mtutiger

Finish your thought.

Not really, it's about building depth in the minor leagues that can be useful when injuries and attrition inevitably happen. Avila did not use the waiver wire like this. He just didn't. We all acknowledged this as an issue when Avila was GM. Now that Harris is here, it gets mocked. I dont get it.

It's the humorous part, but it may be the most important part of what he's doing. Guys like Mario Feliciano and Andy Ibanez are pretty solid options to have as non-40 man guys if the team gets hit with injuries at those particular positions. With any luck, maybe it means the days of Jacob Robson or Josh Lester types getting ML ABs might be over.

I disagree, I would call it meaningful right this moment. This organization needed depth, and it increasingly has more having added players who are former prospects and / or have had previous major league experience. And it isn't Avila-esque. There is this tendency to want to discount it because it may be low risk, but when the alternative was the previous guy who wouldn't even make these sorts of low risk decisions, it counts as progress.

The way I see it, there are multiple players on last years 40 man roster (Brendon Davis, Angel De Jesus, etc.) who are no longer on the 40 man and still in the org. It's progress, and it is a pretty big example of not being an Avila "paint by numbers" approach. Money or risk is kind of irrelevant, Avila did not do this stuff, which seems notable.

McCarthy bringing in the closer....

What if, and hear me out here, there are transactions that can still take place between now and Spring Training?

So what? It's an example of how Harris isn't Al Avila or a "paint by numbers" approach, which was the point being made.

I'm shocked to learn that Andy Ibanez isn't actually the plan to be 3B in 2022.

But to my point, it's also nothing like Al Avila's "paint by numbers" approach either

Add Biggs, he's 4. Harris was the shakiest, he just flipped. The other holdouts (Crane, Rosendale) are basically where the worm turns...

Norman and Gosar seem big, they didn't seem gettable to me. There's gonna be a lot of pressure on the remaining folks to flip. But the agreement is also delicate as well.

I get it, I just don't think Mike White's vision is germane to the comment

Entertainment that contains social commentary is , at the end of the day, entertainment. People watch entertainment for a variety of reasons, not one given reason or even for the reasons intended by its creator. And given the size of the audience, probably not worth psychoanalysis of an entire shows audience. Anymore than me making up a psychoanalysis of Yellowstone's audience would be (a show which I'm guessing has a significant overlap with White Lotus and Succession despite having a much different commentary/POV)

Not sure this makes the original comment any less ridiculous. Believe it or not, people may watch The White Lotus for reasons other than envy of the ultra wealthy

All of the flips are positive for McCarthy, but it really comes down to the resolve of the holdouts....

A few more votes picked up, but still defeated in the Gs

Harris began this offseason with making a calculated risk on Jeimer Candelario - he let him walk when the safest and easiest thing to have done would have been to settle on resigning him for more than what he was worth on the open market. The response by the fan base to the fact that 3B is still an open question shows that risk IMO

Apparently the waiver wire must not count, because that has been nothing like Al's approach.

At what point does Kevin earn the nickname "Sisyphus"?

The other comment here - people thought January 6th would be yesterday's news come election time 2022 and yet it ended up being a bigger factor than people realized.

Bacon's comment likely reflects his own district some - the district (essentially Omaha) gave Biden an EC vote in 2020. And the possibly the only reason he was reelected in that year was that the nominee wasn't good and was a little too far to the left of the median voter. But the other part of this is that, along with Bacon's district, there are about 15 other districts that voted for Biden in 2020 where Rs represent. Chaos in the US House of Representatives comes with a lot of peril for those districts and, by extension, the GOP majority - flipping just a handful of these districts would flip the House. I do think it's a fair point to point out that overperformance, but past isn't necessarily prologue and guys like Bacon or Fitzpatrick aren't necessarily going to be feel comforted by that either.

Good Lord, they're just entertainment lol

All of which can still happen this offseason. Again, I think there's an implication by some that Harris is just sitting back and not trying to do anything because there hasn't been a lot of buzz, and that is pretty unfair. But in any free agent market, players have a decent amount of leverage, even those at the lower end of the market. This team won 66 games last year... teams that are unsuccessful generally don't have the same kind of leverage that teams who win more games do. Last years Tigers likely stand as a good example... they won 77 games and did manage to have a decent offseason on paper in the free agent market. But I keep preaching patience because the offseason isn't over yet. Maybe a couple of free agent signings happen and/or a trade or two. Even now, we are a couple of these kinds of transactions away from all of the laments about the Tigers offseason being made obsolete. Maybe nothing additional happens, and I'm fine with the criticism at that point. But a lot of epitaphs are being written about this offseason while it is still ongoing, and it's kinda puzzling

They aren't going to give up their majority. If the rest of the caucus are embarrassed, they need to figure out a way to isolate them. This happens all the time at the state level, in Texas, Speakers have been elected for years with Democratic votes. That will be happening in Ohio this upcoming year, Pennsylvania will have a coalition government, Alaska, etc.