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And I don’t think they have any plans to tank in the way we think of teams tanking. If they trade Skubal, then that’s tanking. If they trade Flaherty, I would say that’s not tanking. I do think they are putting together enough of a team to try to be .500 at least.

If Avila may have done things behind the scenes, I have no idea what those things might have been that have been carried over by this regime. Anything I might speculate would be just that.

I think Harris is acknowledging that we truly are in a rebuild, but he’s being careful with what he says about it because he doesn’t want to scare away fans by saying, in that many words, that this is a rebuild so strap in. But reading between the lines of his interviews, he has said that we won’t go after free agents until the building blocks of a contender are in place.

I suspect that I am a minority here, or maybe even the only one, but I’ve come around to the idea that when Al Avila was finally given the gate and Scott Harris came onboard, we basically had to start in on a new rebuild. Avila’s seven years turned out to be complete toilet time, and if he moved us forward at all, it was only because he got a few building blocks into the system before he left (although it looks like only one of the players he actually tanked for, Riley, might end up paying out the way we hope he might). Any other building blocks he got, chiefly Skubal, were chosen late enough in the draft that we didn’t have to tank for them at all. But the point is, the seven years in which Avila peter-principled into and stumbled his way through the job were completely wasted in terms of rebuilding the team into a winner, so we had no choice to start all over. So I no longer have any expectations at all that we will compete this year, and I will be pleasantly surprised, rather than expectant, that we will seriously compete next year. I don’t think we can reasonably expect to be actually competitive until Harris and company, who have been fully in control of the organization and its development for less than a season and a half, have finally cleared out the dregs that they inherited and have established this as fully being the result of their work. I understand that this will make many here angry, and I accept it will be interpreted as and played back as me wanting the Tigers to lose games and wanting tank some more—which isn’t true at all—but that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after careful consideration, and now I have shred it, so I have no choice now but to own that.

Dan Dickerson totally called that stolen base by pointing out just how terrible Ruiz was at throwing out stealers, and not two seconds later Ruiz botches the throw on a SB

Yeah, Wenceel doesn’t have much of a wing either.

Ooh, that was a minor league play by Kreidler. 😢

I wonder whether, in five or so years, City Connects will fade into oblivion as the kid of fad that spawned this monstrosity:

I assume these gambling-related threats have escalated dramatically in the years following the Murphy decision, and I would guess that’s a combination of way way more people gambling now, which obviously includes the kind of psychos who would lodge threats against players et al; and the kind of incessant in-your-face marketing that casinos do suggesting that gambling and winning are synonymous, which maybe creates a sense of entitlement among people who don’t fully internalize that losing is also a part of gambling.

You might have massaged the first part of your post to clarify what you say above, but I do agree with your general point that, regardless of this particular instance, people sometimes exaggerate the presence of threats in a bid to portray themselves as brave in the face of mortal threats in a bid to increase sympathy. I see that in particular as a sad commentary on how our entire society has evolved to reward playing the victim to win points.

Courtesy of the Department of Full Disclosure, seems that Lauren Windsor, an acknowledged liberal documentarian, posed to question to Alito at a function while basically pretending to be a conservative Christian, that is, in a bid to fool Alito into showing his hand, and I don’t like the dishonesty of that, even though it doesn’t mitigate the awfulness of what he said. OTOH, Windsor took the same tack with John Robert’s but he refused to take the bait and claim that the US is a conservative Christian nation, replying that it’s not up to the lawyers to enforce morality, so good on him.

They think he cares about America and them because that's what their media are telling them.

Sure he can come right out and say he doesn't care about you,he only cares about your vote, but the funny part is, people were laughing at this as though he were joking. They don't think he's serious, but if he were ever serious about anything, it's this.

Chris McCosky, your flight is boarding.

Maybe making smart financial decisions is a little like being able to do math in your head, but you still can't reason your way out of a wet paper bag.

That's probably true of anyone who devotes their lives to a single vocation or profession, to the exclusion of becoming a well-rounded, self-actualized person. In fact, I might hypothesize it's a common way someone who has profound social deficits deals with those deficiencies, by avoiding social situations they can't even begin to master and instead throwing themselves into becoming an expert in something as a solitary pursuit. Sometimes it's something innocuous and time-wasting like studying baseball. Other times it's something that's actually results in a lucrative high-revenue-producing career, like becoming a Supreme Court Justice. Either way, they are still siloed from the world and live with their heads way, way up their asses.

He might be loaded but that doesn't mean he's either smart or educated.

I think maybe a lot of it has to do with, they "learned" something that's counter to the conventional wisdom they put their faith in and are now being told to be disappointed with, and they think they now know things about the world nobody else does, and that they're the ones with clear vision, and that we're the ones being brainwashed by the MSM, when all the while all that's really happening is that all their ugliest retrograde beliefs are begin confirmed out loud, out proud, and in front of a whole world that chastised them for still having those beliefs. Basically, they're getting fluffed and it feels too good to stop.

One of Chris McCosky’s old crushes toiling away for the Iron Pigs in Allentown tonight. He gave up a bomb on the first pitch to the first hitter he saw. You can tell it’s not going well in general for him.

And still he’s pissed.

He’s pissed because he was the one who won WWII, not these capitalist dilettantes.

Not entirely. Four months means he’s out November 1.