gehringer_2

the standard Trump "I have no idea who that is" defense. Pretty stale at this point.

doesn't seem likely you would have a future in the NBA with a low release point shot.

this x 1000. Hitting is a skill so detached from other conventional athletic characteristics that that approach is doomed to failure. You have to identify hitters *as hitters* and then hope their athleticism is at least good enough you don't end up with 9 DHs. But the cruel truth is that as much as I love to see great defense being played, you are still better off in the MLB with 9 DHs than 9 Andreton Simmonses. You. Have. to. Hit. Now TBF, the tigers haven't been wrong in every case recently. But not right anywhere near enough. So e.g. -Remember when we drafted Greene, there was enough skepticism about his fielding that there was even talk about him being destined for 1b. But he could hit. So he has 'surprised' in terms of turning into a pretty decent OF. That's a way better bet than that NIko Goodrum or Willi Castro was ever going to become a hitter. Ironically, under Avila the Tigers do seem to have learned how to identify arms with MLB potential with some success, but I've always held that pitching is far more amenable to analysis via the advanced measurement tools currently available than hitting is. Avila's regime got some handle on the former, but not much on the latter. And of course they were done in as much as anything by not understanding how to keep those arms healthy. If finding hitters is job one, pitching health is job one 'b'.

about time

Hear, hear!

OTOH, just to be clear, Armenia isn't likely throwing a hissy fit because they have some scruples about what Russia is doing in Ukraine per se, it's only about Ukraine diverting Russian resouces that Armenia wants deployed in their battles with Azerbijan and Pashinyan angling to pressure Putin to maintain higher priority for supporting Armenia.

FYI - Umich alcohol expense account policy is $20/person/event including all tips and taxes and has to be charged to accounts excluded from the totals that go toward the U's overhead as used to claim G&A costs on external (Gov, NSF, NEA, NIH, DOD etc) grant dollars. The events also have to be related to fund-raising or specific documented business purpose beyond normal operations. I would guess rules at MSU are probably pretty much the same.

Two or three more games and Tyler will no longer have the excuse of not having his legs back - we'll see.

It would be nice if Bertuzzi would start to break out of it. He's yet to show the disruptive harassing/forecheck/stick in the lane presence that has been his forte.

absolutely. He stole this one. Should have been about 5-2 Preds - way too many defensive breakdowns by forwards- many while Copp/Bert/Sundqvuist were on the ice.

Wings up 2 -0 going into the third but the Copp line still playing some terrible D.

I think this is part of the difficulty with moving hitters through the minors. I think brain research argues that the windows on adaptability progressively close off every year older we get. That argues that there is biological pressure to move guys as quickly *as possible*. The trick is that for every player there is a fast which is too fast.

Caputo is a sad case. Could be it's my expectations that have elevated in recent years, but at least as I remember it, Caputo was once very good on baseball.

I will grant him the one point that for the group charged with only misdemeanor's, they probably would only have serverd a one or two game team suspension as a result, so frustration at the slow turn around at DPSS and WashCo DA office that has meanst at least a 4 game suspension, is not unreasonable. Still, I'm going to guess probably not a lot that could have been done to make it quicker. I would guess that DPSS had to have their every step micro-vetted by both the legal and equity offices at UM, and maybe at MSU as well.

I think oddly enough there is something to that. DD brought in players almost exclusively based on ability to hit the FB and the Tigers were uniquely vulnerable to junk ball pitchers to the point it was a running joke here. Like in a lot of areas, it seems Al Avila reacted too far in the opposite direction with his preferences. I would think the most reliable team is the one with at least some hitters that are going to be successful against whatever pitcher you have to face. Obviously you want the best hitters in general, but in the real world where you can't have that, I still wouldn't want a team where all the players profile with the same weakness whether it be the FB or off-speed.

I guess that's just part of the contradiction of China. They are reaching the point where trying to have it both ways is stressing the system. That and the increasing rigidity that Xi has brought into play. China's continuing political imperative over science approach to COVID is such a total repudiation of 40 yrs of work to become a techological, scientific power. It reminds me of nothing so much as Stalin's suppression of modern genetics and geneticists because Lamarkism was a better fit with his political ideology.

curious they would bother puttting Parker on the 40 if he can't hit the FB. Have to assume they think they can shorten him to the ball enough to change that. Good luck if that's the case.

read another story the other day that because of the basic drugery, plus policies like this, young chinese won't take factory jobs and industrial suppliers are struggling with a greying work force that is losing the ability to handle what are still in many cases, jobs that require physical strength and endurance. The demographics of factory employees skews even older than the rest of China's aging pop. The gov is in a quandry because if wages go up enough to bring the needed workers in, China's industrial competitive advantage gets frittered away. LOL - Welcome to the 1st world, sucker.

key tidbit: Sounds like the Generals are waiting for Lula to sweeten the pot for them before casting their lot.

Chinese policy is to lock employees in as a COVID defense. You can imagine not all the employees go for that for very long.....

exactly. But look at a modern box-score and tell me how many times the average manager makes a subsitution that matters in the modern game. Hardly worth the candle to worry about it. It's one of those effects which are out in the decimal places of winning percentage compared just having better hitters playing anywhere. Ironicallly, DD, the guy everyone cites as having the winning formulae, hardely cared a bit about handedness balance. We had a lot of massively right handed teams under his watch.

I do admit I don't understand the concern over whether your R/L hitting balance resides in the OF or the IF. You are sending the same net number of RH vs LH batters to face the pitcher regardless of where they play defense. I suppose it goes back to the modern fixation of having Swiss Army Knife like flexibility to have a thousand different subsitition possibilities in a modern game where virtually no-one ever substitutes/pinch hits/platoons in practice at all.

Despite my incipient addition to their ranks, it's still really too bad retirees have nothing to do all day on election day other than go vote.

career his OPS is 60 pts better as a RHB, which was about what the differential was last season. 616 OPS as a LHB last season - so indeed, not great.

The question for Harris is not so much whether he can bounce back, but how the odds of that compare to his confidence he can fill the position with an alternative. At this point Harris is the devil we don't know. Maybe he lands Drury or Anderson and makes us feel silly that we worried about whether we would have 3B covered. Or he doesn't and then we log the new guy's first failure.... I sort of take the attitude that until proven otherwise, I'm going to assume Harris is a star in the making and he's going to prove it to us by pulling rabbits out of hats that Avila didn't even know he had in his closet.