chasfh

Yes, Harris has the responsibility, and he’s working through it now, still trying to figure out which players are redeemable and which are not. There are a lot of detritus we have already let go since 2022, and there will be more. That process is going to take more than a couple months into the season, though. I’m guessing he doesn’t think it makes sense to start releasing guys en masse and run a revolving door of players through the team and releasing more guys if they can’t make it within a week. Guys like, say, Malloy, who some posters here were ready to cut bait on right away after clamoring all year for him to be promoted. Revolving door roster management would be chaotic, and that would make us all unhappy, too. It’s OK for our patience to thin dramatically with every loss, and that’s OK, because we have no responsibility for this organization. All we want is win, now, and wake me when that starts happening. That’s what fandom is about. It wouldn’t make any sense for Harris to operate the business like that, though. He has to be deliberate, thoughtful, and measured in how he guides the evolution of this team, and given where the organization stands, he has to prioritize long-term objectives over short-term objectives. We don’t have to like that, and we always can take a break and quit paying attention for a while any time we want. Harris doesn’t have that luxury. The tricky part for him is determining when the short term is so borked that we have to do something off-plan NOW to address it. Apparently, he doesn’t think we’re there just yet. But if this recent malaise keeps up much longer, I would bet we’re getting close to something.

I think it’s less a matter of counting on Tork than it is giving him every chance to succeed. He’s proven he’s got awesome hitting talent in there somewhere and the Tigers are doing everything they can to unlock it. The most horrifying thing would be we release him after this year, he catches on with someone who unlocks him, and he comes back to beat us over and over. I think if he continually shows nothing by the middle of next year, then he’s out, but not before then.

That’s what they’re working on. There’s really not much to work with.

I’m not sure what kind of clarity people are looking for on Tork, but if the thought is him getting ****-canned, it ain’t happening. Even if he stays in Toledo and slashes .200/.250/.300 for the rest of the season, he’s coming back in the spring at the very least. It would be a shocker of historic proportions for him—a 1/1 who has already had a modicum of success in the majors—to be done done at 24. I would expect to see him on the field at Comerica agin, maybe even this year after a meh performance in AAA, but almost certainly next year coming north, albeit with everybody’s fingers crossed. Here’s a wild idea: maybe we see Tork in a change-of-scenery trade this winter where we take someone else’s failed project in exchange for him. Just spitballing a name without thinking too deeply about it, maybe Henry Davis of the Pirates. We could probably use a catcher, too, and the Pirates have no future at 1B at the moment.

Live free or stay put.

I read it more as they just couldn’t get to the changeup, or to the fastball for that matter. That looks more like a competency problem than an approach problem.

It’s getting harder to keep the pig still for the lipstick.

Oh I remember Melissa. I was on the old board, too. 😁 That pic, though … just … *swoon*

Is it not the plan to get on base? Is it Hinch’s plan to get perfect gamed or something?

Goodness. That’s a wedding night picture. 😍

It’s hard to wait a few more years after having seven years of our life completely wasted. But wait we must. No one is getting fired a year and a half after the biggest change in this organization in at least two decades. Harris—and Hinch, like it or not—were brought in to change this team for the long term. If it were all about winning now and damn the costs, we’d be stealing Dombrowski back from the Phillies. So strap yourself in and enjoy the ride. If it doesn’t get better later, you can call me a liar.

So, again with the City Connects today. I thought they were supposed to be rare and special? Look, I admit I’m an old man, and I do like certain traditions, and I do whine when they are flouted, and I don’t feel any pride in being like that, but it is what it is. But I think it is fair to ask whether the Tigers are hurting their essential brand equity by wearing City Connects every day. The traditional uniform, and particularly the cap, are iconic brand symbols going back more than a century. I mean that literally—this is from 1923: (Don’t focus on the pinstripes on two of the guys. I can’t explain that.) So this is a well-established look, the look that’s been driving hundreds of millions, maybe even into the billions, of dollars in merchandise sales over the years, and continues to do so. And by wearing the City Connects every game, they are basically repudiating this look that they have, again, spent more than a century cultivating. I accept that City Connects are not going away and teams will continue wear them until they fall out of favor, which will hopefully be soon (although maybe not). But in the meantime, someone from the Tigers has got to step in and put a stop to players wearing them every. God. Damned. Home game. It’s too much, but more importantly, it hurts the essence of the brand.

