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I will trade you my Bet365 ads 30 times a game for your Josh Allen ad 30 times a game straight up.

Wenceel made the coolest-as-a-cucumber over-the-wall catch I think I’ve ever seen an outfielder make.

If I'm reading between the lines of Manfred's comments correctly, I'm thinking he wants the whole American/National League distinction to go away completely and teams to be placed in convenient geographically-driven divisions within convenient geographically-driven conferences and leagues, which would help northeast and Midwest teams and hurt teams out west. There will be a fight about that, I assume, with western teams resenting northeast teams getting cushy travel situations such as NYY, NYM, BOS, and PHI all in the same four-team division. What they should probably do is create divisions that has the most equitable travel arrangement possible for all teams. It will never be even steven, unless they move Seattle, Washington to another part of the country. But they could put, say, NYY and TBR in the same division and have them travel to each other more as division rivals. If Manfred were to get his way, though, and geography with a dash of division rivalry wins out, it could look something like this: League 1 (East) Conference A Division 1: NYY, NYM, BOS, PHI Division 2: WAS, BAL, PIT, TOR Conference B Division 3: MIA, TBR, ATL, Nashville Division 4: DET, CLE, CIN, CHW League 2 (West) Conference C Division 5: CHC, MIL, MIN, STL Division 6: HOU, TEX, COL, KCR Conference D Division 7: Vegas, ARI, LAA, Salt Lake Division 8: LAD, SFG, SDP, SEA This is what it would look like on a map: Yes, this would suck for west coast teams, especially Seattle, but just about any realignment in the wake of expansion will suck for west coast teams, especially Seattle. As things stand, it already does suck for west coast teams, especially Seattle, right now. (And also for Miami, although they've managed to win a couple rings down there anyway.) However, one of the things this solution would solve is the time zone issues where Texas and Houston now have to play so many more 9pm Pacific coast games within their division than other Central teams do, which, as a lawyer chasing the money, Manfred definitely has a hard-on to fix. In this solution, no divisional rival is more than one time zone away. I am doubtful they will go to an eight-team divisional setup, because no owner wants to have to try to sell an eighth- (or seventh- or even sixth-) place team to their target market in August and September. The only certain thing I would bet money on is that they will find a way to reduce the season to exactly 154 games, even if it results in a schedule that's unbalanced even within one's own division. The players desperately want it; the owners will accept it in exchange for a richer playoff schedule; and the fans will think it's way super old school cool. Win-win-win.

It's what happens when nobody wants you around them all day anymore, and you get paid a pittance to stay the hell away. 😁

Yeah, I've had it with the trolling and the intellectual dishonesty and the name-calling and the flat out lying. It won't end well. It never does.

He does not want people who put on a sash that says "police" on it to be held under any standard of conduct. He also voted for Harris, under whom the police would definitely be held to strict standards of conduct.

jk 😉

Yeah, baseball is the kind of game where, because of the bouncing ball, Skubal could get chased in the second inning and we could end up losing 12-1 or something. BTW, the seeming inexorability of Skubal's march to a second straight Cy Young seems to be somewhat in jeopardy, based on the past three starts.

Seattle's ballpark is somewhat like the one I went to see the Seibu Lions in Japan, which is essentially a ballpark with an umbrella. It was still hot and humid as balls when I saw a game there.

Or maybe not. I don't know. Just look at the pretty colors, OK? 🤣

I can see after posting and then clicking on the combined two tables above that they do not expand enough for you to read those numbers, so here's another post showing each table separately, and you should be able to read the number better if you click on either of these. Runs scored: Runs allowed:

