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That’s my hypothesis based in part on my reading of the articles I’ve posted. I accept that no one here is with me on that.

I think Baez and Rodriguez didn't get offers from anyone else even close to what they got from us.

Sure, there are players who are not driven to win or else—I think Mike Trout is one of those guys. If it's not about winning, then it has to be about something else: team culture, the city, close to offseason home, more money than anywhere else, even backed into a corner to make the decision (like Pudge in 2004). Different people have different reasons. But I do believe that a high percentage of players, probably the majority, would rather play for a winner in a nice climate and/or an amazing city, for even a little less money, than to play for a organization that's perceived to be going nowhere in a city that's perceived as dying or even dead. As for whether the Tigers have a rep for treating their players well, what do you base that on? We may not be thinking of the same thing.

Major league free agents are a key part of any winning team. Sure, you can't free agent your way to a consistent winner, but you can't rely only on guys coming out of your system, either. Good teams need both players who are there by choice and players who are there by team control. Even the Rays have at least half a dozen or so free agents on their roster in any given season. So while it would not have made sense to go into the market this winter with both wallets blazing and overpay for an entire starting lineup, at some point we will have to be ready to go in and make smart signings, and to do that, we have to reasonably have our pick of talent, which we don't have now, and may not next winter, either. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the plan is to be in that position by 2025, after word has gotten out that things in Detroit have changed, the Tigers are serious about putting good teams on the field consistently, and perhaps most importantly, current Tigers are eager to evangelize to players on other teams about what a great organization this has become to play for—like night and day, man. When that happens, then we should be able to sign all the first division regulars we're gonna need to round out our roster and starting playing baseball on October instead of golf.

I wouldn't be mad if they ended up winning only 70 games, although truth be told, I'd be a little disappointed, because I think as currently constructed, they're probably a 75-win team. But, like you, I did not expect any major free agent signings, although it's a little sad to see we can't even get any one-year guys beyond Boyd and Lorenzen. I can see why most players want nothing to do with coming to the Tigers, though. We're not going to win anytime soon, and I do believe our reputation among players in general is that we're messy to play for (TenaciousD, I will continue to agree to disagree with you on this), so who among the better players who are ready to win would want to come here? We have to show and prove first before that happens.

Did you ask them why? I'd be interested. The only businesses I know that take cash only are dispensaries.

My '98 booming with a trunk of funk ...

I know how the prevailing idea here for months now has been how A.J. Hinch should bear harsh culpability for the hiring of Scott Coolbaugh and for holding onto him for the entire disastrous second year, but I'm coming around to the idea that hiring Scott Coolbaugh and Jose Cruz, Jr. as hitting coaches may not have been Hinch's idea. When Hinch was interviewed by MLB Network shortly after the hire, he said "didn’t know Coolbaugh personally aside from as opponents on the field", and he then talked mostly about the topline resume things he knew about Coolbaugh. The article also touted how Coolbaugh was hired for his experience, something Al Avila is known to have valued highly. By contrast, Hinch said he'd known George Lombard for a long time, and had a great deal of personal experiential details he could relate about George in the interview. This contrast in tone when discussing the two strikes me as a clue. I have even stronger conviction that Jose Cruz, Jr. was also imposed on Hinch by Al Avila. In this Free press article, Hinch's reaction to the hire came in a statement released by the Tigers that was very bland and not too specific. Al Avila, on the other hand, was interviewed live about the hire, saying very directly, “we identified Jose as someone who would be a great fit for AJ and his coaching staff ... over the years I’ve watched (Cruz) as a player and know him to be a leader both on the field and in the clubhouse." All this sure doesn't make the hire sound anything like A.J.'s idea. Both Coolbaugh and Cruz are now gone—in fact, Cruz bolted two months into the 2021 season for the head baseball coaching job at Rice, which he led to a 17-39 record in 2022 and a ranking of #204 out of 301 schools by the NCAA. George Lombard is still around. So, my new working hypothesis is that A.J. Hinch probably wasn't the guy who hired Scott Coolbaugh as hitting coach of the Tigers. If that's true—if Coolbaugh was hired by Al Avila instead—then no wonder Coolbaugh didn't get fired early in the season when it would have made sense. By the time Avila was shit-canned, shoving Coolbaugh out the door right after him wouldn't have mattered to the team's season, and I think the organization realized it would have looked chaotic if they were to start firing people up and down the line within days of firing Al.

