chasfh

Not sure how aware people here are of how much the national press has noticed Riley Greene, but here is yet another story I am seeing. he keeps this up and he will get MVP votes this year. https://theathletic.com/5445695/2024/04/30/mlb-hitters-hot-starts-barrel-rate-improvement/ Riley Greene, Detroit Tigers We’re focusing on batted ball quality here, but this is truly a breakout in all regards for the 23-year-old outfielder in Detroit. Consider that, so far this season, he has: • Reduced his whiff rate by a larger margin than all but 16 players in the bigs • Reduced his strikeout rate by 2.4 percentage points • Reduced his chase rate by a larger margin than all but 18 players in the bigs • Increased his walk rate three-fold (the biggest improvement in the bigs) • Reduced his ground-ball rate • Increased his fly-ball rate by a larger margin than all but five players in the bigs • Improved his range defensively Often across-the-board improvement like this is due to a player settling into his approach, and that seems like the case here. “It’s been a lot of nibbling to get me to chase,” he recently told the Detroit Free Press. “The more that I don’t chase, the more they’ll come back in the zone and hopefully try to challenge me.” Players generally see more pitches, chase less and lift the ball better as they age, but this is a more aggressive version of that natural improvement. This is a player coming into his own. He may not be stealing bags like he did last season, but Greene seems likely to be able to hit .250-plus with 25 homers this year, with the type of defense and base running that could make him an All-Star.

Well, at least we know where it all comes from now. 🤨

Sounds exactly like my mom and my oldest brother telling me when I was in college that I was a liberal because I read garbage like Mad Magazine and Metro Times.

TBF, that’s a lot a lot more imported from the land of Elsewhere as well.

Yeah she did a great job.

My buddy the PBS hotshot worked hard to paper over his!

I can hear the boos if I strain to, but the cheers basically drowned those out.

I have noted on a few occasions here that his Queens stevedore accent is a huge part of his appeal. If he talked like Bill Buckley he'd be just another criminal real estate nobody.

So of course I’m gonna critique it. The lady in the red dress looks too in on the joke. The guy needed to turn his head and body more. The lady in blue looks more pleading than pissed off. Otherwise, spot on.

Regrettably, they vote, too. They are voting for the personality more than the fascism. Not that they are anti-fascism, or even agnostic about it, but if it weren’t for the personality, they wouldn’t be voting at all. They certainly wouldn’t be coming to the polls if Mike Johnson were running, and he is easily as fascist as Trump, if not more. That’s going to be the challenge for the Profa movement after Trump leaves the scene: getting someone with a personality to front it. The personality wouldn’t even have to know what he’s doing. Kid Rock would do, if he could get the olds to show up. And Don Jr doesn’t have anywhere near the broad-based charisma that Agent Orange has, try though they might. It will be an actual quandary for them, which is why this election is probably the last best chance they will have for maybe decades to win and finally destroy democracy.

God, I love that woman.

And then after you answer “yeah I know”, they invariably reply, “so why didn’t you do it??” And you wanna answer, “because I’m ****ing human and I made a ****ing mistake. Do I really need to defend that?!” But you don’t, because it just doesn’t matter, and you just want it to be done with already. But it’ll still bother you for a few hours. Then you’re over it, and everything resets.

O’re definitely right on paper, although I have personally experienced playing left field with a ball hit almost exactly to me and the center field yelling he got it. I shouted back no no it’s mine and I definitely did not get out of the way. So I can see something like that happening in the bigs, and I can definitely support the corner outfielder holding his ground under such a specific circumstance. Again I haven’t relooked at this play.

The Tigers have played only seven of their 28 games against teams who are currently higher in the power rankings than their #13 (per MLB this morning), and they were 3-4 against those guys (Royals #9; Rangers #12). So it will be a nice little baptism of fire when they go on the road against the Guardians (#4) and Yankees (#5) starting this Friday. It will give us a better sense of how improved this team really is.

Just speculating with actually going back and looking, maybe the ball was more in Perez’s area than it was in Meadows’ so he had a better shot, but Meadows was big-timing as the CF, and Perez stayed with it because it was his by proximity, but Meadows insisted, and at the last second Perez pulled off, and it dropped. That’s one way it could have happened, again, without actually searching for it.

Just to build onto what you posted here, I wanted to look at effectiveness of LH pitchers since 1975, so I am adding FIP- below. I like FIP-minus because it measures a pitcher's expected outcomes on the things he can control, taken against league average. I used 220 innings minimum because that's the lowest qualifier on your table (i.e., Willie), which is why we see Lolich on the table. 100 is average; lower is better: David Price 71 Mickey Lolich 82 Willie Hernandez 85 Drew Smyly 88 Tarik Skubal 89 Phil Coke 90 Jim Crawford 90 David Wells 90 Justin Thompson 91 John Hiller 92 FYI, Skubal's FIP- for the season coming into this game is 55, and it was 47 last year, so, I expect him to move up the list within a short period of time.

We had to have this one. We couldn't lose two of three to KC at home.

Come on, boys, we need some instant runs!

Benetti is a bit of a cheerleader, too. You can tell when he says things along the lines of “come on, guys, we need some insurance runs here”, whereas Dan would say, “Tigers could use some insurance runs here.” Big difference, at least to my ears. You can also hear difference in reactions after home runs and the like. Dan is all business and always a journalist. Jason will allow himself to be a fan. Nothing like Monroe, though—being one of the clubhouse guys in the booth at all times is practically his entire schtick. But I do think later vintage broadcasters, even play by play guys, purposefully incorporate blatant homerism into their broadcasts, perhaps at the behest of their employers, and responsive to focus groups. Maybe it’s that the kids like more than just one kind of homer.

I actually signed up for NordPass as a replacement, but obviously they made it for the mobile-only generation, because it works fine on mobile, but it is practically unusable on laptop, which is where I do all my heavy lifting. So I'm sticking with LastPass for the time being. That's fine, they do not store anyone's master passwords so no breach can reveal that, and the nature of the passwords is that they exist encrypted on the user's machine and even if that's breached, they are useless without knowledge of the master. So I feel reasonably confident that I'm gonna be OK.

I think it counts. Stern is a major legacy media vehicle by now.

That checks out with the map.

I'm OK, you're OK.

The company you keep.

I read about people's preferences for seasons in the Washington Post and this is a pretty good map: What it basically shows is which season people tend to look forward to more, spring or fall. A lot has to do with the local climate, obvs: if you live in the cold north, you are more likely to look forward to spring; in very warm or hot climes, more likely to look forward to fall. This is apparently based on Google searches. Now, this isn't a map, but I found this really interesting: you are more likely to prefer the season your birthday falls within!