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I don't think we have enough of a team to mortgage the future and go for anything yet. We're not done cooking yet. I think if we can somehow stumble into the playoffs with the green, young team we have now, that will be nice. But I feel confident we're not going to liquidate the top of our farm system so we can win 86 this year and cross our fingers that's enough.

Meaning, is it worth our selling a guy like Flaherty? If that's what you mean, we haven't seen Harris sell yet, so I think he deserves the chance to show us what he can do when he does.

I think "tanking" is more than just a synonym for rebuilding, which is what I think you're describing. I do think there are teams who deliberately put teams on the field they hope will get them a higher draft pick, because really, if you're trying your hardest but you're already going to lose 92 anyway, what's the difference whether you lose 102, as long as you get a better player out of it? People may think tanking is what I myself am advocating, and perhaps I may not be able to convince anyone I'm not no matter how nuanced (a dirty word) I am while describing the idea, but I'm just describing what I believe some organizations have done and maybe are even doing now. When talking about thirty different orgs, I believe the odds are high that some of them will tank. As for Avila: maybe it was as simple as, he thought he could build a winner the way teams could in the 1990s. Maybe he was just a man stuck in an era.

I think Chris has already shown us he is willing to spend after 2021, but that was when they thought they were ready to compete right then and there. The 2022 season showed us we were not what Al Avila convinced us we were, and there's no reason to throw money at a rotting core just to get you closer to the playoff spot you're most probably not gonna get anyway. I'm pretty sure Harris made no overtures toward J.D. Martinez, and I believe it's because J.D. is just not a fit for a team that's not mostly cooked and ready to compete. The playoffs this was was always going to be a nice-to-have, not ours to lose. Besides, I'd be surprised if J.D., in his waning years, would come to a team not ready to compete, anyway. After all, free agents do have agency, which is merely a schmancy nouveau term for having a choice. Hinch isn't the only one who doesn't want a full-time DH. Harris didn't want a full-time DH either, and most teams don't want or use a full-time DH. Hinch is not a lone wolf villain in that regard. They had to bring up Malloy not because he was ready, but because Carpenter is out, Why are we not playing Malloy at 3B or in the OF instead of DH? I think we already know why. If you think we should have brought up someone with a glove instead, I'd love to hear who people think that should have been.

That's true, and also, if someone starts publicly bad-mouthing other executives, active or retired, living or dead, in their organization or not, people are not going to trust or respect them.

I think if we have a wild card spot in hand at the deadline, or at least a 50% chance to get one, we might hang onto him. If all we have is a mathematical chance, I don’t think that will be enough to justify holding onto him. We simply don’t have the basis of team in a position to consistently contend. Harris is going to have to get us there before we start buying at the deadline.

Given how Ilitch was willing to spend after 2021 when Avila convinced him that we were ready to win, I really doubt that he is instructing Harris to keep payroll low first, and make everything else subservient to that imperative.

I’m not completely sure what you’re trying to get across here, but I do think neither Harris nor anyone else in the organization believes that this is the end of the rebuild and we are ready to compete for a ring now. Until we get to that point, the rebuild is on.

Unless Flaherty falls apart or gets hurt, I think Harris will be able to flip him for near-major-league-ready position player(s), and at the risk of disappointment, I assume he will be successful until he shows me he won’t be. I am confident it will not be an Avila return.

And I don’t think they have any plans to tank in the way we think of teams tanking. If they trade Skubal, then that’s tanking. If they trade Flaherty, I would say that’s not tanking. I do think they are putting together enough of a team to try to be .500 at least.

If Avila may have done things behind the scenes, I have no idea what those things might have been that have been carried over by this regime. Anything I might speculate would be just that.

I think Harris is acknowledging that we truly are in a rebuild, but he’s being careful with what he says about it because he doesn’t want to scare away fans by saying, in that many words, that this is a rebuild so strap in. But reading between the lines of his interviews, he has said that we won’t go after free agents until the building blocks of a contender are in place.

I suspect that I am a minority here, or maybe even the only one, but I’ve come around to the idea that when Al Avila was finally given the gate and Scott Harris came onboard, we basically had to start in on a new rebuild. Avila’s seven years turned out to be complete toilet time, and if he moved us forward at all, it was only because he got a few building blocks into the system before he left (although it looks like only one of the players he actually tanked for, Riley, might end up paying out the way we hope he might). Any other building blocks he got, chiefly Skubal, were chosen late enough in the draft that we didn’t have to tank for them at all. But the point is, the seven years in which Avila peter-principled into and stumbled his way through the job were completely wasted in terms of rebuilding the team into a winner, so we had no choice to start all over. So I no longer have any expectations at all that we will compete this year, and I will be pleasantly surprised, rather than expectant, that we will seriously compete next year. I don’t think we can reasonably expect to be actually competitive until Harris and company, who have been fully in control of the organization and its development for less than a season and a half, have finally cleared out the dregs that they inherited and have established this as fully being the result of their work. I understand that this will make many here angry, and I accept it will be interpreted as and played back as me wanting the Tigers to lose games and wanting tank some more—which isn’t true at all—but that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after careful consideration, and now I have shred it, so I have no choice now but to own that.

Dan Dickerson totally called that stolen base by pointing out just how terrible Ruiz was at throwing out stealers, and not two seconds later Ruiz botches the throw on a SB

Yeah, Wenceel doesn’t have much of a wing either.

Ooh, that was a minor league play by Kreidler. 😢

I wonder whether, in five or so years, City Connects will fade into oblivion as the kid of fad that spawned this monstrosity:

I assume these gambling-related threats have escalated dramatically in the years following the Murphy decision, and I would guess that’s a combination of way way more people gambling now, which obviously includes the kind of psychos who would lodge threats against players et al; and the kind of incessant in-your-face marketing that casinos do suggesting that gambling and winning are synonymous, which maybe creates a sense of entitlement among people who don’t fully internalize that losing is also a part of gambling.

You might have massaged the first part of your post to clarify what you say above, but I do agree with your general point that, regardless of this particular instance, people sometimes exaggerate the presence of threats in a bid to portray themselves as brave in the face of mortal threats in a bid to increase sympathy. I see that in particular as a sad commentary on how our entire society has evolved to reward playing the victim to win points.

Courtesy of the Department of Full Disclosure, seems that Lauren Windsor, an acknowledged liberal documentarian, posed to question to Alito at a function while basically pretending to be a conservative Christian, that is, in a bid to fool Alito into showing his hand, and I don’t like the dishonesty of that, even though it doesn’t mitigate the awfulness of what he said. OTOH, Windsor took the same tack with John Robert’s but he refused to take the bait and claim that the US is a conservative Christian nation, replying that it’s not up to the lawyers to enforce morality, so good on him.

They think he cares about America and them because that's what their media are telling them.

Sure he can come right out and say he doesn't care about you,he only cares about your vote, but the funny part is, people were laughing at this as though he were joking. They don't think he's serious, but if he were ever serious about anything, it's this.

Chris McCosky, your flight is boarding.

Maybe making smart financial decisions is a little like being able to do math in your head, but you still can't reason your way out of a wet paper bag.