FWIW, I thought you were serious when you posted that, too. Not saying this is you, but there are a lot of guys, particularly those of a certain age, or at least those a few generations removed from current players’ ages, who insist that for players it’s all about the money (or the “Benjamins”, as the kids of the 1990s would say), and once players make the money they don’t care about winning or even about playing anymore, so they laze about and phone it in because who cares anymore—as if their teammates, managers, coaches, and the front office wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t care even if they did notice. But as Tiger337 basically says, players are hard-wired to be ultra-competitive, or else they would have crapped out of baseball a long time before they got to the majors, because it’s goddamn hard to slog through the years making all the incremental improvements you need to get over that hump. I’m sure there are more than a few players who don’t love love love baseball and see the game as merely their job, which is a different kettle. I’ve always thought Derek Jeter might be that guy. But again, to get to the pinnacle of the major leagues, you have to have a great deal of pride and professionalism to thrive enough to get good and paid in the first place. Because there are no 100% absolutes even in this, if I had to pick one guy I think actually does phone it in because he’s got his money and he doesn’t like baseball, it would be Anthony Rendon, who basically said as much this spring, and he has gotten raked but good for that very thing. Lucky for him he tore a hamstring in April so he can keep checking big bank while sitting on his fattening ass popping bonbons in his mouth, or so I would assume … 😁

You misspelled “coaching”. 😉 I wonder whether there might be a perception-is-reality thing going on,

As for what's going on in Detroit—I'm not sure any hitter would want to come here anytime soon. Notable exceptions notwithstanding, the Tigers have looked like the team where hitters go to die for a few years now.

Candelario had shown that he could be a very good hitter across multiple seasons so I thought he deserved another look. Willi was actually better under the hood in 2022 than his surface stats were and, despite the anecdotal rage regularly expressed here, was showing proficiency at multiple positions. Ultimately neither would make us playoff team now, but both would be useful pieces if for no other reason than they could be trade chips now.

Willi was one of those guys I thought Harris might hang onto, same with Candelario, but as it turns out, I believe it was the noise from the media and fans about them being way too much to ignore. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Ilitch urged Harris to push them out the door, although I don't think we ever will. But all the numbers indicated that they were worth keeping around for a couple more years, anyway. Is it a shame? Probably not.

I do know they had been trying Vierling over at third, but he's been more in center lately, probably because Urshela is now fully back. But you're right, he's a minus defender at third this year so he's probably off the list. He's probably not an everyday CF, either, although he has improved this season over previous seasons.

It does, in fact, look like AI.

Ah, Melissa. Perfect, perfect Melissa. I’m wondering whether her public career has taken a downturn. Even her French Wikipedia page has almost nothing about her since 2018.

The team doesn’t want to keep fielding questions about him, although he wasn’t a particularly high-profile part of the team. I did post way back in March that I thought Craig was big-timing Benetti in the booth that first broadcast, stepping all over Benetti and hogging the mike and using what I thought was an alpha-jock-talking-to-nerd tone, and I do wonder whether that had any lingering effect on their working relationship.

The thing about Keith is not that he’s a failure because he can’t play second base—which I know you’re not saying here—but that we are in the beginning of an actual rebuild and we don’t have a complete team around him. He’s playing at second base because we already have long-term guys we are trying to figure out at first base (Tork) and third base (Jung, Vierling). Plus, he wasn’t particularly good at third, anyway. We wanted to see whether he could hack second, which was a long shot going in, and we know for sure now he won’t. I think if we were to start playing Keith at first, that would tell us a lot about Tork’s future with the team.

Super weird because Come Sail Away came out when Petry was 19, and Benetti was not even close to being born. It would be like me making a joke about Kitty Kallen and “Little Things Mean a Lot”, and **** Tracewski draws a blank.

If you believe Baseball Reference, Canha is sub-1 WAR player, and Urshela is literally at reaplcement value. Neither one starts on a playoff team, so we’ll get very little of value for either, if we can move them at all. Jack Flaherty is the prize.