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I’ll be impressed when the responsibility extends to the white principal, too.

That might help on the one count, although I’m not sure it would help keep balls from flying out of the park, so pitchers would still need max/max effort on every pitch to avoid that outcome.

Which leads to the $64 question, how does the game get restructured to lead to this? And bonus question, when needs to happen for Baseball to care enough to address it?

It doesn’t much look like they’re gonna get tonight’s game in, and they don’t have a workable common off day until September 23 (unless Thursday after All-Star Game is on the table), so they may have to play a doubleheader. That would make seven games against our key division rival in the next ten days. This might set the tone for the whole season, right here.

I've been giving this a good deal of thought, and I realize that it's possible that the pitching coaching is just far ahead of the hitting coaching. But from a smell-test standpoint, I find that less likely than another hypothesis I've been gravitating toward: as a group, our hitting prospects are simply not as good from a big-league standpoint as our pitching prospects. It's not as though all players are tabula rasas that can all be molded into Hall of Famers under the right circumstances and coaching. Different players have different ceilings. Some will indeed top out at the Hall of Fame level; others top out at the minor league level. When it comes to groups of people, that's just the way things are. My hypothesis is that when it came to player acquisition through the draft, international, minor-league free agents, trades, whatever, the Avila regime may simply have had a better idea of how to acquire pitching talent than hitting talent. I think it might have had something to do with the types of pitchers and hitting they preferred. Avila was known to draft pitchers for speed and spin toward the end, perhaps resulting from the data analysis Jay Sartori put together. But when it came to hitters, Avila always did like scrappy guys who were more run manufacturers than he did on-base guys or big boppers. That's why our system was lousy with that kind of hitter, at least until last year and this. So maybe it's not that the Hinch coaching team is incompetent when it comes to working with hitters. Maybe it's that they simply had less to work with when it came to the hitters they inherited than they had with the pitchers. Here's some more sample size fun for you: this, from FanGraphs, shows all Tigers hitters with at least 20 plate trips, ranked by wOBA: There are twelve such hitters on the Tigers. Five of the top seven are Harris acquisitions. Of the two that aren't, Carpenter was a 19th-round pick so I wouldn't consider it an Avila coup; and the other is Riley Greene, a slam-dunk 1/5 pick. All five at the bottom are Avila pickups. They have all working under the same hitting coach team who all report to A.J. Hinch since February. Again, sample size, so maybe this means nothing and will be completely disproved within the next few weeks. And TBF, this is a blunt table that doesn't take into account the commitment Harris has made to bottom-fiver Colt Keith. But I think this is at least worth watching over the next year or two.

OK, hope so either way, because the alternative.

Jerry Seinfeld hosted something in 1990 called Spy Magazine’s How to be Famous, which is a hilarious but at least semi-serious examination of how people become famous and maintain their fame. Rule #1 was “Have talent”, which he demonstrates doesn’t always work by showing a concert violinist plying her trade on a subway platform.

Oh good lord, now what?!

They’ll get the waiver. The system is designed to help Trump and people like Trump.

States’ rights is practically the textbook definition of fascism, which elevates the rights of the state above the rights of the people.

The idea that an athlete would expend just enough energy needed to win the game sounds reasonable on paper. But considering that most professional ballplayers are actively striving to either make the majors, or to keep from getting sent down to the minors, every single pitch adds to a body of work against which he will be judged worthy or unworthy. I don’t see where a Mud Hen pitcher lays up just enough to still be able to win a minor league game, when doing so affects the record he and his career prospects will be judged on. In the end, he is judged on his personal pitching record, not his team’s win-loss record.

Related to our topic:

OK, sorry, I misunderstood. I thought when your put "threaded" in quotes you were referring to my post, since I also used the phrase "threading the needle" in exactly the same way as being a potential wild card for Trump's messaging.

Replying since this is a direct reference to my post. This is not my word, or my implication, at all. Not even close.

The extreme on the right are Trump's base, and they make up at least a quarter and maybe a third of his party. The extreme on the left are definitely not Biden's base, and they make up probably single-digit percent of the Democratic Party. Biden's true base is the establishment middle of the party, and they make up the substantial majority. The job is to get them to come out. Hanging the election on whether the extreme left votes for Biden is like hanging the election on whether the extreme right can be moved off Trump. Neither is going to happen, anyway, so the Democratic Party should go after what can be got, not after what can't.

This should provide comfort.

