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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.

Like everyone else, I sometimes have bad consumer experiences. I would love to feed back to these companies about these experiences, but too frequently I can't find any way to contact them to let them know. That's bad enough, but to me it's even worse when you get a survey invitation from these companies, and you're thinking, great, now I can tell them about the poor experience I just had with them. But too often these surveys are short (two or three or four questions) where every question asks you to rate their attributes on a scale, and there is no text box in which you can provide specific feedback about your experience, or even about general things they could improve upon. They're all scale of 0 to 10 questions. Seems clear to me they are using this data to compensate or punish employees, or to publicize how much customers love their business. In short, it is not at all a meaningful feedback mechanism. It's a marketing and/or employee management tool. I've developed a shorthand for determining whether the survey I'm being invited to is of this type: if the very first question they ask you is, "Would you recommend [Our Company] to your friends and relatives?", or something along those lines, I bail. Because then it's clear to me they only seeking numbers they can leverage or promote.

What head-stuffing information are you talking about here? Are you envisioning them trying to do math in their head while they are at the plate? Or are you talking about information such as "in this count from this guy, look for this particular pitch" being too much for them?

Heroes? Or vigilantes?

Leyland?

I think it's probably more like we simply don't have good hitters, than we do have really really good hitters learning bad habits from the new guy. FWIW, Mark Canha has a grand total of three GIDPs, and he is the best qualified hitter on the team by wOBA (.366) and wRC+ (141).

I'm in on three of your four. Re: point #2, I would be really, really surprised to learn that the coaches are firehosing the hitters with the math so they could understand the science behind the numbers. That would strike me as being deeply dumb. I would bet the coaches are instead sharing the tendencies the numbers show: in this count from this guy, look for this particular pitch. I think it's more likely we simply have hitters not remembering that, or following through with it, in the heat of the moment.

It was worse ... we were fans of the Tigers for the last seven years.

Perfect.

I might reply that it's a fine line between giving in to a natural impulse to break character in an extraordinary situation, and allowing yourself to break on purpose because you think the audience likes being in on the joke. It's one of the reasons Frank Zappa was never allowed back on the show back after he'd hosted. He constantly broke character in a bid to convey to the audience how stupid he thought it all was. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/frank-zappa-saturday-night-live-banned/

Naw, man, ya got it all wrooong. They don't rail against leftists engaging in cancel culture because they are shocked and dismayed by the idea of cancel culture. They rail against leftists engaging in cancel culture because they are projecting their own cancel culture behavior onto liberals in a desperate attempt to gaslight us into believing they themselves don't engage in it, even though they constantly engage in it right in front of our eyes. Is it working? 😏

I still think about his final post he made about Torii Hunter.

Tigers making runs happen!

Not today!

I can try to remember! It shouldn't be super hard to update since I have the calculations on the sheet all set up. Remind me if I don't do so and you want to see it.

What the ****, Javy Baez! Carlos Peña: "Call the doctor, because that was SICK!"

Mark Canha is the best hitter on this team, coming into this game.

OK, just for kicks, I took at hack at trying to figure out whether the problem here is the chicken or the egg. I can tell you upfront that I'm not sure yet, mainly because I believe April 16th is too early for such conclusions, but I wonder whether this approach I am considering is directionally valid. I want to compare each player's estimated wOBA from ZIPS with their actual wOBA so far, and then group them together as a team. The challenge is figuring out what the team wOBA when bringing it all together. But you can't simply just average everyone's wOBA together because they all have different numbers of plate appearances. You have to even that all out somehow. So what I did what to multiply each player's actual PA with their actual wOBA into a number I'm calling "Mtlply" (I'm obviously not good at naming things), adding up both for to arrive at the team number, then dividing PA into Mltply to get the team wOBA. Then I do the same with their ZIPS PA (Z-PA), ZIPS wOBA (Z-wOBA), and Z-Mltply, and then index the actual to estimated to see whether they are beating their ZIPS or not. Index average is 100; anything higher, the player is outperforming his ZIPs estimates; a lower index means he is underperforming his ZIPS. Here's what I mean—here are the Tigers numbers so far (minimum 30 PAs): Read it like this: Kerry Carpenter's ZIPS projection was for 496 PAs and a .323 wOBA. (That multiplies out to 159.960, which matters only when adding up all the players). His actual PAs so far is 45 and his wOBA is .361 (which multiples out to 16.240). Index his actual wOBA to his Z-wOBA and he is coming in at 111.9, which is well above average at +11.9%. Rinse and repeat for all players. Then, add up all player's ZIPs PAs (5,360) and their Z-Mltpy (1689.549), divide the former into the latter, and we get the ZIPS wOBA of .315 for just these eleven players. Do the same with actual PAs (556) and Mltply (155,170), get the actual wOBA of (.279) for the eleven, then index actual to ZIPs to get how the whole group of players is indexing against their ZIPS estimates, which is 88.5. Easy peasy, right? 😜 A group index for these eleven Tigers hitters of 88.5, which is -11.5% against average, is, frankly, bad. How do we compare to all the other teams? Second from the bottom, which, even for a team projected to end up with a bottom four offense anyway, according to Z-wOBA, is prettehhh, prettehhh, prettehhh bad. Such underperformance would lead some to indict the team's coaching after all. So now here's the $64 question: how real is this? Are we as bad as all this? Is the coaching making the hitters worse than they should be? Are the players feeding off each other and making everyone else worse? Is this just a random small sample that will iron itself out as the season progresses? I report. You decide. My decision is to give them more time to see whether this state of batting affairs is persistent after all.

I might have been one of the first, if not the first, to hypothesize that the main issue might not be that the coaching is failing the hitters, but that this collection of hitters just might not be good enough. After all, not every player can produce at a Hall of Fame level if only he had the right coaching. Some guys simply have very low ceilings. I think we might have a few of those guys on this team right now. That said, I also can't say that this is true, or even that this is what I firmly believe. It's still just a hypothesis for me, and it may not really be provable one way or the other, because how do you do so except through the eventual results years from now? So I expect we will have an active and spirited discussion about this during the coming couple of years. But I am glad we've gotten this discussion rolling, because frankly, I was getting a bit tired of hearing the hitting coaches, and by extension A.J. Hinch, getting raked for failing to put All-Star-level hitters in the batter's box this year. Not that I'm a slappy for Hinch and the coaches, but it seemed like too simplistic an implication being made: change the manager and coaches and the guys we have now will become All-Star hitters. To Oblong's point, there is a force on the other side of the field actively trying to thwart us and that we have to work through. But, also, we were told by multiple sources (ZIPS, Marcel, PECOTA, etc.) coming in that this team was going to be a bottom-of-baseball offense, and I'm pretty sure they were not predicting that because of the coaches we have.