chasfh

As much as it appears our relief corps has let us down, in terms of what we can control—walks, strikeouts, homers to a degree—we have actually improved lately. The problem has been the outcomes. Through end of April, our relievers' FIP-minus was 102, which is ever-so-slightly worse than the average of 100, but our ERA-minus was 73 (6th-best). For May, though, our FIP-minus has been 88, ranking 11th, but their ERA-minus has been 115, which ranks 19th. As you may have guessed, the culprit has been balls starting to fall in. Our March/April BABIP was .232; so far in May, it's .340. That's a problem for a bullpen like the Tigers' that was already among baseball's worst in striking out the opposition in March/April (21.8%, 18th), but has gotten much worse in May (17.9%, 29th). You may or may not agree that strikeouts are fascist, but when a team doesn't get enough of them, they have to rely on some combination of their defense and dumb luck to get guys out.

True, you did say you don't want to hear excuses, although your post mostly criticized his not hitting for power at the big league level, implying his "supposed" performance in the minors might have been a mirage. I think it was real, and I'm not so worried that Colt Keith's power output won't click at some point.

I still don't know anything about the guy, and FWIW, which may or may not be much, your all sides research looks like a bunch of random websites and numbers without sourcing, linking, or corroboration.

Well, I must admit, “Black America’s attorney general” does sound very threatening …

Hitting big league hitting is harder and takes more of an adjustment to get right than hitting minor league pitching.

So, basically, Hittin’ Harold territory.

Someone is having a good day. And so is Zach Short.

Why isn't there an "ewww" emoji on this thing?

We already knew hardly anyone at campuses were involved in these protests, even though the media makes it look like every campus in the country is completely falling apart. Honestly, I'm surprised it's as high as eight percent. 2. Chart of the day: Students on war By Monica Eng and Sareen Habeshian Data: Generation Lab; Note: Respondents selected up to three issues; Chart: Axios Visuals College protests against the war in Gaza are dominating headlines. But only a sliver of students are participating or view it as a top issue, according to a new Generation Lab survey shared exclusively with Axios. Why it matters: The poll hints that the war — and the accompanying protests — might not hurt President Biden's election prospects among young voters as much as previously thought. By the numbers: Only a small minority (8%) of college students have participated in either side of the protests, the survey of 1,250 college students found. Go deeper

Seriously. Despite its apparent comic value, the name never broke through to me in any news stories I read about incidents he was involved in. But I can see how right-wing media, which thrives on demonization and dehumanization, would name him and show his face over and over to rile up their consumers and get them clicking on ads for gold-based 401(k)s and fascist pillows. Although: part of it might also be that I don't generally pay close attention to stories about big topics like police shootings or mass protests that mainly focus on a sprawling cast of named characters and how they interpersonally interact. People will get named in these stories, even people with funny names, and I will immediately forget the names while internalizing the big idea the stories are getting across. Zimmerman and Trayvon was different because it was the first, or one of the first, story of its kind; same with George Floyd and Derek (or was it Darren?) Chauvin. But I don't remember the names of anyone from any of the follow-up incidents, at least not in terms of unaided recall. Tell me their names and it might ring a bell, or it might not. But I don't generally think of stories about incidents with broad sociological or political implications as being about this person vs. that person. That would explain in part why Crump doesn't ring even a little bell.

I totally get now what Oblong meant. 😏

Part of the uniform everyone else has as well.

I just looked it up, and pink bats on Mother’s Day were first used in 2006, which is even longer ago, and if I’m not mistaken, the only player in the majors today who also played in 2006 was Justin Verlander, who, either for nothing or not for nothing, is not sporting even a stitch of pink anywhere on his person. At least not visibly. 😁

Remember when they started sporting pink in ballgames on Mother’s Day? That was probably about, what, 2010 or so? Back then there was still enough of—to use a way of speaking contemporaneous to the times—the stink of gay around the color to suppress adoption of use, and I would say roughly two-thirds of players did not participate, and of those who did swing a pink bat their first time up, at least a third of them went back to their regular non-pink bats for subsequent trips to the plate. We do have a completely different generation of players in the game now, though, and a lot of them were familiar with female authority figures in the sports they grew up playing, like women coaches, umpires, girl players, and the like. There’s a lot that’s good about that in general, and one of them is the softening up toward use of the color pink as not being a commentary on your manliness.

I have no idea who that is, no, so I assume he must be just another bogeyman right-wingers bring up to scare red hats of modest worldliness.

Guns are in the Constitution, and not-babies are not.

They would argue that the Confederacy is more American than anyone or anything not wired in to Trump could ever be.

Southern culture in general rules America, whether it’s veneration of the military, or the ubiquity of country music, or the spread of evangelical religion, or the watching of Hallmark Channel movies. Also, practicing and/or wishing cruelty on those who don’t share their nativist culture, because we respect toughness projected proactively by those of modest means—which is another way of saying everyday bullying. Just another example of how the North won the war, but the South won the peace.

They did get an education—in the militarization of America society over the past two decades, and the normalization of our kids going overseas to become warriors in distant lands populated by people not like them who don’t want them there, and then they are praised when they get back and feted at places like every single ballgame you go to. No wonder Americans thinks of soldiers as benevolent gods on Earth appointed to protect them by raining death and hellfire on people they hate. That’s what they want here, because that’s what they’ve been trained to want here.

Maybe, but I don’t think we miss 33-year-old Buck Farmer all that much.

He had given up only a single run when taken out, but relievers walked in two inherited runners with the bases loaded. He also got a ****-ton of swing and miss and threw something like 17 pitches at 100+.

If you would have asked me that in 2019, I might have said yes, I’d be disappointed. I would have wanted more out of a 1/1, after all the losing done specifically to pick him, and despite whatever the averages say for 1/1s, I would have wanted something more than 13 wins out of Spork. Ask me that now, though, and I’m probably less disappointed, because if he ends up with 12.2 WAR when he leaves after the 2028 season, that would mean gets almost 14 WAR between now and then, in just short of five full seasons, which is pushing 3 per season, which would probably include a 4 or a 5 in there somewhere, which might entail an All-Star selection, and at that point, I’d have to say I’d be happy with that, just in time for him to leave us and go kill it in a DH-only role for somebody else. Which does bring up a question: if he were taken off the field completely, would his mind be freed up enough f-r-o-m the stress of worrying about his defense that he would become the hitter everyone assumed he would be? That would surely be the best outcome for him personally, and as things stand now that’s the kind of player we have no room for on this team.

There was no one else. Spork was the consensus #1 pick, and no one would have not picked him, including me. And the Orioles did have better luck picking during the drafts they did instead of during ours. I will still be disappointed if he ends up around replacement level for his career with the Tigers, because it’s disappointing versus the expectation we had. To Tiger337’s point, if the benchmark is that Spork ends up with a 13 win career, I would want those 13 wins to come with us, and not after he leaves, which would be a double disappointment. I think you know me well enough to know I had no expectations of a Hall of Fame career from the guy, given his already-well-known defensive liabilities, as well as the positional WAR ceiling first baseman already have. But he was considered practically a fully-formed hitter when we got him, and I did have a reasonable expectation that he would anchor our lineup at some point, and I would have expected him to at least start doing so by the early months of his third season. So maybe the disappointment at his inability to do even that is driving my fear that he will have thrown up a goose egg by the time Scott Boras takes him on the road.

That’s gonna put the hurt on the Pale Hosers’ chances of losing 120.