gehringer_2

I don't know how much is Blashill and how much is a team that is just out of gas and out of hope of beating the teams they are playing that are just better than they are. You can chase people around the ice that are faster and stronger than you are only so much of a season before the talent difference wears a team out mentally and physically. The problem now for Blashill is that even if it's not 'him' in any objective way, his coaching credibility has been eroded away by so many losing seasons that it may not be possible for him to turn it around with the Wings anymore even if he is a good coach in the abstract, and who knows if that's true at this point? But this roster is still going to be too weak to win next year and maybe even another, so that probably means the next round will be another another young 'disposable' coach as placeholder.

dept of baseball salary weirdness: just noticed this on JD Martinez's BR page: for the Tigers: 4 yrs, 13.52 WAR, $9,750,000 for the Sox 4 yrs, 12.5 WAR, $90,600,000

Oh! Wait! I know! I know!...It'll come to me in second!....

Jax could only take Walker 1 after the Lions trade their pick....

what war (me) are you talking about, what's (ME) really important(ME!), here is (ME ME ME!) is that we keep (ME ME ME!) the dems in check (ME!)

Hmm, 'some of".."? I guess if that's Seider and Raymond I care, if it's any of the rest of the under performing crew (Zadina, Veleno, Rasmussen etc), not so much. I suppose if anything it's surprising there there hasn't been more dissention on a team that's losing this much. If they've tuned Blashill out there isn't much you can do but dump him. Like they say, you can't get rid of the whole team.....well, wait - you actually could get rid of pretty much this whole team less 5 guys and be no worse off. Stiil, it seems unlikely (to me) Yzerman would do anything until the end of the season.

Lynn apparently decided his hit rate was falling off too precipitously. Classic click-bait if there ever was. There is less than nothing of substance here. And FYI Lynn, what counts against big-league pitching is...RESULTS.

IIRC, Lanier was pretty strong against Kareem. I always wonder what Big Bob could have accomplished on a good team.

so far in ST Greene (450) and Torkelson(375) are #1 & #2 in OBP on the team. I suppose they could both crash and burn in the next week, but seems unlikely.

well, war is hell. We have journals that my dad wrote in WWII in the pacific that he didn't send because of the censors that shed a little light on why there weren't some Japanese POWs taken in that war.....

>national treasure? yeah - I don't always agree with Kareem but he is an honest an perceptive thinker. if he had a piece of sheepskin from an Ivy instead of NBA championship rings maybe we'd be able to listen to him instead half of the gas bags like Sharpton the media normally goes to for racial commentary. Of course I have no idea if Kareem cares about having a higher commentary profile. He definitely has always marched to his own drum.

second reference I've seen to the Russians leaving their dead behind. I bet that does wonders for Morale. Then again, since the poor conscripts may actually trust the Ukrainians to have more respect than their own commanders.....

Rosemary Wood's ghost still haunts the White House!

I think as of this moment the job is Victor's to lose, which he could still do, but so far he has shown a little more patience and has hit the ball hard in the air, and that is what they wanted from him.

this was good:

well, that's kind of fun.

Panetta? Did they have to get him out of cryo-storage for the quote?

would have loved a blood sample on Smith. If you watch the clip he was having a good time laughing 10 seconds before he went ape. Mood instability/impulse control etc. Reasonable markers for some kind of impairment...

actually, sanctuary for Putin is somewhere the Chinese might be able to make themselves useful. It seems doubtful Putin would go, but that's probably based more on the image he projects for himself than his reality. In the end most of these guys don't actually have the personal courage to stand their ground till death.

yeah - that was about as far as I've seen a ball hit to right at Lakeland.

Do they? Guys like Kronwall, Mantha and Anathasiou and Glendening were limited but did provide some kind of talent floor. in Glendening's and Kronwalls cases esp there were getting old so they were getting worse but they still haven't been replace by players better than they were before they aged out. DeKeyser is terrible but he wasn't before he was hurt. You've get Sieder, Bert, Vrana, Larkin. The whole rest of the roster is still minor league unless the two new guys start to show something different.

It's funny that for all these years the diamond has not been square. It's a pretty small difference in the overall scheme of things, but the diamond should be square and now it isn't. The biggest diff will be 1st to 2nd on a steal where your cutting down the distance by half the bag? That is significant. When the batter is rounding the bases bringing the base in will probably be of more marginal value because the sharper turn has the counter balance of slowing you down.

My favorite part was that supposedly Denzel told Smith afterward "It's when you're on top, the Devil comes for you" LOL - Denzel should be somebody's grandmother.

and just to expand on the last point, it's actually wonderful that the US is self-critical, the only issue I have is that too often we are self-critical about silly things "The President told the truth! Reactions at 11:00" and not critical enough about important things - for instance the way so much of the US journalism fell in behind the invasion of Iraq. ( or even 'Gulf of Tonkin' in its day FTM )

just for grins, if Merkel had said this out loud about Trump, what do we think the reactions from various quarters would be? Probably along the same lines as we have now? In Europe: "Of course!", the GOP: "c'est Terrible!", Dems: "Another person roasted for telling the truth by accident" and so on.... ...The difference would be that unlike the NYT and WaPO, Die Welt would all be: "You go girl!" .