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The Tigers started nine different players at third base last year. I did a little Excel thing and found that these are all the teams since 1956, the earliest season Fangraphs has data for, that started nine or more guys at third base: Team 3B Starters 2022 CIN 11 1958 CLE 11 2022 SFG 10 2022 LAA 10 2013 NYY 10 1959 CLE 10 1956 BAL 10 2023 DET 9 2022 MIA 9 2022 ARI 9 2021 PIT 9 2021 CIN 9 2018 NYM 9 2017 SFG 9 2015 ATL 9 2014 ARI 9 2006 LAD 9 2003 TBD 9 1997 CIN 9 1969 CLE 9 That's 20 out of 1,766 teams, or a little more than one percent. Eight of those twenty teams have done so since 2021 alone. Starting more guys at third base is a bona fide trend. This chart shows the average number of starting third baseman per team by season since 1956: Fun fact: Only fourteen teams started only one guy at third the entire year. The 1995 Tigers were one of them. Without looking it up, do you remember who?

Do you honestly believe Vierling should have gotten the majority of starts at third last year?

A team in our position, last year especially, needs to give someone enough latitude to learn and get better at a position to see whether they can become a more permanent option there. That’s going to be a matter of weeks, not days. There’s not enough roster depth and 40-man flexibility to put a guy out there, figure he can’t do it after three or four games, then say “you’re done, next up!”, all season long. Nobody has a couple dozen different guys in their system to be able to option them up and down during a season trying to find The One. An organization has maybe half a dozen guys tops they could do that with at any position, not counting guys on big league contracts they play out of position there, and when you hamstring yourself at third base like we did when we let Candelario walk, you have to give the best of a bad lot time to figure out whether they can actually keep the job. In Maton’s case, he apparently had enough tantalizing moments to make the Tigers think yeah, maybe he can do it, but those were interspersed among the many more moments they looked at him and went, yikes. By end of July it was like yeah, this ain’t gonna work, and we didn’t see him there much after that.

I don’t think we’re ever going to stop trolling the waiver wire—especially after the last guy basically ignored it—but our reliance on it will decrease as our major league club becomes more settled. We are definitely not there yet, so I would expect to see a lot of action on it certainly this year, probably next year. It’s always going to be a handy tool to shore up the back end of both your 26 and 40, especially on the mound. But to Tiger337’s point, it’s unlikely we’re going to run eight regulars out there day in and day out. To the degree that was ever a thing, almost nobody is doing that today.

Who did we have in-house last year who would have been a major-league regular at third?

Given baby-naming trends a couple of decades ago, probably half the organizations have both a Colten and a Kolten by now, or will soon. 😉

Anyone want to take a swing at who this hottie from the Golden Age is?

Nick Maton will catch on some place else and put up another couple years. Maybe Asia.

My favorite part is when they say their thing, I hesitate, they look suspiciously at me, things go quiet, and that’s the end of that.

Thanks, man, but I’m out of the game now. 😁

This is a really good point. All the rhetoric about so-called "open borders" is basically just an invitation for more people to come than who might normally have.

Oh, I think she would ...

Oh, I don't know, I could still hang with a 38-year-old ... 😁

I was one of seven. I get that.

This is why Republicans stop showing up on nonpartisan media.

Fine by me. His opponents are loading up on the mere politics of the issue, so I wouldn't want Biden to unilaterally disarm on it. And I think him painting the Republicans into a corner by giving them exactly what they want and making them reject their own words to try to appease Agent Orange and win elections is exactly the right move.

I think it's just the opposite. They're not blind to the politics at all. I think they see the politics of it very clearly, and the politics are all about the value of the issue to them, and not at all about the problem it's creating.

They have no interest in fixing it because they could no longer run on the problem. plus, they would be responsible for the failures of the solution, and who wants that? Also, it won't matter if Republicans run the board this November, because they still won't want the problem fixed because it's more valuable alive because they can blame the Democrat deep state for thwarting their "efforts", than it would be dead and now it's their responsibility for making it succeed.

Probably as unsurprising as learning he has an Epstein island would be.

I think there were some explanations. I saw one saying this way of speaking is native to the west coast and so the spread of Hollywood culture has spread it across the country. I'm not sure I buy that, though, because Hollywood talkies have been the dominant cultural force since at least the 1930s, including when you and I were kids, but I see a clear generational difference in speaking. That's why I mentioned hip hop earlier—all those artists say bu'eh' and ohawn, and hip hop is the dominant music of the world, and kids have wanted to emulate them for at least the last 25 years. I'm just spitballing on this topic, but I can't explain the recency of its spread otherwise.

I wonder whether changing speeds of delivery is something they do in post. I listen to the New York Times podcast The Daily on occasion and I suspect they ramp up the speed to 1.25x or maybe even 1.5x to compress it for listeners, rather than letting listeners make that change themselves on their app. It sounds not unlike disclaimers on radio commercials.

Hey, Google: why do people pronounce “button” weird? https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-young-Americans-pronounce-the-word-button-like-bu-en-without-even-using-a-glottal-stop-They-seem-to-emphasize-the-short-e-sound-rather-than-the-normal-glottal-stop-going-straight-to-the-n-sound-Same-with#:~:text=Because over time pronunciation changes,That's how languages work.&text=Why do so many Americans,in “uh-oh.”

Bu’eh’. Yeah. Same thing. Hillary Cli’eh’, too.