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Thanks. Shows you how much I follow cabinet politics.

What do we expect? For-profit news goes where the eyeballs want.

Well, Secret Service is part of the IRS, so that definitely tracks.

In a country that fethisizes cutthroat competition and frontier-like self-reliance? Not a chance. Doctors would take fee payments in chickens first.

I think the only way Harris fires Hinch is if Hinch goes off book and starts doing things that go against Harris's plans. Once that verifiably starts happening, I'll come around to your way of thinking on this. If, for example, one of Harris's plans is to micromanage the lineup and have Hinch run the same eight guys out there night after night, but Hinch continues to mix and match anyway against Harris's will, then I see your point. But if Harris is giving Hinch free rein to run the team on the field as Hinch sees fit, then I just don't see Harris firing Hinch over something as low impact as failed mixing and matching—as though Hinch is losing scads of winnable games this talented team is playing.

It's nice to be in the top half of the league in something positive for a change!

I don't believe this is true at all. Assuming there's no personal fallout between him and Harris, Hinch's honeymoon won't be over until he is given the players that he is expected to contend with and then fails to do so. Until that happens, Hinch won't get fired even if the team ends up losing 105 games this year. What would be the point of firing him over that? It's not as though they could give this exact same team to, for example, Jim Leyland and expect him to win with them in a way Hinch can't.

We simply don't have eight everyday players Hinch can run out there night after night. Blame him, blame Harris, blame Avila, blame Ilitch, blame anyone and everyone, but that's the fact, and A.J. can't reasonably pretend otherwise.

OK, that's cool. I'm not saying at all this is definitely you, and at the risk of going a little out of bounds here, there is a general populist movement to dismiss everything all media reports as being fake. And in some cases that's true, particularly when people try to pass off opinion or ideology as being verifiable fact. But I think that happens only in cases for which there is a clear incentive to lie, and I just don't see the Detroit sports media's incentive to lie on behalf of the organization on the specific question of whether Hinch was involved in Harris's hiring—as though the organization would want to lead fans to believe that Hinch was involved when in fact he had zero involvement. What would be their incentive to make that happen? And how would Hinch, presumably a trusted agent of change for the team, agree to forfeit his actual agency and allow that? I can't fathom any incentive for him to do this, either.

And then there's this: https://theathletic.com/3613278/2022/09/20/tigers-scott-harris-president-baseball-operations/ But again, feel free to discard this and believe whatever you want. Also, feel free to root for A.J.'s dismissal. I think you'll be disappointed, though.

That's fine, you can believe the media in your head versus the actual media and their journalism.

I meant to post this past Thursday but I got busy early on and then it got by me, but here close I came with my predictions back from the first day of the offseason. Pitchers Returning: Alex Lange - correct Andrew Chafin – wrong, with ARI Angel De Jesus – correct, although NRI Casey Mize - correct Ed. Rodriguez - correct Jason Foley - correct Joe Jiménez – wrong, traded to ATL Joey Wentz - correct Matt Manning - correct Rony García - correct Spencer Turnbull - correct Tarik Skubal - correct Will Vest - correct Minor League Contracts: Beau Brieske - push, here but on 40-man Luis Castillo– wrong, in Japan Kyle Funkhouser – wrong, non-tendered and with TEX Leaving: Alex Faedo – wrong, on 40-man in Toledo Bryan Garcia - correct Daniel Norris - correct Drew Hutchison - correct Elvin Rodriguez - correct Garrett Hill – wrong, on active roster Gregory Soto - correct José Cisnero – wrong, on active roster Miguel Diaz – wrong, NRI Tyler Alexander – wrong, on active roster Position Players Returning: Ali Sánchez– wrong, with ARI Javier Báez - correct Brendon Davis - correct Luis García - correct Eric Haase - correct Ryan Kreidler - correct Jake Rogers - correct Jonathan Schoop - correct Sp. Torkelson - correct Akil Baddoo - correct Riley Greene - correct Austin Meadows - correct Miguel Cabrera - correct Kerry Carpenter - correct Willi Castro – wrong, with MIN Minor League Contracts: Josh Lester – wrong, with BAL Zack Short – wrong, on 40-man in Toledo Leaving: Tucker Barnhart - correct Jeimer Candelario - correct Harold Castro - correct Kody Clemens - correct Daz Cameron - correct Victor Reyes - correct So, kind of a mixed bag, especially with pitchers. I thought Chafin would stick around close to home since he made such a deal about that, but he wanted out bad enough to go to Arizona. Joe Jiminez would have had a place on this roster if we didn’t flip him for Molloy and the other guy. I thought the new regime would see Cisnero as having a last hurrah last year, but I guess they didn’t want him to just walk and apparently hoped he could do well enough in Lakeland and during the season so we can flip him at some point. I was also surprised to see us hang onto Brieske and Hill, who predictably both stunk it up this spring. Breiske especially seems to be impervious to merit-based consequences, I guess because he has stuff that could best be described as “tantalizing” which, let's be clear, is not a compliment. I think Alexander probably would be gone if we were a better team, but every team needs southpaws, and sometimes you just take what you can get. Willi Castro wasn’t such a big whiff, I don’t think. I thought he was the one guy of all the Avila crew who had peripherals enough to stick around for one more try. Instead, he broke camp with Minnesota after a pretty good spring. Apparently, what he needed was a team that at least thinks they know what to do with him. I thought maybe that could have been us with Harris et al running things, but maybe they just didn’t see it in him, or perhaps the pressure to dump him was just too great, as with Candelario, who had a sub-optimal spring and is off to a bad start.