Because I am retired and I have not only a lot of time on my hands but a ton of Excel skills I want to continue wielding, I put together a graphic representation of how the Tigers have scored runs and allowed runs in game streaks between two and 20 throughout the season. Using Baseball Reference, I downloaded a list of all games played by all 30 teams through yesterday (August 19). Then I created two tables, one for runs scored (offense) and another for runs allowed (pitching and defense). I added columns in the middle of each table to reflect season win-loss record along the way, as well as records for streaks of 10, 20, and 30 games, pretty much as you see within standings tables on Reference itself. Then I created additional streak columns at the end of each table for last two games through last 20 games, to reflect runs scored and runs allowed during those streaks. You can easily figure out what's what by looking at the column headers at the top. Then, to make it easy to see whether the Tigers have scored/allowed a lot of runs versus a few runs in the last X games, I color-coded each box to show whether the Tigers did well in the past X games (the redder, the better) or did poorly in the last X games (the bluer, the worse). White boxes reflect average runs scored/allowed. The numbers in white means those streaks were at the extreme 1% percentile at either end of the spectrum, meaning the most (or fewest) runs of any team for that streak length throughout the season. I'm basing these colors on the average of runs scored/allowed in each set of X games throughout the season by all 30 teams. The analytical cognoscenti among you might notice that I am using standard Statcast colors on this table. Hopefully, that's enough explanation for you to figure out what's what. So here they are, side by side, with the runs scored table on the left, and the runs allowed table on the right. Just remember that for each table, redder is better (more runs scored, fewer runs allowed), and bluer is worse (fewer runs scored, more runs allowed): Yeah, it's really hard to read the numbers within the post, so if you want to see the actual numbers, my advice is to click on each table to see those tables expanded in your browser. But even if you don't expand the tables, you can tell by the colors how well the Tigers did in streaks of anywhere from 2 to 20 games throughout the season. You can see how the month of May was "peak Tiger" on both sides of the ball, but you might be surprised to see by the gaggle of white numbers showing that during early May, the Tigers had among the very best offenses of any team during the entire season for long stretches of games. Did you remember that during the 12 games between May 1 and May 13, we scored in double digits six times, and at least eight runs eight times? I didn't remember exactly that until I saw this! Then you can see how the offense went colder than average from late May into mid-June, but our 30-game records were still in the .600 to .700 range because our pitching was redder than average during the same time. But then it flipped around from Mid-June into early July, when our offense got redder while out pitching/defense got bluer, and yet, we still maintained close to a .600 winning percentage over a series of 30-prior-game chunks of season. Then you can see where it really falls down in late July, which is a sea of blue on both tables. That's where all the losing really came from, and you won't be surprised to be reminded that it was the offense that really went splat, but the pitching/defense was also well below average, taken against all other teams for the entire season and their performance for streaks of similar length. And the happy ending to this post is the red at the bottom that has crept back into both the run scoring and run prevention. Well, this was fun way to kill a morning. 😃

I’m not a public employee on the public dime, and it’s not as though we’re talking about DMV employees being harassed in the office. Police carry immense power in the public space with lethal weapons at their disposal, and I think that specifically because of that, they should be held to a much, much, much higher standard of conduct than just about any other public employee. Despite what you appear to think, we are not engaged in a shooting war in this country, so they shouldn’t be acting as though they are soldiers deployed to Iraq.

With the Chargers and Clippers no longer there, the Padres have become more of a civic duty.

Shep—may I call him “Shep”?—was a weird detour in the history of Tigers broadcasting. Remember, Shep was not a baseball guy coming in. He’d done some replacement work on the Tigers’ broadcasts before 2019, but the sum total of his baseball experience was less than 25 games when he’d been handed the job. Shep was kind of the Xavier Nady of big league broadcasters. I would probably like Bennett better if I didn’t have Dan available via audio overlay, because I’d be comparing Benetti to Shep and not to Dan. I would be more open to the non-baseball wisecracking—or more exactly, the whole truckload of it—during the broadcast were he my one and only choice to listen to. A few scales have fallen from my eyes about Dan and I do recognize the egregious errors he makes in the moment—that sunshine “homer” last night being merely the latest—but man, does that guy know the analytical side of the game, and he is really good at translating it to layman terms for the broadcast. Plus, he is all business, and maybe you don’t care for that, but that’s perfect for me, and I’m gonna enjoy that as long as he can manage to stay on the air.

I don’t like the team out of San Diego so much, either, so as much as I like seeing the Gucci Dodgers lose, I don’t mind that they swept the Gucci-wannabe Padres this past weekend, either.

Come on, just enjoy it! 😂

I don’t have much faith in Lange. I think it’s 50/50 he makes it to the end of the season, and 20/80 he makes the postseason roster.

