gehringer_2

The positive part is that there is only one team in the division playing particularly well. The bad part is that it's not like Cleveland is playing so well they are bound to fall back and be easier to catch. I wouldn't count on a WC coming out of this division either.

I still have concerns I don't see the way out of. On the offensive side, my confidence level that Javy, Gleyber or Carpenter are going to add that much is low.. All three are fast joining the ranks of those those whose name has to be prefaced with 'the oft-injured.' Will any of them be able to stay on the field once back? Not to mention Javy isn't that big an offensive add under any circumstance. And Parker is already only about half a mis-step away from being a 'might have been' The pitching talent is going to be there, but you still have the problem of how you get Jansen and Flaherty off the field. It's not going to do any good to have better young arms able to pitch if the team keeps sending those two guys out there anyway. This management has been pretty bad about cutting bait on its mistakes in a timely fashion (Kenta?). How many games are they going to let those two lose?

so for the sake of argument, if the Piston's sit and wait and no-one else offers what happens?

KM should have clobbered that 1-1. Just couldn't barrel it. But hitting the 3-2 works too.

Vierling couldn't catch up to Rogers FB that AB

And they got Mookie Betts for Verdugo and have been laughing about it ever since.

You can't play every possible edge to win every game, and do player development at the same time. Hinch should be managing a rich team that buys fully finished product players. I love how he manages pitchers but I've come to question whether he is the manager you want on team that will have to always have a lot of young players coming up that need to play through their troubles and development. Hinch won't manage that way. He's too proud of his ability to push all the buttons.

Because the probabilities multiply with adjacent batters, offense gets bad by a higher order when you put really bad hitters in the lineup. If you send 3 guys to the plate in an inning with less than 300 OBP, you're chances of scoring are poor. If it's 3 guys with 250 OBPs it got worse by more than just 16.7%. You can't play good enough defense to make up for that. If it were one guy you were putting in a team what could score that would be on thing, but that 7-8-9-1 last game had no chance to do anything, they were just giving away half the innings in the game.

the platoon thing has gone off the deep end - it's like they aren't even thinking about what they are doing. You want to go by the numbers, fine: Lets say Colt's OPS split is 250 - (and I'd wager it would be less than that if he playing everyday), and he is 800 against RHP - he's still a better option against a LHP than Short by 200 OPS points! Any strategy is only as good as the players you have to implement it. The guy on the team that may have the best contact skill right now on a team literally dying for it, and he can't stay in the lineup.

I've got news, we are desperate. Besides, giving yourself more time is never a bad negotiation strategy. Thing is, at this point I don't know if I want Harris making the deals.

They are getting something out of Valdez, but Flaherty and Jansen have been mistakes. We can talk injuries all we want, but those two aren't getting their PT because other guys are injured. And Verlander? What can you say other than predictable outcome.

that's the conclusion I've come to. At this point everyday they wait value returned goes down, while the team just gets further behind anyway.

Tork gets his average back to 200!

nice little rally runs out of gas on the soft underbelly of the lineup.

7-8-9-1 four batters in a row, 162, 156, 125, 181. Best odds of two consecutive hit is 2.5%, that's once in 40 times through the order.

QFT

Montana is doing something like this also. Corporations operate under state law. A state can decide what kind of corporate structure and purpose they allow. I'm sure there will be some kind of challenge under the ICC eventually but we'll see. The flaw in Citizens United has always been the fallacy that sits at its heart, which is that the 'corporation' has some kind of independent existence and thus some kind of standing under the constituion. They do not, they are 100% the creation of statute law, and thus what they may and may not do under terms of incorporation must be subject to statute law under any consistent logic. State legislatures could decide tomorrow that every current corporation in America ceases to exist and then recreate corporate existence on a different set of operating principles.

the argument going into the season was that if you had a chance to win, keeping him through the season would be worth more than any likely return. So the part about the return not being great hasn't changed, what's changing rapidly is his potential value to a team that isn't going anywhere. How good does the return have to be to be more valuable than the difference between finishing 4 and 5th? Chasfh is correct you can't really do anything until he is pitching again, but that could still be substantially before the deadline.

mistake was probably made years ago when they decided to have one super fund instead of breaking things up by municipality or district where each fund could be judged against its peers. Now trying to reform it is a too big to fail situation.

No, you save that for your left fielder....

so given this and your post about the likely future of any Tiger team that went 2-15 - is the inescapable conclusion that the only rational thing to do is offer him (and anyone else over 26 that will bring back value) in trade while there are still 4 months left in the season? If you're ever going to get to the top of the mountain you have be ruthless in your self-evaluation.

so for this season, Jack's best inning is his second with a 2.45 ERA. In the first inning of his 11 starts he has a 5.7 ERA with 6 walks, 15 K and 3 HR. But still, since for Flaherty so much of his success seems tied to his FB velo - it he can come out throwing hard that could be a key to better success in short outings. OTOH, throwing harder might send his command completely into the toilet. But what else are they going to do? They have to try to get some kind of value out of him.

Thing is, even if Hueter ends up on the 60 eventually with a more serious muscle strain, that's probably a decision they would normally prefer not to make until a week or more on the 10 day after they see how it's responding. Of course what they 'prefer' to do is probably swirling down the drain with the rest of team's chances.

this is true. But to be fair, I think there is at least some synergy to hitting; as the number of dangerous hitters in a lineup falls, it gets easier for the opposing pitchers overall and I think that tends to make it tougher for the rest of the hitters as well. Or another way to put it is that unless you are Barry Bonds, it's tougher to be a good hitter on a bad hitting team.

yeah - the guys I would care least about losing are position players but that's a mismatch since it's pitchers that are coming back.