chasfh

Maybe it’s because Good came in with a light envelope this month.

Oh man, Game 2 is gonna be fugly, isn’t it?

He did work out the trade well ahead of the deadline, kept Eduardo and his team in the loop the entire time, had it all ready to go well ahead of the deadline, Eduardo killed it with his last second demand, and Harris stood up and took responsibility for the trade falling through. This was all well-reported at the time. OTOH, this is the media we’re talking about, with all the cultural baggage that entails, so you can reject as much of or even all of it as you see fit.

What I meant to say in my clear-as-mud way is that the Free Press reported on Cobb beating up a black man on the streets of Detroit and explained his violence as being that of a man born in the south who dislikes black peoples. Leerhsen rejected this reporting with evidence by claiming the Free Press itself was racist in the way they reported about black people at the time. IOW, Leerhsen rejected the story not because he had evidence, but because he wanted to. Also, in response to Buddhist, when I use the term “Baseball” with a capital “B”, I mean Baseball the industry, versus baseball the game or baseball the fan base or anything like that. So when I say Baseball likely embraced the Leerhsen version of Cobb’s story, they didn’t need to do so with any grand pronouncement, but it is better for the business of baseball to deflect any and all attention away from any negative aspects related to players, especially their racism and focus on the positive achievements and personal traits, and Leerhsen’s book does that for both Cobb and for Baseball. Rehabilitating Cobb’s image helps Baseball, and they appreciate help.

How was Eduardo layering on an extra unworkable demand at the last second Harris’s fault? What specifically did Harris do, or did not do, that cost us the deal?

Harris has to accept the responsibility as PBO, but it wasn’t his fault the Eduardo trade fell apart. Harris had a deal all worked out with the Dodgers, and at literally the last minute, Eduardo demanded the Dodgers add an extra year to the deal for him to accept it, and they naturally balked at it. That’s was they didn’t get it done, not because Harris is a ****up.

If Flaherty does get traded, it will have to be for a near big league ready prospect. We’re not dumping him for low-A lottery tickets. We are no longer at the stage where we will accept that. If we can’t get anyone who’s near ready, I think we’re keeping him.

The Leerhsen book is a pretty good read, and I think it would make a good movie. But he did not do anything like a solid job of proving that Ty Cobb was significantly different from how he'd long been portrayed. Leerhsen did acknowledge that Cobb was combative and likely to fight at the drop of a hat, or some other perceived slight. This was not at all uncommon at the time, especially among southerners, who have traditionally embraced a culture chiefly defined by honor and defending it against all slights large and small. But Leerhsen does not do a good job of proving Ty Cobb was not racist, which was the author's greatest claim while promoting the book. For example, Leerhsen cited situations involving Cobb's father and took leaps to conclude that Mr. Cobb was a man who wanted to see blacks and whites on equal footing under the law and in terms of opportunities to succeed, but Leerhsen did not deliver any actual quotes or citations affirming this was the case. He drew his own conclusion, and worse yet, wrote it up so that it read as though it was merely his own conclusion. And then he imputed this thinking to young Ty himself, absent any evidence. Beyond this, I was specifically looking for solid citations in the book's endnotes supporting Leerhsen's claims that accounts in Al Stump's book about Cobb were wrong, but the only evidence offered in the Leerhsen book was him merely saying Stump was wrong. I saw no citations of any newspaper, magazine, book or anything else that supports the Leerhsen's contentions about Stump. In fact, on at least one occasion, the author simply rejected, flatly, the accounts of newspapers of the time (specifically, regarding a fight with a street worker in Detroit early in his career, sometime before 1908), but without offering any contrary evidence to support his rejection. Leerhsen just says so and leaves it at that. This is a common tack he takes in the book, and I don't find that convincing. Plus, there are a lot of conclusive statements about Cobb's character that the author makes throughout the book that do not have any supporting citations in the end notes. For a reader to believe these statements are true, they would have to take only the Leerhsen's word for it, and nothing else. Likewise, with Cobb's own behavior, such as the fight mentioned above, Leerhsen disregarded actual newspaper accounts in the Free Press which, at the time, reported straight up that as a southern man Cobb had a natural disinclination towards blacks which led to the fights. Instead, Leerhsen cited the Free Press's own racism in its general reporting about blacks, as though the paper was seeking to implicate Ty Cobb as a racist due only to his southern roots. Point being, the conclusion that Ty Cobb was simply not the racist everyone has always believed he was is based on nothing but the author's own hopeful conjecture, provided without citations of confirming evidence, and even to the point of contradicting actual reporting of the time when it suits him to. In short, Leerhsen comes off a Ty Cobb apologist whose goal was the do doing everything he can to exonerate Cobb's reputation as a racist. I am not surprised Baseball embraced Leerhsen's version of Cobb, since they would the stink of past racism to be washed away by our sepia-tinged 21st-Century imaginations of what we hope and wish people back then, which includes our own ancestors, were like.

