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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.

On the face of it, it looks to me as though the front office is doing everything to be diplomatic and even encouraging of Eduardo. Seems to me all one has to do is add up all the pieces from the various sources over the past few days to come to the conclusion about Eduardo's conduct.

Yeah, what about **** Allen! 😅 If I were confident that Eduardo would provide four more solid years of above average pitching through age 34 and a lock to never again flake out like before, then sure. Now ask me if I'm confident of that. 😉

Fascinating insight in this: Some of the more interesting tidbits, some of which I wasn't so aware of: The average physician over 40 makes over 400 bills a year, and that's including general practitioners, not just specialists. Graduates from the top medical schools, who can presumably write their own ticket to any field they want, tend to choose those that pay the most, responding to earnings potential when choosing specialties to go into. Homo economicus, indeed. As if to highlight something we all already knew, corrective and interventionist doctors make beaucoup bucks, and preventive medicine doctors make the least. Physicians were up in arms about this study when it came out because it questions the myth that doctors care only about patients, and not at all for the money. They probably care about both, and on a sliding scale depending on the individual doctor. The US has fewer physicians per capita than most first world countries, and than many second world countries as well. Most shocking to me, we have an artificial physician shortage due to a federal advisory committee who issued a report, which claimed we were "barreling toward a massive physician surplus", to a Reagan administration only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems. Therefore, from 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical graduates flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent. Least shocking to me, that current state of affairs was strongly support by the AAMC and the AMA, who only now is sounding the alarm about a doctor shortage. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

A flakeout is 180 different from an injury, for me. A guy who's 100% physically ready to pitch and who willingly removes himself from the team and remains incommunicado for months at a stretch for self-labeled "personal matters" is worse than a malingerer, in my opinion. And as though nobody else playing in the majors has their own personal issues to deal with. The more I think about this, the more I come to the conclusion that there is no way on god's green earth Scott Harris will extend Eduardo—also, the more I believe Eduardo will be motivated to decline his opt-out and maintain his income stream, if he gets wind that nobody in the marketplace wants his services. Of course, if his agent is the only source he trusts for that kind of insight, he may never hear that and opt out anyway. If the Tigers wanted to give Eduardo a taste of his own medicine this winter, maybe they should encourage him to opt out and explore the marketplace for his own good, while guaranteeing him that they will exceed the best offer he gets. Then, when the market craters on him and he comes back for his original deal, the Tigers tell them they've changed their minds and are going in a different direction because we want "stability for our family". 😁

I have my doubts, plus the flakeout potential is not a non-factor—for me, anyway.

Given all the volume of drama around Eduardo, I doubt the market for three or four years of him would be all that strong.

If I were confident that Eduardo would provide four more solid years of above average pitching all the way through his age 34 season and also was a lock to never again flake out in such a way that would affect the team and its performance on the field, then sure, I could be talked into it.

As you imply here, just because Eduardo is within his rights to lead the teams along, appear to be approving of a deal, add an 11th-hour demand for an extra year, then nix the deal at the last second and turn around and blame his family for not letting him go to LA, doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to be raked over the coals for it all. McCosky's lift job here may be the indicator that the local media has permission to turn on Eduardo. The team may want him gone after all this, and if so, yes, we'll miss the production—if he can keep it up—but it's also understandable why they would.

Good detective work by McCosky to find someone with a The Athletic account he can borrow login credentials from, read the Rosenthal article, and heavily paraphrase it here. I especially enjoy his lifting of the phrase “poison pill”.

The Franklin Perez era has concluded. I don't know whether Beck is playing down Perez's part in the trade intentionally to shield his employer or what, but Perez was THE headliner of the return on that trade when it happened, not just a "part".