gehringer_2

I don't think wanting to go back to what worked in College captures what he said. He said he's trying to become more athletic at the plate which can only mean strength and flexibility to cover more of the zone. IF he does it, he will be leaving his old approach (mostly look for center cut pitches to drive) behind. But it's a very hard thing to do. For every guy like JD who finds greater success with a new approach, there are probably as many or more who learn the hard way that their long years of work has already converged them to the optimum solution for their capabilities and there is no upside in changing the approach.

It struck me that if he is making changes to get to more pitches so he can be more aggressive in the zone, that has to be what they want because that is what he needs to do. Also, early last year he was late a LOT, which is one symptom of trying to think too much/mental overload. I just want to see if he’s actually going look different, none of the talk about matters-what’s he going to hit? the other thing to note is that as successful as the coaching staff has been with pitching, they still really have no particular claim to success with their hitting prescriptions. They have not been churning out hitters that exceed expectations.

This is true on the CPU side, but they really dropped the ball on the GPU side. Sort of ironic that Intel IRIS probably once had 90% of the laptop basic video market but they never leveraged that expertise into the high performance end where AI has landed. I don't know enough to evaluate much of what I read about this either. One question is whether the ARM CPUs will eventually displace x86 since it is a more 'modern' design. The counter is the argument that CPU architecture doesn't really matter, only fab scale, and that the Apple M series only looks better now because they got to smaller scale fab faster than Intel and if Intel closes that gap, they will be producing X86 just as energy efficient and otherwise powerful as M series. That's the arg FWIW. I can't evaluate it one way or the other. It reminds me a bit of the arguments about micro-kernel operating systems, which sounded good on paper, but in the real world Linux pretty much blew up in the end (meaning it proved it didn't matter).

intel is in kind of a holding pattern. They've pored a lot of money in to building out foundry capacity that could be worth a ton if they execute well, or else will leave them in the toilet if they don't. And Trump saying he was unhappy with the terms of the CHIPS act the other day could be a downer. I expected more of a dip for all the foundries after that -- but nope. EDIT: as Del's post indicates, it's basically down to tea-leaf reading trying to guess if any of the players is going to end up significantly ahead or behind their competitors at the next fab gen. I think some analysts have been more sceptical about Intel just because they are having to make the biggest internal tech jump to catch up.

competitive balance tax (amount). The threshold was $237 last season. MLB.com says $241M for this season. The CBT number is not the same as the annual cash payroll amount as it's adjusted for deferrals etc.

Ivey was shooting .410 from three. That's probably never expendable.

geesh - maybe people don't like goalies, but to move them in front of even the Lawyers?

Last season the Tigers were 28th of 30 teams with a taxable payroll of $109M. This season there are currently at 19th at $145M. Ok - If you wanted to be a big meanie about it you *could* say 28th was starting from a small baseline. (BTW - The highest they have been recently is 3rd, 2017) (these numbers as per Spotrac - probably close enough to get the gist...)

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I agree with you up to here. I'm not seeing a ML hitter in Malloy yet either. And oddly he's got just a slightly different version but pretty much the same problem Torkelson does- he hasn't shown he can put strikes in play for hits. Once pitchers figured out to not let him walk, he hasn't done much either.

The thing with Torkelson is that even if he is committed to being a different kind of hitter, he might need 250 AB at AAA to work out the kinks, yet there is going to be a strong drive to fall back to what he's comfortable with if he's trying win a spot in ST. In that sense maybe telling him he has no spot so he's resigned to time at AAA is the right approach. (?)

yup. It will be hard for the pitching to look good if this IF plays down as far as it easily could.

I would bet this is the exact plan, unless Tork or Jung blow away expectations- and honestly, that’s pretty hard to do in 50 ST PA.

True, you can also do a pass through to another router, but then that's one more stop in the IP chain.

for the Sox probably, but the for Bregman it's still his best available estimator of where he should have gone.

yup - looking at his relative performance in the two venues, we probably should have just ignored all the talk from the beginning.

the advantage of a laptop rather than a phone I think. I find the site pretty unusable by phone, but the blockers on a PC browser are fairly effective. MTWG used to run a subscription service for the old site but said it was more costly to administer than it yielded. In general, if you are network savvy, apparently the best way to block ads at for you whole home network is at the DNS level using a raspberry PI at your router, but it only works if your router allows you redirect DNS, and if you are on ATT&T you are out of luck as it's locked down on their equip.

IDK, I think "I wanted to get more athletic and get out of the mechanics" is pretty much what they wanted from him. In the past Tork always wanted to take the same swing, but that swing didn't provide enough plate coverage. What he needs to do to succeed is put the bat wherever the ball is - i.e. by being athletic. Sort of like his buddy Riley, who swings in all kinds of different planes going to any field - to find the ball where it was pitched. If he can do that he'll be a better hitter but talk is talk, let's see what he can do. If he's actually made that big a shift, it does increase the odds he's going to start in Toledo to refine it if he can.

Reports about Baez health all seem to be glowing. Getting anything out of him this season would be an unanticipated bonus.

2 out of 3 ain't bad? You can be thoughtful and articulate and still have priorities and values that other people think are nuts.

ummm.. the January increase (0.5%) was more than the December increase (0.4%). The interesting question is whether Trump will be more worried about inflation or more dedicated to tariffs. In the current environment he can't be both because tariff's are a direct add-on to prices. Even if he were to get onshoring (which he won't without investment support) it will still be at the higher price level.

let's hope Edman is right about the roster move timing and this saga is over by the time the snow hits tomorrow.

exactly. You hope any tiger offers is commensurate with the Tiger analysts' handle on what was going on there.

In SE Michigan I'd consider 12 on the air sources pretty good. I'm more amazed there are 60 broadcast sources on the windy side of the lake.

I don't know how much the type of hitter per se that matters - when you start losing vision and processing speed it's going to get harder. What I think matters more is how good you were at your peak - it's how much loss of function you can sustain and still be a positive contributor. If your career best is 230/290/400 you're likely cut if you fall off 10%. If you were capable of 310/380/570 you may have a number of years of moderate decline when someone will still want you on their team.