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Wow that was a lucky break to get out of the inning. Could have been a disaster if it had gotten by Vierling.

Urshela just had an awful at bat, but then, we didn’t hire him for his hitting, anyway, did we?

If MLB had ABS, the inning would be over. Let’s make ‘em pay!

Javy ties the game on THE FIRST PITCH! A.J. And the batting coaches must mad! 😜

Exactly. I think a lot of fans, maybe not here but elsewhere, who believe that geeks just want to fill players’ heads with endless numbers, because they are myopic and they themselves never played the game so they don’t know any better, are hoping it truly is that way, so they can point to analytics and say, see? Told ya analytics is a failure. They think analytics is still a debatable proposition. It’s not. The war on analytics has been over for at least a decade, and analytics won.

This whole line of discussion took off from your mention of inability to deal with information, which is analytics. In any event, maybe not you, but a lot of people want to see Hinch flop and get fired and be replaced by a manager who doesn’t know from analytics, just like when we were kids. That’s never going to happen. We have analytics, we are going to use it, we will share guidance from it with hitters, and that’s that. I’ll also assume that Hinch is not so rock-headed that he will hold onto his one approach because he refuses to admit he’s wrong even when the hitting is failing and the team is losing, until he proves he is that guy after all. I will continue to hypothesize that we have not had hitting All Stars who are failing only because the coaching is failing them, and that instead we need different, better hitters on the team than many if not most of the guys we have now.

We have no insight into exactly what the coaches are telling or showing players, but I would really be surprised to learn that it involves computational math, and I don’t believe there’s anything we have seen to indicates that’s what’s happening, other than we are flailing at the plate.

If hitters don't have information about pitchers and pitches, then how would they have any idea of what to do at the plate?

I can promise you that any change Hinch makes will involve analytics, and that whoever is coaching the hitters, whether it's these guys or whether it's new guys, they will be sharing that information with hitters. The strategy of leaving hitters on their own to simply see ball hit ball is dead.

If none of it works, then what's your solution for them?

I looked into this maybe last year or perhaps two years ago, but I'm pretty sure the Tigers have more weekday home day games than just about any other club, including the Cubs. For sure, every getaway game is a day game. Perhaps if we ever get really good and get any kind of national or ex-pat following, we may see a higher percentage of home night games during the week, for the purpose of TV ratings. The players themselves would prefer night games every game, even Sundays. They like the regularity of it, especially the no-day-game-after-a-night-game part, and also, it's a lot cooler playing at night and out of the hot sun, which matters everywhere except domes and the west coast.

Seems like that information would do them a lot of good! "Look for this type of pitch in this area. If you see it, swing; if you don't, lay off and look for a pitch related to the new count." That may be why the Tigers are laying off first pitches at a greater rate than any other team. They're not seeing the exact pitch they can do damage on, and by and large they're laying off, for better or worse. Otherwise, just what are they swinging at, and what do they hope to do with it, if they have no inkling of what to look for? If a batter can't recognize a pitch when he sees it, he's probably not long for the major leagues in any event, since pitch recognition is a Hitting 101 skill. I suspect we have too many of those types of hitters to field a contender as it is. I believe I remember reading that you're a big proponent of "see ball hit ball". Sounds reasonable on its face, and that was a reasonable approach fifty-plus years ago, when we were eleven years old and starting to learn the intricacies of the game. But in this new era of consistent faster-than-Feller heat and sophisticated pitch shaping, if you don't know what's coming, or at least what this pitcher in front of you is capable of, I wouldn't think you'd have much of a chance. Like it or not, the age of data science in baseball is here to stay, and it's never going away.

Like everyone else, I sometimes have bad consumer experiences. I would love to feed back to these companies about these experiences, but too frequently I can't find any way to contact them to let them know. That's bad enough, but to me it's even worse when you get a survey invitation from these companies, and you're thinking, great, now I can tell them about the poor experience I just had with them. But too often these surveys are short (two or three or four questions) where every question asks you to rate their attributes on a scale, and there is no text box in which you can provide specific feedback about your experience, or even about general things they could improve upon. They're all scale of 0 to 10 questions. Seems clear to me they are using this data to compensate or punish employees, or to publicize how much customers love their business. In short, it is not at all a meaningful feedback mechanism. It's a marketing and/or employee management tool. I've developed a shorthand for determining whether the survey I'm being invited to is of this type: if the very first question they ask you is, "Would you recommend [Our Company] to your friends and relatives?", or something along those lines, I bail. Because then it's clear to me they only seeking numbers they can leverage or promote.

What head-stuffing information are you talking about here? Are you envisioning them trying to do math in their head while they are at the plate? Or are you talking about information such as "in this count from this guy, look for this particular pitch" being too much for them?

Heroes? Or vigilantes?

Leyland?

I think it's probably more like we simply don't have good hitters, than we do have really really good hitters learning bad habits from the new guy. FWIW, Mark Canha has a grand total of three GIDPs, and he is the best qualified hitter on the team by wOBA (.366) and wRC+ (141).

I'm in on three of your four. Re: point #2, I would be really, really surprised to learn that the coaches are firehosing the hitters with the math so they could understand the science behind the numbers. That would strike me as being deeply dumb. I would bet the coaches are instead sharing the tendencies the numbers show: in this count from this guy, look for this particular pitch. I think it's more likely we simply have hitters not remembering that, or following through with it, in the heat of the moment.

It was worse ... we were fans of the Tigers for the last seven years.

Perfect.

I might reply that it's a fine line between giving in to a natural impulse to break character in an extraordinary situation, and allowing yourself to break on purpose because you think the audience likes being in on the joke. It's one of the reasons Frank Zappa was never allowed back on the show back after he'd hosted. He constantly broke character in a bid to convey to the audience how stupid he thought it all was. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/frank-zappa-saturday-night-live-banned/

Naw, man, ya got it all wrooong. They don't rail against leftists engaging in cancel culture because they are shocked and dismayed by the idea of cancel culture. They rail against leftists engaging in cancel culture because they are projecting their own cancel culture behavior onto liberals in a desperate attempt to gaslight us into believing they themselves don't engage in it, even though they constantly engage in it right in front of our eyes. Is it working? 😏

I still think about his final post he made about Torii Hunter.

Tigers making runs happen!

Not today!