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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.

Well, you know, Carlos has to live in this town … 😏

That sounds awful good on paper, although, setting aside the idea that the Tigers were never going to sign Bregman under any circumstances, we were never going to get him for only three years. Not as long as any other team was also on the table for three years, which would have been a lot more teams than those offering six. Because if the idea of signing short term is to put up video game numbers so he could finally sign his $200MM deal next winter, he wasn’t going to do that here. I’m still not 100% convinced we had an actual 6/171 on the table for Bregman, but accepting the story that there was, an offer like that was our only shot to get him, and that would have had to entail two things: (1) giving him a player opt out basically every season he’s here, which it was said we didn’t offer for year one; and (2) getting him to potentially commit the final six years of his career to living in Detroit the same way Javy has, and there’s no way on god’s green earth Bregman doesn’t know how abjectly miserable Javy is in Detroit.

This is really true not only for us, but for most teams that want to contend. The Tigers had the fewest injury list days of any major league team in 2024; only one team had fewer players going on the list; and only two teams had fewer contract dollars on the list. That was really one underrated aspect of why we were so successful last year, especially late in the year when we started reeling off wins at a 70%+ clip. The $64 question for me is, was that good luck for us, or did we make some gains in our medical staffing and approach that led to fewer debilitating injuries? We were top ten in keeping guys off the list in 2023, too. We will see going forward. Perhaps Edman can tell us why our apparent success in maintaining team health is not really all I am cracking it up to be, maybe because we have so many green players in the organization we can move on and off the 26-man or something?

I would imagine it’s hard to get ownership to agree to lay out six years and nine figures on a free agent after finishing below .500 for seven straight years. Perhaps almost as hard as it is to get a premium free agent to commit the remaining six years of his career to a team in a cold, dreary rust belt city that finished below .500 for seven straight years.

So the rumor mill says maybe we didn’t offer 6/171 to Bregman? You don’t say.

I figured once they threw 6/144 at Baez, and then even after that Ilitch still spent millions on infrastructure at the behest of the new guy, the team would be willing to pony up for the right guy. It still baffles me why they would have thought Bregman was that right guy. Maybe he could have been for 2025, even 2026. Probably not so much from 2027 on. But lots of fans wanted him, especially early on in the process, because you know how we fans can be when we are super laser focused on winning this year. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die …” As for the environment tilted way to pitchers, I am definitely on the side of evening that out, and sooner than later, and if that means making the home bullpen ten feet wider than it is now, I’m down. The Orioles realized their mistake and changed, so it can be done.

A lot of people on the old board were arguing that 15 years ago. Imagine how it felt to watch the Tigers rushing in the opposite direction. I think that particular front office was snowed by that generational SP talent we had in the early 2010s, especially 2013. “Oh, this is easy. We can do this all the time forever.”

Pete Hegseth just gave away Poland as Trump's gift to Putin.

"Russian cybercriminal in exchange for American schoolteacher? Seems fair to me. Then we get to try to teacher here for cultural crimes he surely committed against children. Win win! Make America Great Again!"

That might be a self-inflicted Kroger problem (or Kroger strategy, if you prefer). I don't see same problem at Jewels or Pete's.

Eggs at the Kroger near me have been decently stocked, although they've had a standing limit of two cartons per purchase. I make egg-white omelettes for my wife and me for weekend breakfast and I go through an 18-pack each weekend, plus, I hard boil a pack of twelve so i can eat two egg whites each morning during the week. That's basically 30 eggs per week. So, yeah, I'm egg-forward and this is kinda sorta affecting me.

Depends on the pitcher and his skill set.

AdGuard is great if you're a Mac person and use Safari across platforms. If you're PC person and use Firefox across platforms, not so much. The site is borderline unusable on iPhone. I will click a link to reply or go to a thread and will get a pop-up ad for some game. Then close the ad and go back to where I was where I will see a creep-down ad. I will click the up arrow to make that recede to the top and then I get the game pop-up ad again. Then I close that ad again and go back to where I was to start with. Then I click the link again and get the pop-up ad again, then close the ad and return to the top of the page, from which I have to scroll down to where I was to start with. Interestingly, though, the site is far less problematic on iPad. Get a pop-up ad, close it, and you're fine. Or at least I'm fine. I don't know about you. 😁

Maybe he doesn't. Or maybe he does. One or the other. Pitchers can and have dramatically improved once they've gotten here. We'll see whether the Fetter team see anything in him we don't.

Obviously, there's one and only one answer to this problem: shut down the USDA so we don't have to hear about it.

My buddy is not exactly OK with Cora but he has made his uneasy peace with that.

He’ll be the next Mark Twain prize recipient.

Yeah, “conflict of interest” is the nicest milquetoasty way you can put it.