I don’t buy Leershen’s hagiographical version of Cobb’s story. It was an intentional whitewash in many respects.

Too bad Manning can’t pitch the first game so we could get a Skubal/Skenes game. That would be worth playing hooky to see. Skubal/Jones ain’t chopped liver, either.

This is so, so good.

And the guy you're thinking of isn't even being serious about it!

Fire Hinch! I hear Pedro Grifol might be free soon … 😁

I don't think it was small talk. I think she was genuinely annoyed and genuinely wanted me to know that. To what end, I can't be sure.

lol couple of dozen

I guess beating the Blue Jays three of four and having a record 2-1/2 games better than they is not enough for these particular writers to consider the Tigers to be better than they, especially since the Tigers were ranked two spots higher before the series started. But then, Kaitlyn McGrath is a Blue Jays beat writer, so ... 🤷🏻‍♀️

This will go down as one of the favorite examples of a players effectively going ape**** at an umpire.

I won’t. I am reminded that when I went to Game 1 of the 2005 World Series, he was working right field and Country Joe was working the plate. Laz Diaz was nowhere to be found.

Brought to you by the fine, fine people who bombed a marked caravan of aid workers “systematically, and car by car”. But always remember: not a genocide.

Ok, here we go: assuming Leyland doesn’t like it, doesn’t buy into it—could he have stopped the players who are acting on explicit orders of the front office and the owner from carrying out a cheating scheme? I have a hard time envisioning that even Jim Leyland could make a general manager and an owner heel. After all, they hired him. They’re his boss. How does Jim Leyland use his very force of will to take control of the situation like he’s the boss and intimidate everyone, including the billionaire owner himself, into bending to his will on this? I don’t know, that sounds like fan fiction to me.

Not sure. For all we know, maybe either or both those guys would have bought in to it?

I agree Hinch learned an important lesson, and that lesson might have been that when you take a managerial job, make sure the front office hiring you has, at the very least, the same morals and values as you.

If a guy is a workplace superstar and the big boss in the office wants them to cheat, they’re not going to listen to their immediate supervisor who is definitely not on the same page telling them he wishes they would not do it. That’s just Workplace Politics 101. Hinch’s only moves were to quit, or to try to navigate through it, because stopping them doing it just wasn’t going to happen, and it was literally an impossible situation to find himself in. I do not think any less of him as a leader for not being able to affect it. We’ll simply have to agree to disagree on this.

Which I basically said.

Based on the Tom Tango research, run expectancy is about 0.86 runs with man on first and one out, versus 0.66 runs with man on second and two outs. In a case like yesterday, though, it’s not run expectancy we want to look a—that is, how many runs a team is expected to score—but run probability, meaning what are the chances a run will score, because one run is what was needed, and not many runs. Run probability with a man on first and no out is 41.6%, while a man on second and one out, it’s 39.7%. So the chances of scoring at least one run, which is all we cared about in that moment, is actually worse after the successful bunt. Not enough worse to start firing people over, but definitely not better. If you want to increase run probability after a sac bunt, the only situation it makes sense is with man on second with no out, which is 61.4%, to achieve man on third with one out, which is 66.0%. That is definitely better, but also, this is the only situation it even makes sense. And that’s why sac bunting has gone the way of pitchers batting—it just doesn’t make any sense outside one very specific circumstance, if what you want to do is better your chances of scoring runs, or even scoring one run. As an aside, if Cody Stavenhagen is characterizing run expectancy as being 80% and 65% in yesterday’s case, then he is unclear on the concept, since he is confusing run expectancy with run probability.