gehringer_2

starting to see a lot of IONIQs. Hyundai seems to be doing well with that.

they are projecting - and I'm sure they would agree there is a lot of uncertainty in all of it. Things nobody knows for sure: which of the two faces of Gleyber Torres will we see this season - so far it looks like the 2nd half guy - we hope it stays that way; How good was Colt's defensive learning curve at 2b and what will it be like at 1b? How much better could he have gotten with more reps at 2b, how many reps at 1st before he's at least neutral?; What is Colts ISO going to look like thise season?; Torkelson of course a huge unknown. A lot of assumptions had to made about what we would see from him this Spring - it was completely right not to leave themselves dependent on him. So far he is probably upsetting a lot of those assumptions but who knows if it will last? What I hope for in the FO is that they make a plan that has enough options so that they can adjust to whatever actually happens that wasn't plan A. As it stands, with Vierling and Meadows out - Carpenter spends his time in the OF and having Keith, Torkelson and Torres rotate through 3 open positions is no problem at all as the season opens. From then on, performance will probably sort things out.

I don't know how either system weights outright misplays, but for Colt most of his errors at 2b were early in the season - he played much cleaner in the 2nd half, so if the numbers we see are averaged over the whole season, I would argue that by the time he finished the season he was playing significantly better than his season aggregates. Hard to know exactly how much from what we have available, but of course the team has breakdowns over shorter intervals.

But it doesn't force the GOP to any table - they're the ones who don't care if it's all killed. Do the Dems think the GOP cares if they the dems decide to hold themselves hostages? It's like Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles. Not to mention the opposition will lose a ton if he decides the can shut down the federal courts as 'non-emergency'.

Granting all that, the question remains whether forcing a shutdown does anything but make Trump stronger. ‘Accelerationism’ is a nice buzzword,another intellectual construct, but I’m not seeing any real way a shutdown advances any practical increase in opposition power.

This.

Of course that contract also makes him a very attractive trade chip if some of them surpass him as well. Love your players, but never too much!

This is true. Long term, 1b is Tork’s to win back or not. If he hits 30+ again, the pressure would shift back on Keith, if not tough for Tork. That’s how it should always go.

appropos of that - from the UM consumer sentiment survey (courtesy of the Yahoo finance page)

Sure - this is where the dilemma lies - a movement does need to 'move' to stay alive, yet good long term strategy is always the most important thing. The shutdown is a reasonable debate to have - but if the votes were not there, it's a debate the party needed to have in private then then unify around a necessary outcome even if they don't like it. The preference for the big gesture over the hard work of change is one of the left's easiest critiques ('virtue signaling' etc.) and that probably applies here as well.

I sort of disagree with that as a general principle - you can say Al Kaline ended up at first base so they should have moved him there in 1956 because it was 'inevitable'. Players abilities do shift through their careers but you always want to take advantage of the best they can do for as long as they can do it. And I never count an MiLB player in decisions about major leaguers - just too many ways for them to fail before they ever play their first MLB game. Maybe if you have a guy at AAA already knocking down the door, but the Tigers best prospects are still too far away to bank on.

Right now he's extremely short to the ball, doesn't extend a lot, which netted him a 285 BA in the second half last season, but it's also a stroke that limits his power. Now for most young players I have no problem with that - learn to get the bat on the ball first then learn to pick your spots to swing away. But I think we agree that that means that at least at this point in his evolution as a hitter, he's not your ideal 1B ISO wise - at least not yet. The other thing for me is that I just hate to see anyone play below their defensive capability - decent defense with any kind of bat is too valuable at premium defensive positions. Now I guess if you think he was a lousy 2b that's not a concern. By mid-season I thought he was playing 2B pretty decently. So Torres has come out of the gate hitting well so sure - we maybe don't miss Keith's bat at 2b - but that's temporary. I would put the odds of Torres being a Tiger in 2026 at <10%.

I posted in the Trump thread why I think Schumer end point was right while his leadership has been all wrong - but again - the Dems are forming their typical circular firing squad in over a strategy that is too knee jerk, too short term, and too poorly thought out to begin with (i.e. forcing a shut down). Wasting their ammo on the wrong battles.

