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Maybe we can move on from him when we find someone decent to replace him. And it doesn’t even have to be a stud with the stick—it could be a halfway-decent hitter with a plus-glove. But I’m pretty sure the last thing we will want to do DFA him out of frustration and get nothing in return, or exile him to Toledo and signal to the market that he’s damaged goods. If we want to get a return for him annd eventually end up with something better, we have little choice at this moment but to keep playing him and hope he figures it out at least a little.

I still have them winning 84.

That’s exactly what Harris always said the plan is: lay down a solid base via the system, continue to build from within over time via the draft and UDFAs, fill in the active roster with trades and free agents and the 40-man with waiver claims and MiLFAs, and don’t fall in love long-term with flawed players based on a good year or two. As for Tork, the tricky part with him is the tantalizing talent we don’t want to go get unlocked somewhere else, especially with the division or league. The talent is there, and the team that unlocks it is going to benefit from it for a while. But probably the best outcome for us here is that he goes on a really good run, and we flip him for a solid starter or major league-ready prospect to someone not exactly looking under the hood. That one would be a tall order, though.

FWIW Tigers are now 4-2 in the six games Javy got a walk.

Objection, badgering the witness. 😉

Baseball did embrace it—you yourself linked to an article on the MLB website that is completely and wholeheartedly accepting of Leerhsen's side of the story. Baseball likely did so because it's advantageous for them to gloss over Cobb's actual documented behavior that clearly portrays him as a virulent racist to the point that he injured people because of it, and portraying him as lied about and misunderstood instead. That way, fans can celebrate his historical accomplishments without feeling icky about it. And that's good for the business of baseball.

See, that’s the beauty part for the advertising side: games are indeed half an hour or so shorter, but that’s all coming out of the dead time on the field there had been before, which is to say, during play. But the advertising breaks are just as many, because the number of innings is the same, and they are just as long, as I have demonstrated in the earlier post. Same with pitching changes—I’m not sure whether the pitch timer has made them shorter, but I would bet the number of ad minutes during them is the same. I’m not sure what the average number of pitching changes are per game now versus what it was before the pitch timer came in, but it would not surprise me to learn that there are exactly as many as before. So really, the bottom line appears to be that there are as many advertising minutes during a game now as before, and that it is the ratio of game time-to-ad time that has dropped.

On the radio side, what generally happens with the shorter break that started last year is the DTRN did not alter their commercial break length, so they generally come back just as or just after the first pitch of the half inning takes place, over which you hear the intro rock music, Dan comes on and does introductory copy for a couple seconds, then calls the pitch that was thrown now 10 or 15 or 20 seconds ago as though it were happening at that moment, then he catches up to the live call on the second pitch. You might notice that sometimes his call for the first pitch and the second pitch comes only five or so seconds apart.

Matt Vierling is my Tiger at the moment.

“Oh, and if you don’t mind a fifth request, two large pizzas with pepperoni and mushrooms on both, and add onions on one.”

An inconvenient truth that will be conveniently omitted in all RWM mentions.

It’s because they did not break ranks from the Capitol Police and join the rioters in hunting down Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, et al.

I’m pretty sure the word count is a maximum because she’s not a reader.

But they’re going to come out of it all rich as Croesus. that’s the idea, anyway.

We already know just by reading history, only back then they were called “white people” instead of “MAGAs”.

Or, more exactly, stand-alone gambling kiosks.

The ironic thing is that gaslighting has lost its bite precisely because it’s overused, and it’s overused precisely because the Trumpublians engage in a whole firehose of it, so the tsunami of gaslighting becomes the exact reason the term “gaslighting” means practically nothing anymore. The Russians figured this **** out centuries ago. We’re just learning it over here.

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.