chasfh

It was a hit and run joke.

Also, downtown Tampa is west of Port Huron. I could do this all day.

I don't think most people think of Atlanta as being farther west than Detroit but it sure is.

I don't disagree but I am interested in finding whether on base or slugging correlates better to run scoring, or more exactly runs created. I could make an argument for either going in.

The Tigers will get nothing for Haase, a 30-year old bat-first sorta-catcher whose bat has completely abandoned him this year. The only guys I can envision us moving and getting something decent for are Lorenzen and the back of the bullpen, and that's gonna happen or at least try to happen, and if we're lucky and/or Scott Harris is really good, we'll be able to snow someone into a giving us a return for Jose Cisnero. Milwaukee, and Arizona are probably our best bets, although Tampa needs arms, too.

Yeah, no doubt, but I remember literally every story they wrote after the signing that Boyd has never stopped being a mentor to the young starters and who has shown he's a positive mentor to younger pitchers on the staff and is a valuable presence in the clubhouse who’s eager to mentor young pitchers and stuff like that there.

I'm almost certain the Tigers do not have injury insurance on Austin Meadows, not only because it's a low-dollar contract, but also because it's only for a single year. Most insurance deals are for players on rich, multiple-year contracts where the risk of pain in having to eat the remainder of a player's deal after a career-ending injury (CEI) early on is substantial. If a player has an eight-year deal, the insurance is probably offered up in two-year chunks, and the team has to keep re-upping at higher prices as the player ages. Also, there's usually a waiting period, typically 60 or 90 days but maybe as long as a year, before payment on the policy can kick in, to ensure it is truly career-ending, and even then it covers only a percentage of the dollars on the deal, like maybe 70%. So, taking Miggy as an example of a 32-year-old guy signing an eight-year deal, it probably happened something like this, and I'm making up the numbers to illustrate: they probably signed an insurance policy for going into the first two years of the deal that covers 70% of the remaining deal in case of a CEI, and they paid maybe 3% of his total eight-year salary for that. Then, after that expires before year three, they sign another two-year policy covering 70% of his remaining six years and paid 4% of his remaining salary; in year five they sign another two-year policy, 70% of his remaining four years, 5%; and year seven, the last two-year policy, 70% of his remaining two years at maybe 7%. That might not be exact, but I think it's close directionally. But hey, why am I the guy talking about this? @Edman85, how close am I?

Exactly. I once heard or read an interview with Ernie Harwell during which he was asked, how do you stay focused and seem interested in calling a game for a terrible team that's going nowhere, not unlike the 2003 team? And his answer was something on the order of, you focus on the game in front of you today, as if it's the only thing in baseball that matters to anyone, and you put all your energy into this particular game. Every game has a story built into it that's independent of its effect on the rest of the season, so just approach it that way. I have remembered that every time the Tigers have fallen out of contention early in the season, and that's happened a lot. Carpe game.

Boyd is here for the mentoring, right? That's what usually say about old guys who get signed.

Any idea where SLG fits in? That's also a component of OPS.

Also, a radio metro map from 2021 that I cobbled together, and this is from Nielsen. I love these things. EDIT: Drat, this did not resolve nearly as nicely as I intended. 😥

Posting this because I love TV DMA maps, even if this is not directly from Nielsen.

He kinda did.

Right on. We never once had the best record in baseball during that nine-year stretch. In 2006 our record was fourth-best in in the game (and second best in our division). In 2012, they had the seventh-best record in the American League (and 11th in baseball). And in one of those years our record was 22nd in baseball. Not exactly ... how do the cool kids put it? ... dominate.

Which is why I did not make a distinction between civilian and military leadership. There are good guys and bad guys on both sides of that particular divide.

Especially if the new kid is coming into the lunchroom shouting, "you know who really sucks at this school?" 😅

I agree that he overestimated his value by signing for less guaranteed money than he would have made here. He probably thought he was going to get multiple guaranteed years.

He was to make more significant money playing for the Tigers this year.

I have no doubt that Chafin did get the best potential deal he could get. He's betting on himself to earn that team option vesting, and so far it looks like he's gonna do it, so good for him. But I would also bet he bolted when he saw the changes coming in the Tiger organization that he didn't like, and if that's true, I bid him godspeed and don't let the door. If it comes to a choice between remaking the Tigers organization versus one year of good middle relief from a guy, I'll take the former all day and twice on Sunday.

No doubt. Utopian visions of a peaceful hand-holding society are beautiful, but they are also just visions. I may be anti-war in all but the most extreme circumstances—I was 100% against the Gulf War and the Iraq War from the word "go"—but I am also less utopian than I am pragmatist. There may be elements of utopianism we can work very, very, very hard to try to assimilate into our culture, and I'm all for that when- and wherever we can achieve it, but for the most part it's proven to be historically unworkable, and that goes double for a culture that celebrates the concepts of individualism over collectivism, self-determinism over interdependence, and competition over cooperation. A by-product of that kind of society is the requirement to field a standing military filled with people conditioned to kill without remorse, devoid of self-reflection and conflicting morals in the moment (that usually comes later, when the soldier-turned-civilian is left to their own devices). That part is never going to change, so the goal, from my point of view, should be for cool-headed civilian leaders to exercise control over the worst impulses of their more zealous counterparts in order to minimize the atrocities that a constant militaristic footing inevitably leads to. We could get into a discussion over how our society conditions entire classes of people of modest means and modest prospects to fulfill that role, but that would take us really far afield from the topic at hand.

That’s a different version of defense, that of a country we went on offense to help conquer, and hearts and minds of which citizens we eventually won over (to some degree). Given the circumstances of the world at the time—even though that country did not attack our homeland directly, it seemed an inevitability they would were they not stopped—I myself would have made the decision to do that one 100 times out of 100. I will spare you the long, long list of foreign lands our military invaded simply for territorial and capitalist gain.

Chafin is making less in guaranteed money with Arizona this year than he would have with Detroit, but he is also getting a club option in 2024 versus nothing for 2024 from us, and players want the security of staying employed for as many years as possible. So he did go to Arizona for a somewhat improved deal, although he has to earn the second year with performance to avoid making less with AZ than he would have with us, so it’s not quite as simple as Arizona offered him an extra dollar, which is what the “money talks” argument implies. I’m skeptical that even that was the whole reason, though. He made such a thing about coming home to the area that it’s weird he left for a completely different part of the country to possibly make less money. I’m guessing there are additional reasons why he left beyond just the money.

Although we claimed Wake Island, it was only to serve as an outpost for our burgeoning empire and no person has ever lived there as a native of it, so it was not an attack on the homeland, which is how people commonly perceive what it is that has to be “defended”, and in any event, we repaid the actual Japanese homeland and its civilians tens of thousands of times over for that.

The point is to break down the human being and remake them as a willing and remorseless killer of people, and the way to do that is to reprogram them to see breaking things and killing people as an honorable defense of their country, even though the United States military has been going on offense exclusively for the last 150 years.

Man, is FOX2Detroit ever a terrible website. It’s a clickbait farm.