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Too many Gen Zs I know have little idea of any difference between Trump and Biden. Or, more exactly, neither affects them or their daily lives, so why bother thinking about them?

If only we were anti-woke like Sweden …

Not surprising since they are on the front lines in Europe. Americans have always engaged in the hubris of believing we are beyond real danger due to the oceans that separate us.

Says the guy who took offense that I used the Jesus metaphor for Trump, and then turned around and called him Orange Jesus! 😉 😅 Anyhow, neither of us can be right or wrong about this yet, because it hasn’t happened yet.

I’d bet there’s more to it than just that, but I’d be willing to agree to disagree.

You definitely won’t be alone!

One possibility is because Anderson was straddling the base like the Colossus of Rhodes, which puts sliding runners in danger of colliding with his knees or other bones.

This is not me saying what I personally want, but only laying out a potential outcome: it would not surprise me if, after Eduardo opts in, Harris trades him over the winter for less than market value, mainly to clear the atmosphere of any future influence Eduardo may have on other players, especially young guys, and as a way to communicate to others that this is what happens when you hang us out to dry or act out in public. If this does happen, Harris will get raked by a lot of the fans and media for it, but he will be unanimously supported inside the organization, because they have a mission and Eduardo will not be allowed to undermine it. I think this is comfortably within the range of outcomes.

I haven’t liked Tim Anderson for a long time and couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I don’t like swagger guys in general, but for a while he was backing it up, so I thought, that’s fine I guess—it’s not just bragging if you can back it up. And he does get involved in the community, so I respect that. But he was still rubbing me the wrong way and I couldn’t figure it out. After seeing this incident and debriefing on it with a buddy, it occurred to us why the swagger just feels wrong with Anderson: he does it without any cheekiness or humor. Ali swaggered harder than anybody, but he was also winking at us while he was doing it, so you smiled while you went along with him for the ride. With Anderson, it’s like he’s street posturing, which comes off as just douchey in a protected environment like baseball, where bloody street brawls just don’t happen. You could really see it when he dropped his gloves and put up his dukes, like he’s some kind of badass. Which we now know he isn’t, since Ramirez found Anderson’s glass jaw in a hurry. I hope he’s ultimately OK and that he didn’t get a bad concussion or anything—but I admit I did cheer a little when he went down. Served him right.

I have a feeling Scott Harris is not going to “give him a pass” on how the ghosting episode will affect what he decides re: Eduardo. I think Harris is going to accept whatever Eduardo’s decision is, whether to opt out or stick around. In either case, I will defer to Harris’s judgment. Another thing we don’t know is what conversations they will have in the meantime that may affect Eduardo’s decision.

If even Trump’s lawyer acknowledge that he violated the Constitution, and thus his sworn oath, how does that not disqualify him from even running for office again?

Yes, of course. Trump is like Hitler and Mussolini and Castro and Kim and all the rest of them. He is a dictator-in-training. Of course you know I understand that. I am not comparing Trump the person to Jesus the god. That’s obviously not what I’m trying to put across. He’s not holy like Jesus, and he’s certainly not my Jesus. Everybody here knows I’m not saying that. But Trump is the Jesus of the movement to the red hats. They truly, honestly believe he is their savior. That’s why I said what I said, as a turn of phrase, not as an objective personal comparison. It’s a metaphor. You get the idea. And just like Christianity did not die when Jesus died, Trumpism will not die when Trump dies. He didn’t create the movement—he just tapped into what was already there, and rebranded it under his name.

The movement will continue beyond Trump, but Trump will always be the Jesus of it.

I’d be a lot more concerned about that if this were the group of guys the organization thought they could contend every year with. I’m pretty sure it’s not, so I think the idea now is to see whether any of these guys can fit in as a useful part of a winning organization down the road, and the rest of them will be free to pursue their careers elsewhere.

I don’t think so. I think he’d be a considered martyred leader who was forced to leave the country. He doesn’t have to be present in front of people to lead them. Most red hats have never even been in the same county as he at the same time. He would have access to all the same media tools to sow the destruction of America that he’s been using all along.

I’m not so sure Eduardo Rodriguez should be given a pass for going incommunicado with the team for two months, and his agent doing so as well. I would think that the minimum either could do was to keep his employer, to which he presumably has a professional obligation, looped in to his status. Is that unreasonable to expect? I don’t know, you tell me. In any event, the $64 question will be, will the Tigers be willing as an organization to put up with this kind of thing for the next four or five years? Because it doesn’t matter what we think or what we ourselves would put up with—it’s up to them to decide and deal with it. But it would be gobsmacking if they extend him for 5/100 or something, his acting out continues, and the organization pretends like they had no idea it could happen again.

On WWJ 950 now because of Lions conflict. Used to be the Tigers were the team that bumped everyone else.

