gehringer_2

I've just started Kristen Kobes Du Mez' book "Jesus and John Wayne." Not sure where her core thesis is yet, but a lot of it seems to be toxic masculinity plus the profit motive of creating a "Christian" cultural state apart from the mainstream culture (music, film, travel, educational immersion etc). A curious thing is that I bet if you ask a white evangelical what they view as their top overall world threats beyond their domestic librul opposition, you know fundamentalist Islam would be right up there. And yet they share so much world view with their supposed enemy, starting with a society ordered around the power of men to suppress women. But it really shouldn't be that surprising I guess. Any philosophy's most virulent enemy is usually the one only one door down the logical system aisle.

/..sigh../ This is what happens when Law Schools become profit centers for schools with good reps.

I wasn't very clear - I was arguing the opposite. What I was arguing was the analyst/media/talking head consideration of the question of what the cut might be and whether a cut was bigger or smaller than that are both fundamentally political questions and thus the market does not and should not respond to them, but rather only to whatever cut actually was or wasn't made. -and of course to whatever the market judges as the likelihood that any given OPEC pronouncement is actually held to by its members!

I shouldn't laugh as I work in an institution every bit as triggered on all this as this example. The difference is I don't think what happens in academia has that much influence in the outside world and I tend to think reality is that the students are often quite reactionary to the prevailing academic orthodoxy anyway, so academia sows the seeds of an inverse intellectual pendulum swing in each generation.

LOL - on reread - to be honest I did misread you post a little. Your qoute was: I glossed too quickly at "experience at *winning* organizations* and took it as "experience in the organization" as in guys who know what's going on the current system. mea culpa

I will absolutely give Jim Harbaugh full credit as being 100% an advocate for players over programs. Always has been. That's no doubt part of why players come to play for him.

The level of navel gazing in Hollywood can reach some epic proportions. For instance, if you can't laugh over all the fall-out from Tilda Swinton's role in Dr. Strange you need a new sense of humor.

IIRC, One difference would be that Jackson was considered a can't miss prospect when we landed him from the Yankees. I don't know if Akil has ever gotten that level of buzz.

I get that argument that bad coaching shouldn't affect everyone because there are a lot of guys who are self coached to the point where they aren't going to be paying much attention to team coaching anyway and so you should get a distribution of guys having normal years. But on the other hand I also believe there is a team synergy to hitting. The more men on base and the more scoring pressure a team puts on the opposition pitcher, the more that stress should result in improved opportunities for your hitters. I don't know how many BA points it might be worth, but I think the effect is probably real. That said, one of the Tigers' biggest single problems this season is either not swinging at or not barreling up the opposition pitcher's hittable mistakes - I don't know how you explain that.

also lost time to TJ.

Ridiculous windmill tilt since they've all already been reviewed. it would be nice to have a legal system in the US that at least still pretends to be attached to reality.

She's a putz

Don't give a rat's ass about Ethereum but I'm hoping this puts a whole ton of high performance video cards on the market cheap.

the 'expected' cut (or increase) is a basically a political outcome and is driven by political factors. The actual world production/consumption balance is what it is independent of that. If OPEC made a cut that was smaller than expected that is a measure of the political/policy unity inside OPEC vs what was expected of that unity, it doesn't mean (at least in the eyes of traders) that the cut that was made was or wasn't enough to firm up prices. Enough decided it was to increase the price. It's a measure of the artificiality in the stock market that stocks don't behave this way (e.g. if Amazon makes a lot of money, but less than expected, their stock may still fall). But that's the difference between a piece of paper (or digital entry) representing a share of stock, and a real consumable product with real inventory/supply/demand factors responding to price and vice versa.

there was never anything wrong with Al's stated objectives, it was always his execution, and his trading, that left too much to be desired.

IDK, this can cut both ways. I might look at the logic from the opposite direction: Who cares what the Tiger system is now or how it functions? It's a failed system. I want a different organization based on a different model with different function. I don't care about the blueprints of the old house if my objective is to tear it down and build a new one. I guess it comes down to your tolerance for revolution vs evolution. Not to make this political but just to speak to how change works in general, evolution in large orgs like countries is certainly more successful than revolution. I think as orgs get smaller that becomes progressively less true, but I don't really have any insight to which side of the ledger something like an MLB franchise might be on.

Things are not completely hopeless even from this angle. Don't forget, Chris was Mike's right hand for a long time before he passed. He has been moving in baseball management circles for a long time and may well know a good number of people individually well enough to have some impression of them. I think we tend to write off C. I. as some kind of super lightweight because the Tigers have not accomplished anything - and he's not the most polished guy in his presentation, but to keep it in perspective, it would seem that the rest of Ilitch empire has been doing well under his management and it's not been an easy time for any business to navigate, so I have to assume he is not any kind of fool even if he is not a Theo Epstein baseball wise. In short, I don't think C.I. faces any better or worse odds of finding the GM he needs than any other average MLB owner.

In all the years of reading Henning, the only column I ever read where he seemed to actually know something that was not easy conventional wisdom that did end up happening what that they were going to move Granderson. But OTOH, by this point you can chalk that up to the stopped clock being right twice a day since we have learned that Lynn is *always* proposing they move their best players for some new pot of gold, even if it's often mythical.

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.