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The funny part to me about this assessment is that the Sopranos is being compared to a show that exists in its current form only because of how the Sopranos influenced and changed TV. I don’t mean this as a knock on the post or the poster, just that, to oblong’s point, it is hard to fathom just how groundbreaking the Sopranos was at the time it came out, since there had been literally nothing like it before.

I remember at the time thinking they could have done 14 or so seasons, one for each year prohibition actually ran for. They certainly could have gotten a lot more mileage out of it, and maybe that was their stretch goal for the series. I seem to remember they had to wrap it up in a hurry because it was suddenly canceled, so the time jump from the early middle of prohibition all the way to the end was pretty jarring. I’ll probably go back and rewatch it at some point because it was otherwise so damn great.

Sounds like they’re being judgmental, broadly assumptive, and presumptuous.

But hey, we have the Gulf of America now! We are great again!

Not necessarily. Maybe the Tigers require their players to upload video of their swings during the offseason so coaches can review it and feed back. (I think I even read that somewhere although I'm not inclined to run around trying to find a link.) And maybe they require the players to view the video before they upload it and provide the coaches their own impressions of their own swings in order to make the process a collaborative dialogue between them, versus a top-down distillation of coach-to-player instruction. I admit this one is just ... ahem ... baseless speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if that were the case. Would that surprise you? Maybe that's not the way everyone would do it, but if this is the case, it would certainly be the Tigers' prerogative to establish who has the primary task of assessing video, right? And it may well be on the players, most of whom are not exactly in a position to throw up their hands and protest, "hey, itsa no my job". After all, coaches can't travel to all of however many players' offseason homes at all times to work with them on their swings on a one-on-one basis. So why wouldn't a team require players, especially those with swing issues—which is probably most of them—take an active role in creating, uploading, and assessing video of their own swings? I also don't think ballplayers have to be necessarily university-educated in kinesiology to have a good idea of how their bodies actually move versus how they should move. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that players on balance know a lot more about body movement dynamics than some folks give them credit for. After all, their careers depend on knowing this. And theirs is a much more savvy tech generation than any that have come before them.

lol, oh really? I have directed nothing toward you, the person—I even said you'd made a good point about Tork—and yet you are offended by my opinion and are taking it very hard, and weirdly personally, and insulting me in the process. I guess trying to make sense of that is also a fool's errand. Look, we can stop here and part friends if you want. I'd rather, if you don't mind.

Accuracy is not the point.

I think people like these are outliers. People are getting exactly what they voted for, and it's not the economy.

Just can’t quit me, huh? 🤣 Well, first of all, I was not “acting as if pure assumptions are fact.” My post was littered with qualifiers such as “I suppose”, “I think”, and “I believe”. If I was stating something as though it were fact, I wouldn’t have used any of those qualifiers. Secondly, you’re not going to succeed at shaming me for spouting my opinion on an Internet opinion board, so you might as well stop trying to do that and go back to talking about the Tigers instead. 😁

I would bet it’s easier and more effective for a coach to watch the video and then show the video to the hitter and point out what he sees and give him the coaching with the visual aid, than it is for the coach to watch the video and keep the video away from the hitter and then try to explain what he saw on the video and then give him his coaching without the visual aid.

And the funny part is they are so far up their own ass on it that there is no chance they can step back and see it for what it is.

is the Alarmist Non-sense part? Are we having Alarmist Non-sense yet?

I think the reason is that there are different groups of people who have different goals. The oligarchs want to steal all our money and create a new Gilded Age (a term Trump explicitly used to describe his goal) of wealth and income inequality; the so-called Christian nationalists want to create an explicitly Christian nation in law and custom, presumably in preparation for Jesus to come back and do whatever their churches tell them he wants to do; and the white supremacists want to reestablish hegemony in the United States. And by “white supremacists”, I don’t mean just people with Nazi armbands who march with tiki torches—that’s too facile and easily dismissible. I mean ordinary everyday people in our communities who have regular jobs and live in kept-up apartments or own homes or maybe small businesses and go to ballgames and do community stuff. Your neighbors. My neighbors. A lot of people are jealous their grandparents and great-grandparents got to enjoy that hegemony. They want that, too. Not all the Trump people want the exact same things, but they will form whatever alliance they need to achieve their peculiar goal, irrespective of what anyone else wants. As for plans, I can’t presume to tell anyone what they should do for themselves. Our plans are our own. I think most people in opposition to what’s happening will stay the course and try to weather the changes, hoping things will change back to the way they were, maybe next year or in a couple years or with the next president or something. That’s a plan, probably the easiest plan and, arguably, a fairly risky one. Other people might have more drastic plans as you imply. Either way, it would probably behoove people to consider what the possibilities are and to think ahead to how they want to respond to the changes. Because the absence of a plan, the pretending that everything is still normal and nothing has changed except the guy at the top, may end up being the riskiest course of all, even though avoiding thinking about any of it may be best for our mental health in the short run.

Are they using canned crowd noise in the stadium or on the broadcast? That’s super weird.

That’s some good dancing around Tork’s comments by A.J. Astaire. 😁 I suppose it’s possible that what Tork meant by “I don’t watch video” was actually “I do watch video but I get in my own head about it and it sometimes messes me up”. But I think it’s at least as likely that he meant what he said, and management got to him and said, you cannot say this kind of thing, especially if you want us to find a spot for you on our bench in Detroit versus riding the bus in Toledo, or at least get another team interested in you so you can get a fresh start starting someplace else, which I would bet both parties would prefer at this point. Because I don’t think the org wants to torpedo Tork’s career or anything like that. Far from it, I believe. He’s been around for years, they know him, they’ve invested time and treasure in him, and I think they’d like him to succeed somewhere, if not here. Preferably in the National League, I would assume. Either way, there’s no way the Tigers could let Tork just lip off about how he prefers to avoid video—and by implication, analytics in general—and let his comments just sit out there for the other, especially younger, guys themselves to ruminate on. The org had to get out in front of the comments and control the narrative on that, so they could keep all their players’ hearts and minds dedicated to the program versus questioning its value.