I'm not sure I have ever heard these six words strung together in this exact order before. 😉

I agree that most sea changes in the game are generational. After all, when they made the ball live in 1920, only Babe Ruth was taking advantage of it while the rest of the players kept batting like it was still a dead ball. It took a decade or so before more players starting figuring out how they could get 30+ bombs, too. (Answer: swing from your heels and accept the strikeouts.) What I'm not sure of is whether Baseball and Players will just accept that the game has changed and that pitchers will shred their arms as a matter of course because that's just how it goes now. At least Players won't accept that; Baseball would be just fine with it. But ultimately, I do think Baseball will make, or attempt to make, some adjustment to address it and reduce elbow/shoulder injuries. I also think that, as with the years they spent tinkering around the edges trying to shorten games, they will fail several times until they hit upon the one major change, whatever it might be, that will fix it.

So, this is interesting: take a look at his Savant this year versus last year. He's basically Bizarro TORK! so far.

So I'm reading this thread and I'm seeing a fear that TORK! might end up being like Rob Deer: super low batting average, quite a few homers, a ****-ton of strikeouts, along with a hope that he won't be so bad and he'll end up like guys who had similar profiles but still decent careers. So I look up his numbers and I see eight strikeouts in 49 trips, and I'm thinking, huh. That doesn't seem so high. I look at his SO% and BB% specifically, and they are coming in at 16.3% and 6.1%, respectively. Those are both lower than MLB overall, but also lower than his last season's numbers. And I'm like, huh. So I go to his Savant card, and I see that he is swinging less on first pitch but swinging more overall; making more contact in the zone but less outside it; his overall chase rate is up, but he's letting more middle-middle pitches go by him unswung at. But most concerning, I think, is that both his exit velo and max velo are way down; his hard hit rate is also way down after being among the best in baseball last year; he has zero barrels in his first 49 plate appearances (he should have four or so instead); and his XSLG, based on quality of contact, is half what it was last year and is among the lowest in baseball overall. Add that all up, and it looks to me as though there's an attempt to remake his overall plate approach to be more selective and to concentrate on putting his bat on the ball when he does swing, versus letting 'er rip. That might not be the worst thing for him, specifically, since he probably has the kind of power where he can jack a ton of bombs without putting everything he has into his swing. If he eases up and concentrates on meeting the ball better, he can cut his Ks down and raise his batting average while hitting just as many homers off the increased number of balls he puts into play. That may be the hope, anyway. But so far, the results are less than whelming. Granted, this is a small sample size and he could have gotten these same results in less than 50 plate trips without trying to change a thing. But given all the differences in these various metrics and how they relate to one another, it looks to me as though there's a conscious effort to re-do his approach, and these are the results so far. I don't know what this means for his future, but I think this is worth keeping an eye on to see whether he continues along this path, which I would assume given it's so early in the season, and whether/when they abandon it and let him go back to what brung him to the Show in the first place.

I would think that along with the improved defense we got at the other positions, it would raise the team's defense overall.

I think we all knew the outfield defense was gonna go get it, but I think we all expected Keith to be meh at 2B. Honestly, if he can end the year with at least 0 DRS and 0 OAA—that is, not negative—with 100+ wRC+, he’s gonna get votes, and I’ll be thrilled.

I don’t see any way in which pitchers en masse, outside of maybe an handful of exceptions, lay down their arms and lay up on pitches and allow batters to put balls in play on purpose. I believe they would basically regard it as career suicide to do so, and I think in most cases they would be right. It’s the game that’s creating the incentive to throw max/max on literally every pitch, because getting a chance at a career in the big leagues is based on outstanding performance, meaning, standing out from the crowd. I see no way a pitcher coming up through college or the minors is going to decide to ease up on his pitching to preserve his arm for the sake of his long-term career when he doesn’t even have his career in the first place. If it comes down to laying up to worse results and not making the majors to reduce the possibility of arm injury, versus going max balls out to better results and having a chance to make the show in the first place, I think they’re gonna choose the latter, if not exactly 10 times out of 10, then probably 99 times out of 100. To paraphrase a now-famous saying, don’t blame the player, blame the game. Therefore, change the game. Just my 2¢, OMMV.

Of course, and it's a big "if", which I implied in the parts you excised. Single-digit percent, if at all. But speaking only theoretically, I think it could work for Trump if he could ever pull it off, and that's a scary thought, because you know on November 6, once he's president-elect, all the moderate talk goes right out of the window and Buyer's Remorse sets in immediately for 70% of the country.

This. It will take a generation of players to adjust to any dramatic change, whatever they land on, if they land on anything. Always remember, too, the financial incentive Baseball has to maintain Next Man Up.