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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

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.