chasfh

Well, yeah, there's that ... 😏 But I meant more like, I believe they are of a kind: guys who don't really want to play, but would like to leave baseball with all the money in hand and just go live the rest of their lives.

Plus, the other top projections in that draft were pitchers Asa Lacy and Max Meyer, and hitters Austin Martin and Zac Veen—any of whom would 100% have been Avila’s alternative to Tork, and none of whom are lighting it up either in the bigs or the bushes. Meyer is off to a decent start this year but his FIP is way higher than his stats. But any of those four would also have almost certainly been ruined in our system, especially the hitters. So considering all that, we probably still ended up with the best of the bunch, at least as of today.

Naw, I think we’ll be over it by 2050, 2060 at the latest.

Wyatt Langford raked at every level of the minors, and he has plus defense besides (grades out at 50 for fielding and arm), so the Rangers may have merely concluded that there’s nothing more he can learn at Round Rock and he’ll just have to work it out in Arlington.

I think of Eduardo Rodriguez and Anthony Rendon as being peas in a pod.

I wonder what the US passenger train map looked like 100 years ago. Probably a lot closer to Europe today than the US today. There’s one big problem with taking passenger trains in the US. My wife and I decided to take the train from Chicago to LA, in a sleeper car. Supposed to take 44 hours. About halfway through, it’s 3am or so and all of a sudden the entire train is woken up. We have to get off the train and onto buses. We drive some six hours across the state of Kansas and end up in Dodge City, where we see another train and hundreds of people milling about. We who were on the buses all get on that train, and those people get on our buses. We soon learn that was the train going from LA to Chicago. Turns out there was a freight train derailment in the middle of Kansas and neither train could get through, so we had to swap trains via buses. We took their train back to LA to complete our trip, and they took our train back to Chicago to complete theirs. And that’s one reason we can’t have a robust passenger train system anymore: freight and passenger trains all share the same tracks. In Europe, they run on different tracks.

I think this might be parcel of the “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me” strategy. As far as they’re concerned, an impeachment inquiry into Mayorkas is basically the same as “Biden is a capital criminal.”

I wonder whether the Dems might be trying to help time things out so that the removal chaos happens closer to the election?

Remember when people on the old board were worried that Avila would go off book and pick yet another pitcher with his 1/1? Detmers and Crochet are looking pretty good, aren’t they? #SecondGuessingFTW

OK, now you’re just trying to lose.

So, heroes. OK.

Hopefully Yates is rattled after losing Canha after being up 0-2.

Maybe Tork is turning into a pumpkin with the glove, or maybe he’s just having a bad game. We’ll probably see in the next few weeks.

Wow that was a lucky break to get out of the inning. Could have been a disaster if it had gotten by Vierling.

Urshela just had an awful at bat, but then, we didn’t hire him for his hitting, anyway, did we?

If MLB had ABS, the inning would be over. Let’s make ‘em pay!

Javy ties the game on THE FIRST PITCH! A.J. And the batting coaches must mad! 😜

Exactly. I think a lot of fans, maybe not here but elsewhere, who believe that geeks just want to fill players’ heads with endless numbers, because they are myopic and they themselves never played the game so they don’t know any better, are hoping it truly is that way, so they can point to analytics and say, see? Told ya analytics is a failure. They think analytics is still a debatable proposition. It’s not. The war on analytics has been over for at least a decade, and analytics won.

This whole line of discussion took off from your mention of inability to deal with information, which is analytics. In any event, maybe not you, but a lot of people want to see Hinch flop and get fired and be replaced by a manager who doesn’t know from analytics, just like when we were kids. That’s never going to happen. We have analytics, we are going to use it, we will share guidance from it with hitters, and that’s that. I’ll also assume that Hinch is not so rock-headed that he will hold onto his one approach because he refuses to admit he’s wrong even when the hitting is failing and the team is losing, until he proves he is that guy after all. I will continue to hypothesize that we have not had hitting All Stars who are failing only because the coaching is failing them, and that instead we need different, better hitters on the team than many if not most of the guys we have now.

We have no insight into exactly what the coaches are telling or showing players, but I would really be surprised to learn that it involves computational math, and I don’t believe there’s anything we have seen to indicates that’s what’s happening, other than we are flailing at the plate.

If hitters don't have information about pitchers and pitches, then how would they have any idea of what to do at the plate?

I can promise you that any change Hinch makes will involve analytics, and that whoever is coaching the hitters, whether it's these guys or whether it's new guys, they will be sharing that information with hitters. The strategy of leaving hitters on their own to simply see ball hit ball is dead.

If none of it works, then what's your solution for them?

I looked into this maybe last year or perhaps two years ago, but I'm pretty sure the Tigers have more weekday home day games than just about any other club, including the Cubs. For sure, every getaway game is a day game. Perhaps if we ever get really good and get any kind of national or ex-pat following, we may see a higher percentage of home night games during the week, for the purpose of TV ratings. The players themselves would prefer night games every game, even Sundays. They like the regularity of it, especially the no-day-game-after-a-night-game part, and also, it's a lot cooler playing at night and out of the hot sun, which matters everywhere except domes and the west coast.

Seems like that information would do them a lot of good! "Look for this type of pitch in this area. If you see it, swing; if you don't, lay off and look for a pitch related to the new count." That may be why the Tigers are laying off first pitches at a greater rate than any other team. They're not seeing the exact pitch they can do damage on, and by and large they're laying off, for better or worse. Otherwise, just what are they swinging at, and what do they hope to do with it, if they have no inkling of what to look for? If a batter can't recognize a pitch when he sees it, he's probably not long for the major leagues in any event, since pitch recognition is a Hitting 101 skill. I suspect we have too many of those types of hitters to field a contender as it is. I believe I remember reading that you're a big proponent of "see ball hit ball". Sounds reasonable on its face, and that was a reasonable approach fifty-plus years ago, when we were eleven years old and starting to learn the intricacies of the game. But in this new era of consistent faster-than-Feller heat and sophisticated pitch shaping, if you don't know what's coming, or at least what this pitcher in front of you is capable of, I wouldn't think you'd have much of a chance. Like it or not, the age of data science in baseball is here to stay, and it's never going away.