chasfh

Twenty-nine-year-old Willie Hernandez still looks like he was in his 40s in 1984.

Grid willing we will never find out.

That’s got to be a joke.

The Tigers are a 5-13 team at the moment, and they were flat to awful against a division rival, so I can see why folks are antsy. Good thing they're getting on a plane tonight and getting back on the horse tomorrow.

Speaking of spending money, I'm sure Prince Fielder would take another 9/214 to come back here.

We didn't get Canha to build around him. We got him because we needed someone to put on the field this year. No matter what, you gotta try to put the best team on the field that you can manage to.

I can only imagine what we'll be saying two years from now! "Not enough Colt Keiths", probably!

Look, I really don't like the kind of interpersonal drama you appear to thrive on, and I want to spare the people any more of whatever this is, so maybe we should just part as friends while we still can. Best of everything to you. Go Tigers, Go Biden.

This ⬆ after this ⬇ In which you're essentially challenging me to deny that these are all genius moves! 💀💀💀 And I answered the question on Tarik Skubal, which was all I ever brought up, in exhaustive detail. But just to answer your other questions from that same post: Kerry Carpenter in the 19th round? Not a genius move. Tarik Skubal in the 9th round? No. Jason Foley? Signed as an undrafted free agent? No. Colt Keith in the 5th round? No. Beau Brieske in the 27th round? No. Reese Olson, obtained in trade for Daniel Norris? No. Wenceel Perez, signed as a 16 y.o. free agent in 2016 for $550K? No. None of these are genius moves, in my opinion. But if you think they're genius moves, or if you don't, either way, that's fine. I won't yell at you for it.

as soon as she said she wasn't going to, everyone knew that meant she was going to.

Both-siders and independents will be quick to point the finger at the mainstream media for this, meaning at anyone that's not the right-wing media universe. But I would bet you dollars to dimes that if we could break down the responses based on where people get their information, we'd see numbers a lot closer to the truth among consumers of MSM than among consumers of RWM.

Oh, come on, what's not inspirational about this?

We could do this exact thing and still have our best record since 2016.

Please relax and stop haranguing at me. If as you say you’ve already answered this, it appears your answer is Avila was a genius because he drafted Skubal in the ninth round and he happened to have succeeded, that it has nothing to do with anything Avila knew before the draft, and everything to do with how Skubal happened to do after it. So, genius after the fact. Of course, that could be due as much to luck as anything else. Otherwise we’d have to conclude that the Dodgers taking Mike Piazza in the 63rd round, or whatever it was, was also a genius move. But the fact is the reason Avila, David Chadd, and the gang picked Skubal in the ninth round is because Scott Boras used his long-standing relationship with Ilitch and that front office to recommend that they take Skubal. The Tigers had wanted to draft another of Boras’s clients and he was drafted out from under them, so Boras recommended Skubal and they took him instead. The Tigers brain trust had the same injury concerns about Skubal as everyone else did, and they probably weren’t going to choose him at all, but because they trusted Boras at least as much as whatever it was their own information was telling them, they decided to, in their own words, “roll the dice” on Skubal and select him. And what do you know! It worked! Since there was no strategy aforethought in drafting Skubal, and they just did so because they “rolled the dice” to select him, I disagree with the idea that it was a genius move on Al Avila’s part. They took a chance, and it worked out. It was luck. And as the man said, I’d rather be lucky than good.

I’ve had just about all I can take from you, young man.

Crap Almighty, that Witt should-not-have-been-a-double has got to be the nail in this coffin.

Kyle Rittenhouse probably has brain damage to some degree. He is also very useful to the party.

Good call! Now tell us what happens next!

Can you imagine the hell to pay if Pasquatino would have dropped that pop-up which was in fair territory, and they could have gotten Keith out at second and doubled off Javy at first, because Javy was just standing around the plate instead of even half-heartedly jogging to first? It didn’t hurt this time, but that should be unacceptable, and I think Hinch should bench Javy for it.

I really, really hope Democrats don’t botch the messaging on just how deadly a second Trump term will be. All they really have to do is use his own words about what he plans to do against him. Intersperse that with reminders of what Biden has done and will do for the people, and D should be as much a winner as basically every election everywhere since 2018.

Any questions about secret death camps for Trump supporters who get caught badmouthing Crooked Joe Biden in front of undercover Democrap operatives? That’s gotta be something near 49% as well.

Maybe by calling the elections for July 4th, Sunak figures he can goose turnout among conservatives who are still sore about Lord Shelburne and those commie Whigs capitulating to those criminal rebels and bailing on America.

It must be so disheartening for Skubal to realize that when he goes down by any number of runs, that’s probably the game.

What's the genius part here? What do you see as the underlying reasons Avila picking Skubal in the ninth round was a stroke of genius? What do you think Avila saw that nobody else saw that led them to make the genius pick? Or are you implying that it was a genius move because look how he's doing now?

The drafting of Tork is not the only part Avila was responsible for. He was also responsible for Tork's development, and it could certainly be true that picking Tork 1/1 was the right move—which to all indications at the time it was—and that Avila takes the responsibility for failing to develop Tork properly, which to all indications he did. First Avila tried to force him to become a third baseman, which was asinine and probably hindered his development. Then he rushed him up to the big leagues long before he was ready, which to all indications he did. I have opinions about why Avila did this that are outside the scope of this post. Opinions aside, the fact remains. It is true that 2020 was a lost year, and that cannot be blamed on Avila. That whole class might have gotten ****ed up because of COVID, although on the other hand, it does look like several from that class are finding their footing in the big leagues even if Tork, who has way more trigger time up here than any of them have, possibly excepting Detmers. But the fact is that Tork was not close to being ready to come up, yet he did, and he has sucked hard for the most part ever since. So, the $64 question is, who gets the blame for the fact that Tork is sucking right now? I think the blame an open question. It is Harris's responsibility to fix him, and they haven't, and that's on them. But I think most of us agree that Tork was already a broken toy when they came in on Sept 19, 2022, and that's on the Avila team. Fixing a guy completely is not like flipping a light switch, but Harris did seem to get Tork going in the right direction toward the end of last year, but he's flopping around this year. Why is Tork flopping around now? Maybe the hitting coaches are giving him bad advice this year. Maybe they're giving him good advice and he doesn't want to implement it. Maybe they're giving him good advice but he's just having trouble it right. Maybe Tork thinks he doesn't need advise from hitting coaches because he got eight million dollars for being a great college hitter on his own and he thinks he can do it up here on his own. We have no way of knowing, other than parsing comments he and Hinch make about his progress. I have opinions about that, too, again, outside the scope. So I know it's fun for some to imagine that I'm blinded by rage at Avila and can't reason logically about him because I am so emotional and irrational about him. I can say that's simply not true, because I'm not at all ruled by my emotions in any event, not that saying so would matter. People will take what they like from my and everyone else's post, and you can see for yourself how true that is. But I do like laying out my impressions of this kind of thing when asked, because it sharpens my thinking about it, so I appreciate that opportunity here.