This post did not age well. 😉

I think I should be entitled to have law enforcement officers identify themselves and the agency they work for. How do you like that? You don’t want that? You prefer a police state? Then move to Russia, comrade.

You'd have to go pretty deep on the market list—past Vegas, past Jacksonville, past Birmingham Alabama and Oklahoma City and Norfolk, and past Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo-Battle Creek—to get to Albuquerque. If Baseball believes they have a market-size and -capitalization minimum, then there really aren't a cornucopia of candidates for an expansion team. I think the long list is Orlando, Sacramento, Charlotte, Raleigh, Portland, Indianapolis, Nashville, Salt Lake, San Antonio, Hartford, Austin, Columbus, Greenville, West Palm, and Vegas, and that's that. Vegas is a #40 market, so no way they go below that. Only the last two on that list are smaller than Cincinnati and Milwaukee; and I don't see Orlando, Sacramento, the other of Charlotte/Raleigh, Indianapolis, San Antonio, Hartford, Austin, Columbus, Greenville, or West Palm getting teams, mainly because their populations are either too geographically-diffused, or they are so close to a current big league city that a new team there would eat into their TV markets or even attendances. So I think the entire list, the short list, for new big league teams are Sacramento; one of Charlotte/Raleigh; Portland; Nashville; Salt Lake; and Vegas. Even with two new franchises awarded, that would still leave four viable markets to threaten current big league municipalities with to beat them out of publicly-funded stadiums.

I am not saying any of these "nonsense" things. You're the one saying them, I assume as straw men statements. If somehow who purports to be a sworn officer of the law refuses to identify themselves or whom they work for when asked by citizens, that means they are trying to hide their identities and whom they work for, and they're doing it on the citizens' dime. Maybe that's fine for you. It's not for me.

Wearing a sash that says simply POLICE is not identification. If they are wearing masks and nothing that reveals their names while rounding up a million people in year, and they refuse to identify themselves when asked by citizens, then the masked men are unidentified and thus unidentifiable, which allows them to act in a way which absolves them of accountability, which, not for nothing, is how police states operate.

TV booth rankings over at Awful Announcing. Tigers rank 8th this year, up from 10th—but there is a bit of polarization in the rankings, which we have discussed here plenty. 8. Detroit Tigers (Jason Benetti, Andy Dirks; also Dan Dickerson on play-by-play and Dan Petry, Carlos Peña, and Todd Jones on analysis): 2.74 Most common grade: A (45.6%) Percentage of A/B/C grades: 79.2% The Tigers saw one of the most significant year-over-year changes from 2023 to 2024, going from dead last with a 1.55 to 10th with a 2.71. A large part of that was about bringing in Benetti from the White Sox. Dirks started with the team on the radio side in a substitute role in 2023, worked more games there last year, and then shifted to TV ahead of this season, splitting duty with Petry as the main analyst. The overall response here saw the Tigers move even higher in the Top 10. However, that came with some intense polarization. They received the fourth-most As (620 of 1,362), but also the fourth-most Fs (230). That polarization was reflected in the comments as well, especially when it came to the discussion of the broadcast’s increased tangents away from the field in the Benetti era. That included “Not sure when a baseball broadcast became a standup comedy act, but that’s what we have every night,” “Wish more people would see through the Benetti schtick,” “Too many jokes, not enough baseball,” and “Ugh, I wish they would just talk about the game.”But there was a huge amount of praise for Benetti and this approach too, such as “Benetti is one of the top PxP commentators in the sport,” “Benetti is a treasure,” and “Jason and Andy are the ultimate duo, providing humor and insight to each broadcast.” On the analyst side, Dirks drew particular praise. That included “Benetti and Dirks work really well together. This is a top-of-the-line broadcast,” and “Benetti and Dirks have incredible chemistry.” Another viewer said, “Dirks is one of the most beloved glue guys the team has seen in years and is an absolute joy to listen to as a color guy.” And Dickerson (who mostly works on the radio side, but fills in for Benetti during Benetti’s breaks for nationals work) drew significant plaudits too, including “a breath of fresh air” and “the best in the business.”