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All the angles on this replay are terrible. Hopefully NY has something better that gets us the call.

Thank god getting jobbed on that Bichette checked swing didn’t cost us.

That was a great strike three. Stefanic looked stupid on that.

Well, that sucks. At least Kirk couldn’t waddle all the way to second on that.

And speaking of waivers, Holton is pitching like a waiver claim pickup right now.

The only way we could trade him is if someone desperately needs a #2 catcher and they are way down the waiver claim order.

Nido’s definitely getting claimed.

Holton will come back out in the eighth and Vest will be already up and throwing when Tyler does.

Despite his outcome success yesterday, Beau did not have a clean enough two outings such that would warrant him another crack at a leverage situation anytime soon. He’s giving up too much loud contact and he’s missing the zone wildly too often. He’s barely better than garbage time at the moment. I get what AJ is trying to accomplish, because 162 games is a lot and you need to try guys in situations sometimes, but I think AJ has enough information on Beau to push him to the front of the pen.

If Beau loses Springer, he’s gotta come out.

Keith probably could’ve gotten the runner at second on that with a quick flip over there. Good attempt by Guerrero to screen the ball and good job by Keith still fielding it.

Unless they have a camera right there, that ball is foul.

Eighty-three pitches in 2025 = 110 pitches in 1995.

Ooooh, I’m not sure I like this … when I said yesterday Beau Brieske would be getting another leverage situation within the next week, I wasn’t thinking within the next 18 or so hours.

Actually, stupid question by me. The only time an umpire would himself return a ball to the pitcher is after a dead ball incident such as a foul ball—i.e., he would never take a live ball from the catcher after a pitch and then throw it back himself. And as we all know, a foul ball results in a dead ball, and the ball is not live again until the pitcher touches the pitcher’s plate (aka “the rubber”) while in possession of the ball.

Reese is pitching a Cy Young game. He’s pitched to the minimum. I would love to see him at least start the seventh.

The same thing could be said about Dan, who also does not let the broadcast breathe like some old timey guys were known for, but his style is information- and analysis-dense, which for me is like eating chocolate bonbons.

I don’t listen to many baseball pods at all. I like Foul Territory, although it’s the little girl with the little curl: when it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s bad, it’s horrid. Their best talents are Scott Braun, who was a revelation to me after he left MLB Network, and A.J. Pierzynski, whose superpower is that he doesn’t give a s***. Plus it’s daily and two hours and they cover multiple topics, so if they do something you don’t care about, like, a backslapping interview with a current player, you can easily skip it and get to something more interesting in short order. Fair Territory, its offshoot, is generally good because of Ken Rosenthal, and it’s at its best when he’s alone on the pod. Alanna Rizzo totally grates on me because she is so obviously a Dodgers slappy on a national pod apparently (or, perhaps more exactly, allegedly) targeting fans of every team, and she doesn’t try particularly hard to mask that. I am in and out of so many other podcasts, like Rates and Barrels, MLBTR Podcast, and the Windup. I go back to them, listen to an episode or two, then tire of them. Baseballs pods that dovetail into my particular areas of sabermetric interest that don’t devolve into gambling or fantasy tips are really hard to find. In terms of Tiger pods, Tigers Territory is the only one I listen to with any regularity and even that’s not religious. Tigers Today is not really on my radar because it’s only once every two weeks. The most recent one is May 6—a lot’s happened since then, so why listen to the latest episode? I also listen to North Side Territory for the Cubs, which is two beat writers, and it’s a little more chuckleheaded than I’d like, but it’s at least as good as Kieran and Cody’s. That’s petty much it. Wish I could be more help.

Umpire throwing the ball back to the pitcher Lauer almost threw it past him. That got me to wondering. If there’s a runner on base and the catcher—let’s call him Mackey Sasser—attempts to throw a ball back to the pitcher but wings it right past him into center field, the ball is still live so the runner can advance. But what if the umpire, instead of Sasser, throws the ball wildly past the pitcher the same way? Is the ball still live and the runners can advance? Is there already a rule that contemplates this?

I always liked Austin Jackson as a player, and I’m sure that he’s a swell human being as well. Kind to his wife, good to his kids, loves kittens and puppies, all that. But as far as that podcast, Tigers Territory, is concerned, the value he adds as a third wheel is exactly zero. He provides no insights at all from a player’s perspective. Everything he says on that pod is the same overview from 40,000 feet that you can hear from a guy in a bar. Arguably worse, he never mentions any specifics about players or games or performances. It’s like he doesn’t do any homework at all, maybe not even watching the games themselves. Every time he speaks, it’s four solid minutes of clichés and generalizations. I feel less knowledgeable about the Tigers when he’s through talking. I acknowledge that as an ex-Tiger he will always be lionized on his pedestal by Kieran and Cody on the pod, but man, is it ever a slog to have to listen to him talk.

Wasn’t this one of the things he said he was being sarcastic about? It’s so hard to keep the asshattery straight.

I remember when I was a little kid, just after the 1969 expansion. I was knocked out by the idea of a team in Montreal, a French-speaking city. That was, in fact, the one thing that got me interested in learning French. One day my family went over to Windsor for a picnic or something. I met a local kid who confirmed he was. I asked him if he was an Expos fan, because, you know, Canada. He looked at me like I was an alien (which, in today’s terms, I guess I was). I’m a Tigers fan, he replied in a what-the-hells-wrong-with-you tone. I replay that scene in my head occasionally.

Guess I’ll have to be less subtle next time. 😏

lol what does he need more money for. And there are people who actually buy that nonsense? That’s really the aggravating thing about this whole experience: the gaslighting that just insults our intelligence so badly, as if we’re the ones who have to defend the idea to them that all billionaires want more and more money. It’s simply bonkers.

That’s another reason against the salary cap/floors without idea: the amount of revenue generated by organizations is vastly different among one another. More than NBA basketball and certainly NFL football, MLB baseball is an intensely local sport with very little national or even regional appeal. Maybe that’s because of the everydayness of the enterprise: to be really tuned in to your team or the league, you have to follow it every day, because the landscape is always changing. Contrast this with football, which stays static and is subject to analysis (over, more likely, overanalysis) for an entire week in between games. So an NFL fan has the luxury of contemplating a lot more teams and players and the league while it is essentially in stasis. I think that might lend itself to maintaining more national profile than baseball. And, of course, the NFL pools its money to a nearly complete degree, and the Players have a lot more access to how much money is flowing through it, making them far more able to negotiate a fair share of the proceeds in a negotiation of salary caps.