gehringer_2

I don't think Dingler's bat has shown enough to get him to the majors yet. Maybe it will next season but if I'm playing GM he hasn't converted his prospect status to eventual MLB contributor yet. That and the fact that Rogers' bat is not getting any preview this season makes C pretty wide open for next season: Haase plus unknown unknowns.

yes. People need to be clear eyed. No one can let down their guard or relax. You can be sure Putin has at least one more throw to make.

Part of it is that most guys would suffer in any comparison to Barnhart, who is really good back there. But even Ozzie Smith had to hit to stay in the majors. You can acknowledge Tucker's excellence with the glove and still be clear it doesn't buy him 250+ MLB ABs if he can't OPS 550.

always.double.down

Haase should have played more this season. He couldn't get out of his own way in April so it put his numbers in a hole for the whole season, but from May 1 forward his OPS is > 800 over 250 PA. I get that they wanted to get Barnhart going and they liked his receiving, but they needed the hitting more. Again, what has the focus of this organization been? Is there any discernable? Winning? Player development? Or just an ad hoc mishmash of playing guys you happen to want to regardless of any movement forward with a consistent concept?

For me it goes back the same argument that baseball is not really much a spectator sport anyway. The appeal of baseball was always that people watched it because they could identify vicariously with the players because they had played baseball. In the older generation even the women played in grade school, played softball in co-rec leagues with their guys, etc. That's is all disappearing and that is what baseball cannot fix by trying to turn the game into something 'entertaining' that it never was in the first place. They might someday come up with a successful mass market product, but it's connection to baseball as it was known to the generations born before 2000 will be incidental. Cultures change. Baseball as we knew it is/going to be a casualty.

banning the shift is the wrong answer to the right question because it introduces a set of totally unnecessary variables for the rules to fret over forever (can this fielder be 'here' or does he have to be 'there') in place the absolute simplicity of 'a fielder can play where-ever he wants to" that managed to serve for a century - until they rabbited the ball that is. But it's the modern American affliction: When you break something, you can never admit it and just put it back, you have to go 100 yards out of your way to change any and everything in the environment so you can deny you ever broke what you clearly did, and all without ever getting back to where you really want to be.

Not to mention that repatriated solders could be a destabilizing force in Russia. Putin's hero - Stalin, knew that all too well, which is why he threw so many returning solders like Solzhenitsyn who had seen too much in Europe into the Gulag.

except that deadening the ball would have been more effective than banning the shift. Banning the shift doesn't decrease the incentive to swing for the fences and strike out at all- it only increases it because you have decreased the penalty for that approach. Sure, there will be more base hits, but not because batters are doing anything to actually play for the base hit rather than the HR.

Dickerson was saying steals were up in the minors with the pitch clock and throw over rules, so the premium on top defensive catchers is only going to go up. Of course throwing is only one aspect of a catcher's defense and I don't think it's his throwing (his CS% is bit above league average) as much as his receiving that is the knock on Hasse.

Mess up his hair up a little more and he could pass for Michael Shrieve at Woodstock.

9 hits and a walk for Greene, Tork, Carpenter, Kreidler.

Foreign Affairs is paywalled, but they appear to have a 'one free article' exemption. I just used it to read a piece by Timothy Snyder that lays out the stakes in Ukraine against a backdrop of all of western history. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraine-war-democracy-nihilism-timothy-snyder?utm_medium=social

Contract and service time rules can make teams (and fans) impatient with guys who need time to get their command together after a TJ. Some guys snap right back, but not all. I think sometimes if results aren't there immediately the temptation is to write guys off when they still have a shot at more improvement.

Speaking of BaBIP, Carpenter with over 60 MLB PA, an 840 OPS on only a 308 BaBIP. Who knows if he will just flame out but that's a fair start for a guy who was given zero chance of making the majors 5 months ago.

a lot easier to score runs when you hit the ball out of the park. HRs for Haase and Candelario. Tigers up 4 in the 2nd.

IDK, I think all the historical claptrap is how he sells that he's doing something wonderful for Mother Russia, which in turn is motivated by his need to maintain his standing. Probably in the end it doesn't matter which is the chicken and the egg. Does he play to being Peter the Great to buttress his standing with the henpecked Russian who is willing to live vicariously through the glory of the state that has denied life, liberty and the pursuit in his own life, or is it the fact that he fancies himself Peter the Great Pt Deux that enamors himself to those same Russians, I tend to see the two things as inextricably linked.

It's a weird calculus. The war was fundamentally a political tool to maintain his domestic standing - so he has to maintain the fantasy that it remains cost free - at least to the Great Russian population. Ukraine has succeeded in making it very difficult for him to win the war without imposing more of exactly the kind of hardship in Russia that the was was supposed to distract from. OTOH, to lose the was removes the distraction from the level of hardship that he had to distract from in the 1st place. It would be sooo much more convenient if someone in the inner circle prepped a bullet with Vladdy's name on it. That seems medieval in 'modern' Europe, but since Putin has proven himself a medievalist in spades it would be that much more appropriate.

I don't believe the people around him would let him when it's a war of choice and not an existential threat - because the Generals would have to know, even if Putin doesn't, that if Russia does that in the service of pure war of aggression/expansion, they *will* face retaliation in kind.

you just *had* to post that didn't you? That should about guarantee we see it in about 5 yrs......

didn't think it would take long for that shoe to drop.

Cruel reality dosage for the day.

agreed. Not sure rules like this will be enough to put me off the MLB, but they are getting close.

so just to be perfectly crystal clear, I'm taking the news coming from Ukraine as unalloyed good news. I'm not selling any "don't poke the bear too hard" cards. That said, it seems that if the Ukrainian offensive consolidates the gains it is currently promising to make, it *has* to puncture the balloon of unreality Putin has inflated around himself - doesn't it? I mean, we are coming down to a real test of George Orwell's ultimate vision. Someone tweeted (so consider the source at your own risk) that some brave souls in St. Petersburg (the most European of all Russian cities) were calling for Putin's removal.

it's a little bit to cut down on the distance by an inch or two, which will make the steal very very marginally easier, but I think it's also partly additional safety - more room for both the runner and fielder to be on the base the rest of the time.