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Well, he put three of them on there, and he had fully co-opted Alito and Thomas going in, so he has his bulletproof majority. Robert’s is just a bonus throw-in most of the time. It’s clear that they work for him, and for nothing else.

He says he wants to use the police to go kill wicked people. Glad I don’t live in North Carolina.

You think this? You’d be the only one.

And even the bullpen was decent to start the season. They have really frayed in the last month or more.

And it defintiely should, since this is an actual morality issue, as opposed to steroids, which was more an incentives issue. JMO

I’m wondering whether the episode will cost them votes. Writers withhold Hall of Fame votes for “morality” reasons a lot.

You are just so relentlessly negative on every. Single. Aspect. Of this team. You seem so unhappy about everything, all of it, and I just want you to be happy. Also, I don't believe he never told his players to stop, because the overwhelming evidence revealed by the reporting all but confirms that he did tell his players he wanted them to stop. And he's not giving back his ring because no one told him he has to. The players who absolutely did engage in the cheating are also not giving back their rings. We'll have the agree to disagree, but I'm pretty sure the evidence for my position is a lot stronger.

It's always on his record, so it won't go away in that sense. But he served his time for it, the time that Baseball itself imposed on him, and now his slate is clean, and now he gets to move on with his life. And your 100% certainty to the contrary, I don't believe Hinch never told the players he was against the scheme. His actions (e.g., smashing the monitors they used to see the stolen signs) say otherwise, so again, that simply makes no sense. Look, if you hate the Tigers so much because they disrespected you by hiring someone you despise, then maybe this isn't the team for you. If you want to follow a team you respect, maybe consider following some other team. The Twins are doing pretty good these days.

The way I read this is that the Astros players who got busted and then started singing in order to avoid serving any time themselves were eager to push the responsibility of this to literally everyone else but themselves. Of course they're going to blame Hinch for not telling them to stop, even though it was widely reported that he did not approve of the scheme, which he surely communicated to them. It just doesn't pass the smell test that he would have said nothing to them.

Are you saying the Lajoie and Dombrowski front offices wanted to implement cheating schemes but knew they couldn't because Leyland and Anderson? 😉

Yes, A.J. Hinch was the field manager of the team, and he is responsible for what happens in the clubhouse, even if it's a cheating scandal everyone knows he was opposed to. And he was fired from the team for it, and was also suspended from the game for an entire year. He served his sentence, and as with all people who serve the sentences that are imposed on them, now he gets to have a fresh start. That will never be enough for some people.

Reese Olson is 2-8, a winning percentage of .200, with a 3.32 ERA, which works out to an ERA+ of 125, which is 25% better than league average ERA when adjusting for park effects and era. The last qualified pitcher to fashion a .200 or lower winning percentage with an ERA+ that 25% better than league average was ... drumroll, please ... Nobody. Eight of the top ten occurred before 1905. And—you will enjoy this—one of the top ten was Shelby Miller, who was 6-17 with a 3.02 ERA in 2015. So maybe he can sherpa Reese through this difficult period. https://stathead.com/tiny/47eSh

Quaint.

25% of Americans are entertained.

And the hits keep coming ...

A.J. Hinch was not the guy who was in charge of the cheating scandal. Jeff Luhnow was the guy in charge of the cheating scandal. Hinch wanted nothing to do with it. All of this has been established and is well-known.

If you have never had your manager at work go around you and direct your subordinates to do something you are on record as not wanting to have done, then you might not be able to imagine just how paralyzing that can be to keep you from being an effective leader. I have. I can empathize.

People hate A.J. Hinch because he has a psychology degree from Stanford. The nerve. Leyland didn't need no stinking college degree. He just blew smoke in players' faces while he yelled at them, and they loved it. Now that ... that was real baseball.

Leyland and Anderson never had the front office go around them directly to the players to enlist them in a cheating scheme.

With America set to go fascist, Britain’s going to need to go back.

I don’t think anyone here thinks their manager in infallible.

Worst case scenario for that is someone else picks him up, they’re responsible for the minimum, we’re responsible for the rest, and then he comes back and beats us a couple times.

I hear ya, and I chuckled, but it is the reality we are facing at the moment. Fun fact: over the past seven days, the Tigers have given up home runs at a lower rate than the Dodgers, Yankees, Orioles, and Guardians have. Of course, all of them have given up homers at a greater rate than 24 other teams have. 😁

Saturday has been designated as a bullpen game to help starting pitching rest up, because everyone has to go all out 100% on every pitch so they can dot corners with twisty upper 90s trick pitches to get swing and miss, and that wears downs elbows and shoulders fast. They have to do that because all nine guys in a batting order can take you out of the park on any pitch near the zone. Gone are the days Mickey Lolich and Denny McClain and Hank Aguirre and Jim Bunning could lay up on the bottom half of every opponent’s batting order—plus pitch to pitchers!—off of flat mounds to nose-to-toes strike zones so they could pad their innings. We had to get as many innings out of Maeda as we could so we could preserve the pen for the next few games. We had to give him the chance to pitch through it—unfortunately, this time, he just couldn’t. That happens. It’s baseball, so there’s no guarantee. Don’t like it? Lions training camp starts in three weeks, so you won’t have to think about the Tigers for the rest of the year if you don’t want to.

That’s the guy they can see on the teevee