Here is the state of the 2023 Tigers three games in: the top story on the websites of the two major dailies is not about the team, but the ballpark food.

What really happened?

I don't think Harris will dump Hinch as a leftover vestige of the failed system. After all, Hinch helped bring Harris aboard! And if Hinch were considered part of the Avila problem, he'd've gone out the door with Scott Coolbaugh and the others. If this is Hinch's last year, it will be because he leaves of his own accord. At that point I might start panicking, because if the guy who helped bring the new PBO onboard, and who's agreed to punt on winning now to help remake the infrastructure down to the studs so we can win in the future, suddenly bails on the team because he decides it's going nowhere after all, then I'm gonna take his word for it, and I'll despair of my Tiger fandom for probably the rest of my life.

I may not push it even then. We have the roughest 40-game stretch to start the season of any team, and it's not going to let up until mid-May. We absolutely have to keep that in mind before, or at least while, we bury this team. If they don't pick it up in the last two weeks of May, when they are playing weaker teams—if they are still struggling along at the same pace they (presumably will) start out the first six weeks at—then I might move toward the button.

DFA is a way to get a guy off your 40 but still keep him in the system by sending him to the minors. To DFA a guy, I believe the team must post him to waivers, and I believe it’s irrevocable in that if another organization claims him, we can’t pull him back. He’s gone. I think claims go worst-to-first record in your own league, then worst-to-first in the other league. If he clears waivers, the team can assign him to wherever in the system they want, and the player can either accept the assignment, or pull out of the contract and declare himself a free agent. (Not 100% sure of that last one? But that would be the fair thing to do.)

Agree, free agent deals we signed twenty years ago were pretty good.

And Harris couldn’t sign a decent big league bat because this entire organization is SFA at this moment. Haniger had a choice of where to go, and he went to a team that has at least a prayer of contending. Also, not for nothing, the Giants is Haniger’s hometown team, and he said that it was always his dream to play for them. So, there’s that.

Everything that goes around comes back around again, doesn’t it?

And the time will come for that, when good players see what is happening with the Tigers and decide yeah, I want to be part of that. I think we both know that’s not us now, and that it’s going to take some time—years, not months—to effect that change. In the meantime, the best we’ll be able to do is Robbie Grossman-level players—guys who don’t have much choice where to go. Last offseason, it looked like we might be going places, so we were able to get Javier Baez and Eduardo Rodriguez and Andrew Chafin to come on board. They thought we were getting into a position to compete as early as 2022. Sure, we had to overpay them to get them on board, because we were still an unknown quantity, but they would never have signed on with us if they knew were were going to lose 90-plus games for a number of years to come. As it was, Chafin ended up leaving the Tigers because he could, and he signed on with the Diamondbacks for less. The Diamondbacks, FFS! For less! This year, those guys we could sign were Matthew Boyd and Michael Lorenzen, guys literally no one else was going after, and had to overpay them to come here. So we did add a player here and there, where we could. And this is what we could get. Grid willing, it will be better next winter.

Was it we who were getting favors from Boras? Or was it he who was getting favors from us? I think it was a symbiotic relationship, and clearly, it ended up hurting us in the end, while things are still going just peachy for Scott Boras

All I was saying is that this is the time for Hinch to move all his players in and out of roles to see who is capable of what under which circumstances. It’s about what I believe Hinch is trying to accomplish, not about what I personally want Hinch to do, or about whether I think any of this matters.

They could not have gotten better players because Al Avila was behind the wheel. So we should be glad he wasn’t the guy to trade Soto. I grant what you say about Vierling and Maton. I was responding to the assertion that they are subreplacement hitters. So far, they are not.

Sure, pay a guy tens of millions of dollars more than he is worth and you can get him to play for anybody. But if you’re a team like the Tigers and you’re the top bidder by only a few million, you’re probably not getting the guy, because he is going to want to go someplace where he can win. I know that idea gets pooh-poohed around here a lot, but it’s true. By the way, how does it feel the root for a team that can’t get anybody decent come play for them unless they dramatically overpay them? Maybe for you … but I don’t like it.