Not sure what aspect of 'Munich' you mean in particular. I can think of some ways we may have 'over learned' Munich if what you mean by Munich is in the sense of 'appeasement'. I would give you Vietnam, where by looking through the lens of Munich we saw Ho Chi Minh's nationalist movement in a more globalist threat context ("domino theory") than we maybe should have. Admittedly hard to put ourselves back in the ethos of 1960 though. One of the curious things about that era was that not even 20 years after the victory over Nazi tyranny, western policy intellectuals had already lost confidence that capital 'C' Communism wasn't the inevitable world outcome, that the best we could do was make a temporary space for ourselves in the "long twilight struggle" in which there was no hope of enduring victory.

TBH, I think a shutdown is the wrong strategy for the Dems. Trumps favorability ratings are falling, he's still basically ignorant and incompetent and will continue to generate failure and need to walk back his missteps - why give him a foil to divert attention for all he is doing to lose support? It's the old line about not interrupting your enemy when he is making mistakes. Not to mention that you give him more excuse to push for greater 'emergency' freedom of action and huge additional leeway to pick and choose who to punish and who to reward. Schumer's huge mistake was taking a position in the first place he now is walking back. Think it through before standing in front of the mics is always better. But the nearby microphone has always been Schumer's Achilles heel.

Versailles was the one lesson that the US learned well and was determined not to repeat. That one act of undeniably high international virtue bought us a ton of good will in the world that we have managed to pretty much completely squander - Vietnam, TGWOT, and now Trump. Three strikes and 'yer out.

by the 2nd half of last season his throws on the DP seemed to be picking up and were very accurate. Statcast only aggregates the whole season but Colt's maximum throws last season at 2b would be a little below average throws for a 3b, so he's not far off, but it could certainly be as much a matter of the re-injury risk going up if he pushes it that hard more often as would be required at 3b.

Schumer, after going public with a Senate Dem commitment to stop the CR, reverses course. I will let others argue the merits of letting the gov shut down vs taking a bad bill and letting the public steep in the GOPs priorities, but I will not accept that it was anything but bad strategy to announce a policy you find yourself walking back so quickly. If the possibility of the dems blocking the CR was real, Schumer never needed to say a word about that publicly. If the votes were actually there in his caucus he could have kept that leverage in his pocket right up until the vote, while leaving his options open for his members to take the temperature in their states and spike the effort if it wasn't playing well back home.

IDK, with scale things operate today, doesn't take many bad actors to produce a hell of big mess - best we don't let anyone start back down that path!

I remember the first time I landed at LAX in the early 70's. You could see the brown miasma settled in the basin as you flew in. Since it was sunny CA they still did not have jetways, it was the rolling stairways down onto the tarmac. When the door opened to the outside it took about 30 seconds for my eyes to start to sting. I wouldn't call the air in basin today great, but it's absolutely nothing like it was. Pittsburgh was another place I had to go a lot early in my working career. Everything was black from coal dust and soot regardless of what color it had started out. Again - you wouldn't believe how it was to see Pittsburgh today. OTOH - in Pittsburgh's case a whole industry did die to produce that change. The clean air and the jobs still there would have been a lot better.

They seem dead set against that. I give them a strong benefit of the doubt that the docs have mandated that - because if even if Tork weren't a factor, it would seem pretty dumb not to explore that.

Chafin came to this invite without his FB, which is probably the main reason it was only a NRI and why he's not going to make the team. Jobe: Stuff is universally praised, results don't match as often as the former would imply should be the case.

Yup - I do remember the idea at the time was if a pitcher could keep the hitter in CF he deserved a chance to get him out even if he hit it hard. I believe the other aspect as to why bigger in left than right, was because once the field was rotated to view the skyline, the 3rd base line ended up pointing SW, and the prevailing summer wind in MI is westerly - so it was possible LF was going to play smaller than it was built. In the end, the big scoreboard and Ford Field going up across the street meant that didn't happen, at least not enough to matter, though there are still days with strong westerlies when the ball flies out to left ridiculously easily.

I'd like to see the Dem's argue a lot less about "liberalism vs progressivism" and a lot more about figuring out practical ways to start running their party in a way that doesn't produce disasters like 2024.

This just goes to show that you are always going to be wrong when you try to deal in economic absolutes. Everything is relative - there are no truly 'free markets', they all have some kind of constraint - though the degree can very widely. There is no truly 'free' enterprise - every operation in a just state must in a way that meets social necessities such as safety. Etc, etc right down the line for any economic organizing principle you want to pick. All these idealized concepts are useful intellectual constructs, but none of them can ever be applied rigorously in the real world because the real world is far more complex and messy and full of humans with their own life imperatives for idealizations to be more than starting off points.