prospect evaluators tend to go a little overboard for young breaking ball pitchers (e.g. Mize, Kumar, Jobe(!?!?) at various point). Those balls darting all over the place making college hitters look foolish are beguiling, but most major league hitters (sadly not all, Mr Baez!) make you throw that breaking ball for a strike, and it's suddenly a whole different world.

the thing with Tork is that if he doesn't get back to mashing against AAA pitching, it's going to be a pretty strong indication that the Tigers broke him. And if that's the case, it's one more piece of evidence that Avila or Ilitch needs to take serious look at what they think they are doing at COPA, because recently guys actually seem to hitting a little better everywhere else in the system. Couch, Meadows, Perez, Lipcius, Santana, Carpenter, Kreidler - plenty of examples of guys making at least incremental progress that stand in contradiction to the regression they are getting in Detroit.

You would think that a team that saw Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer win Cy Youngs on their roster would have figured out that successful MLB pitchers should be able to get guys out with the fastball. With that the rest is gravy. Without it, 'the rest' may become a constant struggle.

average car payment hit $700/mo recently. Nuts.

LOL page 7: GDP -0.9, GDI +1.9.

I can't decide about Mize. I don't think he has shown much strength at the mental aspect, but that can change. Bigger problem is that there isn't much swing and miss in his fastball, he has to command it. If TJ stabilizes his elbow it could actually help his command, but either way command remains an unknown coming out of the surgery and for Mize it's especially critical. Bottom line, he hasn't justified being picked over Brady Singer.

two things with Tork - yes the K's obviously, but the other is he needs to get the ball in the air more. Too often when he does barrel up a ball he doesn't get it over an IF's head - seems to make a lot of LD outs.

What? Me worry? https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2022/07/27/victor-reyes-detroit-tigers-san-diego-padres-victory/10162621002/

of course there's the rub, and Putin knows it. When he does come to the table you can be sure it will be with all kind of wonderful offers, but only in return for the demilitarization of Ukraine. And of course it's perfectly obvious what the long term Russian play is. You can book that. Don't forget, the Russian's already made and walked away from this deal once with Ukraine - territorial guarantees for the surrender of the Russian nukes in their control after the dissolution of the USSR. We might have forgotten that, but I don't think the Ukrainians have or will. No Ukraine deal with Putin will be worth the paper it's printed on. So the west can't give up any defense prerogatives. A 'deal' will at best formalize an armed standoff. And Russia will have no one to blame but themselves for being a lying POS partner on their previous agreement.

At Yellowstone, the bison are all over the park, you actually can't avoid them. They stand around in the geyser pools right up to and even on the pedestrian path decking. So despite all the rhetoric in the park, the Bison are acclimated to people and you often end up walking withing a few yards of them. Now of course, they do tell you what to look for and you pay attention. If they aren't paying any attention to you fine. If they are, go the other way. And obviously don't directly approach one. Bears and Moose are another matter, esp any kind of brown bear. But they aren't going to be around where people are very often. In the Western parks (Teton/Yellowstone) they will close off large parts of the park to hikers if a bear with cubs is known to be anywhere in the area. But people have always been pretty laissez-faire about black bears in the East. I remember people feeding black bears from the windows of their cars in the Smokey's back in the day. Obviously they've tried to crack down on that kind of thing but clearly with limited success. But with black bear the bigger threat may be to the bear, that you condition it to be a nuisance bear and then it ends up having to be put down.