gehringer_2

If you compare stats to the player who may be the best in history at his position not in the HOF, you will get outcomes like that.....

American society has turned "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" on it's head. Today it's all the random drug, gun, pollution and public health disaster death that the pursuit of profit and power can buy.

Protected from same side pitching Haase and Barnhardt are potentially both slightly above average hitters at their position. This move is exactly the kind of unspectacular mid-level roster depth building move that the Tigers seldom made under the previous FO's feast (and famine) trading style.

Surprising that as thin as the catching market is, we didn't seem to be bidding against much to get him. Obviously most teams thought the Reds would just decline his option and they'd approach Barnhardt as a FA if they were interested, but it turned out it required very little to motivate the Reds to give the Tigers the right to exercise his option. I give Al some credit here for seeing an easily exploited angle that the competition apparently ignored. Considering what the Mets paid McCann a team waiting for Barnhardt to go to free agency to save a million or two was probably miscalculating anyway.

Hasse has a 250 pt platoon split (OPS) and hit HRs at twice the rate against LHP. His non-counting stats will benefit quite a bit by having his PAs against RHP limited.

That one could cut either way. It could be they always had Barnhardt catch their the bad starters so they'd have more support. One assumes the Tigers' new generation of back office nerds were all over those numbers though......🤓

at this point all I want from the catcher spot is a decent OBP. Just don't make an out every time up. Barnhardt is 324 OBP for his career. That's 40 pts better than Wilson Ramos or Greyson Greiner last yr. That's an improvement I can live with. Haase's OBP is poor also so he has to keep hitting the long ball to be useful.

Smoltz did return to one observation several times that I think may be spot on and maybe is more generally applicable they he even gives it credit for - which is that maybe on the reasons we are seeing this huge shift in the way managers handle pitching and the decreasing value of starters is nothing more than the familiarity factor. There used to be fewer teams and each team had fewer pitchers. In particular for starters, most teams a Lolich or Gibson faced knew them really well. So you really had to have a lot of tools in the toolbox to have been a successful starter. There are so many team and each team has twice as many pitchers, todays batters just never get familiar with the guys they are facing - esp the relievers - this gives relievers a huge advantage compared to the 'old days'. All a reliever has to do is look different and that can get him through as many innings as any other team will see him for. In that calculus coming in fresh and strong begins to mean more than not being a pitcher with a good variety of pitches. The only question is why it took baseball so many years after expansion and pitching staff increases to actually start managing to current conditions. Probably because it takes a long time for the culture in coaching and management to change. Look at how long the 3 pt shot existed before basketball finally started being played to take full advantage of it - it was decades.

absolutely. It was quite strange. The traditional playoff team's dilemma is usually which regular starters give up their role because you don't need 5 in the players. The Braves were pretty much down to 2 starters and they still managed to win.

You can bank on the Tigers trying to make more moves quickly. That seems to be Avila's MO.

it did strike me that once it looked like there would be no game 7 Fox's attention did seem to shift to football. 🙄

so if what I just read is correct, once the 1b and runner both miss the bag, it's not enough for the 1b to just step on the bag, it becomes a tag play. To get the out, Fried either had to tag Brantley before he returned to the base after running by, or the Braves had to do a regular appeal play where the pitcher goes the rubber - steps off etc and they ask for a ruling that Brantley missed the base. The didn't do either so they forfeited their chance to get the out called by not doing either of the correct procedural options. If they had gone to replay all it would have proved is that Fried didn't tag Brantley. https://larrybrownsports.com/baseball/video-braves-challenge-max-fried-michael-brantley-first/586498

Solid deal. Kind of a So-So player but one that fills a need that will still provide value given the context of the Tiger's weakness at the position. And sure, it's mostly about the salary. Agreed $7.5 does seem high for what Burkhardt can do but it's a seller's market in catchers. Quintana's chances of turning into anything are vary small at this point. He's just enough to call it a trade rather than a pure contract dump.

Cunningham going to have to change his first name to Mason. We're going to need some posts on what terrible early games some past stars have had.

Hopefully Correa has been lowering his $$ with every out he he has made in this WS.... 🙄

I absolutely could not make it through the day with a mask that hung from my ears - so I wear one that ties behind my head. Problem solved.....

I wonder if Va will scare the Dem Congressional caucus in DC into cooperating a little better? Probably not.

that was not going to be workable unless the vaccinated agreed to have their foreheads branded. In America dishonesty is just too high to give people the option of working on the honor system.

Wings with an exhibition of terrible passing tonight.

For your comparison, Maine, Vermont and Hawaii have death rates comparable or better than Canada. The State with population over 5 million with the lowest death rate is Washington, at 1145/M. The state over 10 million population with the lowest death rate is NCar, at 1729. So basically every large state in the US has issues either on the urban poverty side or the conservative vaccine refusal side, or both.

you could be looking through the Hubble, there'd still be no trace.

The way I read the allegory is that there is no moral responsibility for an evil action prior to moral knowledge. It's interesting that some of the Greeks took it in a different direction and said evil (sin) comes through lack of knowledge - that no-one who understands that something is evil would do it. So a perfectly knowing person would never commit an evil act. I guess I can see how either view works.

It's 3:55, do you know where your left tackle is?

all we had on our ballot today were city charter amendments. The joke is that they increase the authority of the city Managers, who are regularly fired by the City Council when they get caught between competing priorities of the mayor vs the council. It's really silly. We really just need to upgrade the Mayor's job and do away with the city admin, but we nurse this myth we are somehow above having normal mayoral politics.

Of course the rich part is that the devil is never explicitly named Lucifer anywhere in the Bible. There is a reference to the 'Son of the Dawn' in Isaiah, which in Latin sort of translates to "Lucifer" (used by Wycliff and kept by the KJV translators) but the referent could as easily have been to fallen Babylonian royalty as to the devil, who actually gets almost no mention in the OT after the serpent in Genesis other than in Job, and it's a different kind of character there. All of our common demonology is Renaissance recapitulation of old Babylonian paganism. It has almost nothing to do with the Hebrew Bible and not much with the N.T. either.