I wonder whether any civilian factions might join in on the proceedings as deputized militias? That is definitely something that was not a factor in 1969.

It took the Salt March beatings and jailings to start changing minds among reasonable British people about India. It took watching kids getting hosed in Birmingham, churches being bombed in Birmingham, social workers begin kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi, to start changing minds among reasonable white people about American apartheid. These violent public events spurred these reasonable people to put pressure on their governments to effect change—too slow change, but charge nevertheless. My question is, how far would it all have to go for reasonable people to demand change, and how far is the government willing to go to maintain their hold even in the face of such demands? A concern I have is how some people have developed a blood lust due to persistent desensitization to violence in the media they consume, people who might enjoy it IRL, providing the kind of popular support which emboldens regimes; plus, a key role model rooting all this on is a country that thinks nothing of killing or sacrificing literally millions of its own people to maintain order. We didn’t have either of those factors when Jim Crow was facing its first real challenges from the public. It remains to be seen how this will all transpire. But transpire it will, irrespective of what you or I desire in our hearts, or hope to have any influence over. We are about to live through some interesting times, my friend. Buckle up, and have a plan if you can.

There are a lot of Russian technicians they could invite in on guest visas who would manage it for free, basically.

The only fly in that ointment is that in order for non-violent protest to work, non-violent protesters will have to suffer public violence at the hands of the violent people in power. That’s what has had to happen for people to change their minds about the status quo. That’s how it’s always worked in the past, anyway. My fear is that too many people in our society have a real blood lust, slaked by soaking up exciting and violent movies and video games, and they think it would be cool to see it all happen IRL in their own communities. I guess we’ll see how they feel when they do see it actually happen.

It’s not even a month yet. It won’t be a month for another six days, and so much **** is going to happen in the next six days that we’ll all wish it was February 14 again. Well, most of us, anyway.

Kakistocracy.

Is anyone else being denied access to mlb.com while they are on VPN? That just started happening to me today on all my devices.

Everything we say in a Tigers forum is both pointless, in that it will not affect anyone's decision-making, and speculation, in that none of us are on the inside and have no real knowledge as to what's going on beyond what we have read. As such, this entire forum and all of its sub-forums is practically 100% pointless speculation. In that spirit, your insistence that everything is fine with how Tork is approaching his job is also pointless speculation. In fact, it's even less than pointless speculation, since you are flat out rejecting what Tork himself was quoted as saying as being untrue.

You make a good point about Tork. I speculated a while ago that Tork is a grip-it-and-rip-it guy who wants nothing to do with the analytics, and that the more information he gets, that more he gets confused, and the worse he does, so he hates getting information because he's never had to use information before just to hit. He's always had to just go up there and hit. No big whoop. And he got paid $8 million upfront for hitting that way in college, so of course he doesn't want to change his way of hitting. And at a certain level, it makes sense that whatever worked in college is going to work anywhere else he plays. But, no surprise, that's not how it work in the major leagues, the highest level of baseball in the world. It's a lot a lot different from college, and also, from the minors (where he seemed to do well until 2022). Even a transcendent hitter is not going to go up to the plate knowing nothing about anything except see ball hit ball and succeed in the majors. Not any more, anyway. Maybe Babe Ruth could do that a hundred years ago. Not today. These days, hitters have to be educated about pitchers, what they throw, what to look for in certain situations, and how to react to it when they think they see it. They have to think about and learn the process of hitting during practice in the offseason and during spring training and in the cages between games, so that when they are in actual games, the learning is totally ingrained and they don't have to think about process while they're in the box. It doesn't look as me like that's what Tork is doing, though. Ironically, it looks like he is overthinking when he at the plate during the regular season. That tells me he didn't internalize all this during practice when he was supposed to, so when things start going south during games, it looks like he starts overthinking and pressing to try to shake himself out of his funk while in the box, which is exactly the wrong time to do that kind of thinking. That's what practice is for. To your other point, I would be really, really surprised to learn that the Tigers take a certain kind of individual approach where they tell their hitters, you can choose to see the analytics, or you can choose to ignore them and just swing any way you like, doesn't matter to us. I believe it matters to them a great deal, since they have established a way they want to develop their players and have poured millions of dollars into the resources needed since 2022 to do so. I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that Tork is not failing as a hitter. The organization has presumably been doing everything they can into fixing that. They've made the resources available to him to help him figure it out, and he has said, flat out in the press this week, that he doesn't want anything to do with that, and essentially, the team should just leave him alone and let him do whatever he wants so he can figure it out himself. I just don't see how that makes good baseball or business sense for the Tigers to simply accept that. Maybe I'm just a judgmental person talking here, but my takeaway from everything I have read about what has happened this offseason is that the Tigers are unhappy with how Tork has been approaching his job and they are making preparations to move on from him. And in all honesty, I hope you get to laugh, point at me and yell "See! I told you!" when Tork is born again hard and puts up the MVP season for the Tigers that befits a former 1/1 pick. Because I will gladly accept your derision to see that happen.

A player can be uncoachable, do-it-his-own-way, selfish, and hard-working. All those things could be true at the same time. As for the idea of his doing everything the club is asking of him, Tork was directly quoted this week saying how he doesn’t like to look at numbers or video and likes to just basically grip it and rip it and let the launch off the bat tell him how he’s doing. Given how steeped in data and video this organization has been reported to be for the last two years, that smells like a lot of smoke to me, anyway.