chasfh

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

Well, you did explicitly set the bar at "ever". I just cleared it. OK, how's this instead, from a couple weeks ago? https://www.milb.com/gameday/mud-hens-vs-saints/2024/06/22/752379/final/box h/t @Edman85

Look, I sympathize with the desire for Scott Harris to do something, anything and throw whatever he can at the wall to make things better. But we don't have a magic bullet we know that will. Maeda is going to keep getting chances, not only because he was signed to "big money", but also because he has a track record of doing well in the majors, and they're going to give him more time than they would a Quadruple-A journeyman to get it right. I promise you he's not getting cut this year, and I think he would have to have an actual collapse—meaning several more consecutive games of very crooked numbers given up—for him to simply get released in the offseason. If nothing else, we need him to eat innings for the rest of the year.

Yes, almost exactly. https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE202106280.shtml

Of course he can. But sure, let’s call him up, because why not? Then we can call Scott Harris a steaming pile of diaper poop for not dropping Manning asap. Can’t deprive the fans of that opportunity.

Ok, so I lied ... 😏

I was just coming in here to speculate that the relentless coverage of calls for Biden to drop out might actually serve to move the polls—and voters—over to Trump. Because as much as everyone likes to bull**** themselves into believing they are critical thinkers with integrity who are impervious to that kind of influence, the vast majority of people do shape their opinions based on editorial zeitgeist. We accept that as being the case when it comes to red hats and the RWM, so why would lefties and centrists be any different? And the editorial zeitgeist right now is, Biden is toast and the Democrats are done. This thread kind of dovetails into that.

I could be wrong about him breaking north with the Tigers next year, but if I am, it's going to be because he stays in Toledo, not because we give him the gate.

Even better than Darnell Coles? Now that's saying something! 😝 I just plugged the criteria into the query machine and it turns out Travis Fryman racked up a higher WAR for the Tigers than George Kell did, and George went to the Hall of Fame in a Tigers' cap!

They're not giving up on Tork this season, or this winter. He is definitely breaking north with the team next March. I think the org is going to cut bait with Baez within a few days following the World Series.

Fun fact: the 1951 Browns were 52-102.

I was thinking of him, too. He kind of got lost in the shuffle with all those All-Star pitchers we had at the time. You know who else got lost in that shuffle and was probably underappreciated at the time? Doug Fister. What a great pickup he was in that trade that included MTS fave Casper Wells. Got several good years out of him, plus a run of eight straight strikeouts in this one weekday afternoon game, just a few years before seemingly everybody was doing that.

Underrated pitchers: how about Jamie Walker? LH reliever came to the Tigers already in his 30s and was a really reliable arm out of the pen for those really bad teams. Didn't walk many guys and still had decent strikeout rates. I'm glad he got to the Series with us. Then he went to Baltimore on a multiyear deal and fell apart. He'd be a pretty good fit in our bullpen today.

Fun fact: Kirk Gibson also did not make an All-Star team.

Exactly.

Does anyone think of Travis Fryman anymore? The guy crushed it for us for seven years. Great hitter for an infielder, plus defense. believe it or not the guy was a 35-win player for his career!

Montero is just another placeholder. He's even getting crushed in the minors. Batters down there are hitting him like they're all Steven Kwan. He is the quintessential Mr. Right Now.

That's why I'm thinking qualifying offer to get the extra draft pick. That depends on whether and how he comes back, though. If his issue lingers past July, and he has to stick around, he won't have much time to come back and prove to a suitor that he's worth half a decade and nine figures.

Any candidates you can suggest?

There's only one way this is going to stop: Biden has to start nailing public appearances, period, starting with Stephanopoulos. Biden has to look sharp, be articulate, and most of all, not rush his words like he did to open the debate. I think his trying to speak faster than a drug commercial reeling off side effects is the main thing that caused him to stumble all over the place. He doesn't have to speak slowly, and in fact he shouldn't because that would be just as bad, but one of the core things he needs to work on moderating the speed of his delivery. Because he needs to projects confidence every time we see him from now on.

Yeah, that whole thing in that podcast about just how competitive Scott Harris is on a personal basis just rang hollow, mainly because it is so tediously unremarkable in an industry defined by its competitiveness. I appreciate Harris's plan and I think it's flaling not because it's a bad plan, but because so many things we all thought we could reasonably count on went so spectacularly wrong. The man is in a tight spot, and I sympathize with his situation because I believe it's not exactly his fault. But it is his responsibility, and when something like this happens, big boys in big pants do big things to set it right. Now, in our case, the scope of "big" is limited. We're not going to trade for Juan Soto or Elly De La Cruz or Ketel Marte, because they're not going to be made available to us; and we're not going to find an All-Star who's still sitting out there waiting to be signed; and we're not going to bring in someone off the pile like Evan Longoria or Hanser Alberto or AJ Pollock or Josh Harrison (or Tim Anderson!), because they're probably below replacement level by now. Just about the best we can hope for now is that somehow Harris can flip our dwindling (e.g., Flaherty) assets for at least one major-league ready infielder. That seems like a pipe dream, but even if it could happen, that's not going to save this season. This season is, for all practical purposes, done. No one wants to hear this, but our options are kind of limited in the offseason, too. Yes, I understand this is a decent free agent class, but remember that the "agency" in free agency means players get to choose where they go, and very few players would choose to go to an organization that has lost for eight years running and will be projected to lose for a ninth next year. When it comes to free agents, we are in a class with the White Sox, Rockies, Marlins, and Nationals. That's how players think of us at this moment in time. Harris could take a big swing at talking a pitcher like Max Fried into coming here on an overpay (if Baby Doc were to allow it) because we have a track record of making pitchers good, but Comerica is basically death to hitters, and short of somehow reconfiguring the park into a home run hitter's paradise, anyone who has a choice is almost certainly not going to choose to come here. The best shot Harris has of signing anyone this offseason, I believe, would be Willy Adames, and that would take an offer in the range of Baez years, and that would make it a tough sell to the fans. In the end, it looks like the surest way we're going to start winning is by building the winner from within, and then adding pieces once we get that core in place—in short, Harris's plan now. It sucks that assets we have now that we were counting on are flailing and setting back the timeline even further, but let's face it, that's our reality now. Ain't no magic wand gonna fix it. If somehow Tork and Keith could come out of the gates raking next year, just those two guys, even if everyone else does what they're doing now, we're going to have a completely different view of this team. To me, that's the main thing we have to hope for. But if they don't, and we end up going through this all over again next year, people's jobs might start being in jeopardy.