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This was pre-WGN Superstation.

The Cubs called up Cade Horton, their #2 prospect, because they’ve lost Justin Steele and Shota Imanaga to injury. They started the game with an opener because, for better or worse, they did not want Horton opening up his career against Lindor, Soto, and Alonzo … ahem … right off the bat. It kinda sorta worked.

Manning is done.

Riley go BOOM!

One of the things I like about Dan calling the game on TV when Jason‘s gone is that I get to watch it on the DIRECTV satellite instead of on MLB.tv. The commercials are just so much better. Every half inning break on MLB.tv, I see a bet365 ad. It just makes my soul leave my body to see them.

Doesn’t have to be either or. Could be all of them.

Flaherty’s gotta be tipping.

I experienced the same thing for Game 163 in 2009. I was about maybe 10 minutes behind live. Tigers and Twins tied in the 12th. Twins had just intentionally walked Ryan Raburn to load the bases. Then the phone rang: it was my good baseball buddy. I knew he was calling me because the game was over and he wanted to talk about it. I let the call go. Then Inge came up and I saw the ball graze his jersey, and for a second and a half I thought, oh my god, we won, we won, he called me because we won! But then, of course, they didn't call the hit by pitch, and at that very moment I knew we must have lost. Sure enough, Inge forced Miggy at home, Gerald Laird struck out to end the inning, and I didn't even bother watching the bottom of the inning, because I knew the game was over since my buddy had called. I looked up the result and called him back and told him this story.

That is simply otherworldly.

My brother likes doing that with Lions games, too. I don't like that because then I can talk about the game with people, or follow up on something I see online, because spoilers.

Religion is a personal thing, and a social thing, for some, but for too many people, religion has become a political thing, a way to create an air of exclusivity for only a certain type of Christian, and exclusion for everyone else who will not comply.

Coincidentally, I heard on the tigers territory pod that his recent run is also 50 strikeouts against one walk! That’s like a doctored OOTP pitcher.

I love Mickey, but there’s no way he pitched every pitch with anywhere near the same intensity that pitchers today do. The only other possible reason is that today’s pitchers are far, far weaker than pitchers from fifty and more years ago, and that does not pass any reasonable smell test.

Except the speeders couldn’t hit and the hitters couldn’t speed. 😉

This is not unlike the way the ‘84 Tigers kept winning and winning, and still could not completely bury the Blue Jays early. Those guys were playing almost .700 ball by early June and were less than a week’s worth of games behind us.

These were Leyland’s batting orders in 2011, going 1 to 9 left to right. There’s room for only ten names, so there was an 11th guy who batted 2nd. The guy not listed here is one who’s also become prominent on Tigers media lately.

Had to be 2014. https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/index.fcgi?date=2014-05-18

TBF, 1968 was really a pitcher’s year like no other.

This is not at all a comment on Tarik Skubal or anyone else’s private views at all, but—I really hate this haircut which is inexplicably popular right now.

It’s almost as though they are basically Tracy Ullman in a bathrobe coming out to the TV audience shouting “GO HOME! GO HOME!”

It took only 20 or so seasons of analytics infiltrating the game to get teams untracked off the tried and true-ish.

And the pitcher. Don’t forget the pitcher. (At least for the first 72 seasons of the league).

It’s even worse than that: they run two minutes of commercials; then have a 15-second tease of what’s coming up next; then have two more minutes of commercials; then another 15-second tease; then two more minutes of commercials; and then the unwatchable post-game tripe begins.

Yeah homey don’t play that in Detroit

Remember when the thing to do was to put your banjo-hitting no-walk-taking middle infielder in the #2 slot in the order so he could sacrifice the leadoff guy over to second during the first inning? That seems like a hundred years ago (and it was!) Nowadays Aaron Judge and Kyle Tucker hit second in the order.