If they were to manage to try, convict, and incarcerate Trump before the election, I don’t see how they can sentence him to anything but house arrest. Even if you put him in Club Fed, never mind regular prison, he’s going to be held up as the ultimate political prisoner, an ex-President of the United States of America kept in a dark and dingy dungeon, treated in a humiliating, shameful, and disrespectful manner, and that could be a triggering circumstance. At least holding him at Mar-A-Lago has the appearance of kid gloves, although no guarantees that won’t trigger, either. (And I do mean “triggering” literally: as incompetent as red hats are at organizing and carrying out their mission as a disciplined unit, they can still do a lot of random damage individually or in small groups before they are vanquished, because they basically have all the weapons. I think all that would be needed are a few guerrilla incidents here and there, presented to them in a heroic David vs Goliath manner, and that could spread around the country like wildfire.) The last thing we can do is let Trump leave the country and go to Saudi Arabia. He would be more dangerous in exile and beyond the reach of American justice than he ever could be here and in jeopardy of it. Either way, the government is in a huge pickle. Trump has masterfully conditioned his hundred million to reject not only any authority the federal government and justice system may have over him, but also to reject the actual American way of governance and even democracy itself. To them, American is about nothing more, nothing less, than law and order, which itself no longer means what institutions say it is, if they ever thought it was. To them, law and order means their right to exercise their own brand of justice in any way they see fit against a rotating set of offenders—black people for centuries, and still to a degree, but also now LGBTQIA+ people, the deep staters, the media, woke business, Democrat-voting liberals, etc. Basically, anyone who doesn’t cotton to their view of what true Americanism is. In the end, though, I don’t see them even bringing this to trial before the election, anyway. It will be successfully repeatedly delayed until the election, and if he’s elected—if he actually manages to convince Romad-level mainstream conservatives that the federal government overstepped their boundaries and did indeed politically persecute him, so they end up voting for and thereby electing him—then John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn and all their ilk will be back in the White House and free to pursue their ultimate agenda. And this time, they will not fck it up. tl;dr: we have to be really, really careful we don’t allow this to become Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch moment.

LOB% along with BABIP are the two elements that separate WAR and RA9-WAR for pitchers. WAR is based on expected wins added based on FIP, which is based not on runs allowed, but expected runs allowed given his performance in those areas he's considered responsible for: walks and HBPs; strikeouts and infield fly balls; and homers allowed. These are the elements the pitcher is being held responsible for, and factors out base hits and baserunning. On the other hand, RA9-WAR is like WAR, but it makes the pitcher responsible for the base hits and the baserunning—IOW, for the actual runs scored. That's why the two figures can be very different for the same pitcher. I think of WAR as being forward-looking, along with FIP: based on how they have been pitching, for those areas they're responsible for, how are they likely to do in the future? If their WAR is a lot higher or lower than their RA9-WAR, they're probably running into a stretch of bad or good luck and, in most cases, are probably due for a correction. Conversely, I think of RA9-WAR as backward-looking, along with ERA: how many runs did the pitcher actually give up on his watch? So when I want to use a WAR metric in thinking about who I think should win the Cy Young, for example, I look at RA9-WAR much more than WAR. The best part is you can see how much the luck affects a pitcher by looking at their Fangraphs card, on which you can see not only WAR and RA9-WAR, but also BIP-Wins and LOB-Wins, and it's all beautifully additive. Tarik Skubal is a great example of this. Here's what his card said for 2022: You can see all the way toward the right that his WAR, based on FIP (2.9) is much higher than his RA9-WAR, based on runs allowed (1.8). if you look at his LOB% of 67.5 and his BABIP of .299 to the left of these, you can see Skubal has been somewhat unluckier than league average (.287 BABIP and 72.9% LOB%), so that led to him giving up more runs than he should have, were he luckier in these two areas. And so the math goes: 2.9 WAR plus -0.3 BIP-Wins plus -0.8 LOB-Wins = 1.8 RA9-WAR. The takeaway here is that Skubal pitched much better in 2022 in the things he could control than his actual runs allowed showed, but for his bad luck in BABIP and LOB, and such luck usually—not always, but usually—evens out, we could expect him to get much better results going forward. The drag part is that it's not happening in 2023 so far, either, because his WAR is 1.0 but his RA9-WAR is 0.2, so he's basically terribly "unlucky" this year as he was last year. But, theoretically, he should get better results going from here, assuming the LOB and BABIP luck even out. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway.

I don't know what they're going to do, and I have no recommendations for them. All I'm saying is that I would be floored if Scott Harris gives him extra years after he torpedoed a done deal that he was on board with throughout the entire process until the very end, and I would not be surprised if they do not pursue him if he opts out. If he does opt in, I will root for him to win until he is no longer with the team.

If Eduardo elects to stay on board, I will root for him as long as he is on the team. If Scott Harris signs him for an additional year, or god forbid two, I will be floored, but I will root for a great outcome for the team to win. If Eduardo opts out and Scott Harris does not pursue him, I will be fine with that as well. We're not winning next year anyway with or without him, and I suspect we will have more pitching options available to us when we are ready to win in a couple years, three at the outside. In the meantime, we are stacked enough with pitching, including Mize due to come back and prospects like Flores and Madden knocking at the door for next year, and with a coaching staff that now has an established track record of getting the most out of their pitchers, that I could see Harris flying into next season with what we have beyond Eduardo. Or, perhaps, try to bring in a pitcher off the winter market for a less-than-long-term deal a la Lorenzen, or even make a trade for a starter on an expiring deal, versus extending an unpredictable personality with an established history of publicly acting out. Either way, I would prefer Harris continue to focus on shoring up our hitting as his #1 goal.