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I can try to remember! It shouldn't be super hard to update since I have the calculations on the sheet all set up. Remind me if I don't do so and you want to see it.

What the ****, Javy Baez! Carlos Peña: "Call the doctor, because that was SICK!"

Mark Canha is the best hitter on this team, coming into this game.

OK, just for kicks, I took at hack at trying to figure out whether the problem here is the chicken or the egg. I can tell you upfront that I'm not sure yet, mainly because I believe April 16th is too early for such conclusions, but I wonder whether this approach I am considering is directionally valid. I want to compare each player's estimated wOBA from ZIPS with their actual wOBA so far, and then group them together as a team. The challenge is figuring out what the team wOBA when bringing it all together. But you can't simply just average everyone's wOBA together because they all have different numbers of plate appearances. You have to even that all out somehow. So what I did what to multiply each player's actual PA with their actual wOBA into a number I'm calling "Mtlply" (I'm obviously not good at naming things), adding up both for to arrive at the team number, then dividing PA into Mltply to get the team wOBA. Then I do the same with their ZIPS PA (Z-PA), ZIPS wOBA (Z-wOBA), and Z-Mltply, and then index the actual to estimated to see whether they are beating their ZIPS or not. Index average is 100; anything higher, the player is outperforming his ZIPs estimates; a lower index means he is underperforming his ZIPS. Here's what I mean—here are the Tigers numbers so far (minimum 30 PAs): Read it like this: Kerry Carpenter's ZIPS projection was for 496 PAs and a .323 wOBA. (That multiplies out to 159.960, which matters only when adding up all the players). His actual PAs so far is 45 and his wOBA is .361 (which multiples out to 16.240). Index his actual wOBA to his Z-wOBA and he is coming in at 111.9, which is well above average at +11.9%. Rinse and repeat for all players. Then, add up all player's ZIPs PAs (5,360) and their Z-Mltpy (1689.549), divide the former into the latter, and we get the ZIPS wOBA of .315 for just these eleven players. Do the same with actual PAs (556) and Mltply (155,170), get the actual wOBA of (.279) for the eleven, then index actual to ZIPs to get how the whole group of players is indexing against their ZIPS estimates, which is 88.5. Easy peasy, right? 😜 A group index for these eleven Tigers hitters of 88.5, which is -11.5% against average, is, frankly, bad. How do we compare to all the other teams? Second from the bottom, which, even for a team projected to end up with a bottom four offense anyway, according to Z-wOBA, is prettehhh, prettehhh, prettehhh bad. Such underperformance would lead some to indict the team's coaching after all. So now here's the $64 question: how real is this? Are we as bad as all this? Is the coaching making the hitters worse than they should be? Are the players feeding off each other and making everyone else worse? Is this just a random small sample that will iron itself out as the season progresses? I report. You decide. My decision is to give them more time to see whether this state of batting affairs is persistent after all.

I might have been one of the first, if not the first, to hypothesize that the main issue might not be that the coaching is failing the hitters, but that this collection of hitters just might not be good enough. After all, not every player can produce at a Hall of Fame level if only he had the right coaching. Some guys simply have very low ceilings. I think we might have a few of those guys on this team right now. That said, I also can't say that this is true, or even that this is what I firmly believe. It's still just a hypothesis for me, and it may not really be provable one way or the other, because how do you do so except through the eventual results years from now? So I expect we will have an active and spirited discussion about this during the coming couple of years. But I am glad we've gotten this discussion rolling, because frankly, I was getting a bit tired of hearing the hitting coaches, and by extension A.J. Hinch, getting raked for failing to put All-Star-level hitters in the batter's box this year. Not that I'm a slappy for Hinch and the coaches, but it seemed like too simplistic an implication being made: change the manager and coaches and the guys we have now will become All-Star hitters. To Oblong's point, there is a force on the other side of the field actively trying to thwart us and that we have to work through. But, also, we were told by multiple sources (ZIPS, Marcel, PECOTA, etc.) coming in that this team was going to be a bottom-of-baseball offense, and I'm pretty sure they were not predicting that because of the coaches we have.

I think Trump would like to be sentenced to jail—not that he wants to actually go, because even if sentenced he still might not (SCOTUS to the rescue!), but he wants the world to see Merchan pull the trigger on it. it would play beautifully into his victim-of-the-deep-state narrative, and I would be concerned that even independents might be swayed in his direction by that. Not least of all, I wonder whether his being sentenced for contempt would become the big issue at hand and they would have to delay the actual illegal campaign contribution trial further to litigate that. So, careful with that axe, Eugene ...

Took me a few seconds to understand your reply, but I wasn't referring to the Starbucks thing, but instead the comment Shai Davidai made in his tweet, that kids yelling at each other in the middle of a street constitutes "domestic terrorism". That seems rather melodramatic.

My favorite part of the map is the reference to the NBL.

I didn’t love how they all gave in to breaking up during literally all the sketches, but maybe it was more or less a Ryan Gosling support thing. It’s not as though it’s an ongoing issue with this cast. I was wondering how did the other people in the audience in this sketch not break up? Maybe they don’t speak English so they don’t know what’s being said? Otherwise they ever really good at maintaining stone faces.

They’re kids acting out trying on political activism for size. They’ll be parents living in the suburbs and working for F500 companies within ten years.

lol kids with cameras yelling is domestic terrorism

This history of detached private equity is that they drive down costs and flip for quick profits, so I would imagine the fan experience will degrade and unnamed source players will start complaining about declining quality of work environment. Hope I’m wrong.

Back on the horse.

Sign who?

Or pick up an additional three or four actual hitters. The rot was so deep when Harris came onboard that we all knew it wasn’t going to be fixed by now, or fixed all at once. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but probably at least another year, if at all. The hitters are also probably going to have to come up through the system—hitters like Keith and Jung and Clark and McGonigle—versus relying on a free agent market as long as we have an inherent disadvantage built into this ballpark.

Well, you got half that right, anyway …

Alex Lange is always going to be the Little Girl with the Little Curl.

What a fantastic map! A+!

Difference being that people liked Adam Everett.

True, they still have 52 minutes to get the thing delayed.

That does seem to be a thing the last few years, where obviously talented performers such as athletes and musicians play down their skills by publicly positioning themselves as everyone hates them and wants to see them fail and they’re fighting against all odds to succeed, so they try to get people to root for them on that paradoxical basis. It’s such a common thing now it must have some cool name attached to it. Fake Underdog Complex? I don’t know, probably too on the nose. Plus a problematic acronym. But you get the idea.

Funny you say that because ever since I moved to Chicago, I am frequently struck by how flat and clipped and nasal Michigan accents are. I sure didn’t notice it while I was living there. I thought we were the Walter Cronkite network standard accent.

Happy Jose Lima Day!

I agree that luck matters, but a good foundation can help you make your own luck, and I think we’re going in the right direction.

If he can turn them against the union, he can turn them against the government, and then he can remake it all to his own liking.