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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.

Reverse projection, or whatever they call when you claim something positive the other guy does that you didn’t do, such as taking credit to lowering insulin prices.

Yeah, I was fine with the deal when it happened and I still am. It’s low risk for an amount of money that’s not going to cripple us if it goes upside down, like, for instance, 8/248.

But we already know voters are not going to do anything that deviates from the path of least resistance, so, then what?

Yes, I admit it’s not something you see very often.

Um … wow, Craig. you gotta hope he’s ok, but I’m not sure anyone is exactly rooting for a quick return to the booth.

You mean a rookie struggling three months into an eight-year deal? Sure, I guess.

Way beyond MAGA. This guy doesn’t use a dog whistles. He stands next to you and shouts the words right into your ear.

Do you think Colt Keith is done done already?

Maybe … maybe not. I am willing to give some credence to G2’s theory about swinging and missing at pitches he would have taken before as a sign he’s working on stuff, for at least a little while. But it would not shock me to learn that once he got picked 1/1 and cashed an $8 million check, he thought he wouldn’t have to listen to any coaching anymore. I’m not I saying I definitely think this happened, only that it wouldn’t shock me to learn that it had.

All correct, but if the Tigers trade Skubal this year, it would be saying a lot to fans, mainly, that winning soon is nowhere on the docket. And it might not be anyway, but management wants to be really careful about what their actions say. The only way he could get away with it is to get a current big league stick that has All-Star potential if not at actual All-Star level. They can’t just liquidate him for the 2024 equivalent of Jake Rogers and whoever that pitcher was.

I was just making a joke on the word “associates”.

I am shocked that you of all people brought this up but I’ve been hypothesizing this since at least last season.

This. Right here. Unfortunately. The Skubal thing, I don’t know how they let him go anytime soon, unless he becomes just too hot to handle in the clubhouse.

I thought he was still at the Free Press in some local bureau doing dogcatcher stories?

Following up on this, has the RWM started weighing in on how Reggie Jackson is a woke commie anti-American yet? Because I have a feeling they’re gonna in the next few days. Because remember: when Reggie was playing, he wasn’t considered anything like Willie Mays. He was a lippy, uppity, mau mau negro, and the media gladly reminded us of that every day.

I don’t think it’s a take that’s hot, either. But I think the fact that he is saying anything like this at all might be actually meaningful, and not just a thing he’s writing to meet a deadline.

BTW, Tork is 1-for-20 (a single) with a walk and six strikeouts in his last five games. In Triple-A. Something worth watching …

Which is why I think the team might be giving a signal that it’s OK to start talking about the team in this way, because beat writers are changing their tone about it all at once. We’re talking about two major guys here at the very least, not just one rogue Fenech. TBF, McCosky is still talking about only minor roster adjustments, like Meadows up for Malloy or Baddoo, but I’m keeping my eye on his output, too.

I think of the art of divining what teams are doing under the hood through shifts in coverage tone by the beat media as akin to Kremlinology. You can’t rely on the powers at the top to be forthright with you about what’s really happening, of course, but you can make an educated guess based on what the supplicants say, and how they say it. When guys like Petzold and Cody make the sudden shift from “things are fine and prospects will advance, trust us” to “things have gotta change and we can’t rely on our top prospect anymore”, that tells me they are getting signals from inside that it’s OK to start talking about this stuff in this way. Because if the beat guys start appearing to badmouth the team and their product in conflict with what the front office itself is saying, they won’t be on the beat for much longer—again, ask Fenech. And I don’t see signals from the front office that everything is still all right as is so trust us. That message hasn’t been coming out like that lately. So if the organization is flashing those signals, and the dependent media are reflecting that in their reporting, then I’m concluding that something is up and something is gonna happen soon. Counterpoint: I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about so ignore me and my tinfoil hat. 😁

I might believe you if the beat writers did not 100% depend on the teams to maintain their access to the front office, players, and information. You can ask Anthony Fenech about exactly how that works. Thank you for your insights about local writers, which I will take under advisement.