Has any team ever traded a 1/1 pick for MLB-ready players while the 1/1 was still marinating? Honest question, I don't know.

If the legislation passes and the retailer fee goes away, will you reduce your prices across the board by the 2% or 3% or 4% you’re currently paying for the fees on the card transactions?

I use Chase Freedom which has a standing 1% cash back deal, plus a special 5% cash back situation for certain categories on a rotating list that changes every quarter, e.g., groceries, gas, Amazon, etc. I built up six figures in spend over the past few years and used a good chunk of the reward dollars to pay for aftermarket speakers and installation for my new car, for which the automaker degraded the factory speakers to be worse than what I got in my 2013. The total cost had a comma in it, but since it all came out of rewards money, I look at the purchase as being free. I’ll miss the cash back program if Chase dumps it.

I don’t remember that about Billy Martin. But then again, that was probably a thing with a lot a lot of players, especially in the 70s.

If you weren’t completely sure whether the beat writers are there to sell tickets for the team, you can be sure now.

You do you, but I think it's better for us to baselessly speculate about what happened on a freewheeling online forum. 😉

I thought that went without saying, so …

Sounds good on paper, anyway.

How’s this—George Santos is a Democrat plant who made it through because he was provided forged paperwork by the DCC Black Ops team so he could pass strict bureaucratic scrutiny, and then the election in NY-3 was rigged by Dominion and Hugo Chavez so Santos would win and then get exposed as a buffoon by the mainstream media—all with the goal of making the Republican Party look bad. Who’s got that on their Aisle Lunatic bingo card?

The tricky part with that is, how do they imprison Meadows but also justify not going after Trump for the same kind of thing? Avoiding demonstrations of protests or violence won’t cut it.

This is what we get when we insist that businessmen make the best presidents—an environment that leads to people who think taking classified intel with them whenever and wherever they want is perfectly, legitimately normal. I myself remember highly-placed people at companies where I worked who stole company secrets and shared them with outsiders on the reg. No big whoop.

I agree with the first sentence only if he custom-ordered the car. But if he accepted a car off a lot, then it already was built. I custom-order my cars when it's time, so it's not so unlikely this guy does, too.

How long before the Warrior Jesus jerks crow about how God is punishing him for going after Trump?

Just did a quick correlation for FIP, 2022 vs 2021, minimum 50 innings each season, n=218. Correlation is 0.42, significantly less than K% or BB% alone. HR/9 correlation is 0.35. Take from this what you will, but in terms of whether we need the three different measures when FIP contemplates all of them together, personally, I like knowing how components of an all-in-one number break down. I think it helps give me better understanding of the player involved. I think of OPS the same way. Player A—let's call him "Jesse"—has a .344 on base and .344 slugging; Player B—let's call him "Marcell"—has a .274 on base and a .413 slugging. OPS would tell you they are practically the exact same type of hitter, but if you break it down to the components, you can see they arrived at their OPS in very different ways, and because of that, they are very different types of hitters.

I remember him from his time with the Cubs. His walk-up song was December 1963 (Oh What a Night). It must have been dad's favorite or something. Tommy was good in his role, but he's never gotten much more than 300 plate appearances in a single season, and it would seem unwise to give him his first-ever full-time starting job at age 34. I also remembering citing him as Exhibit A for just how crazy the juiced ball was in 2019, as in, if Tommy Fucking La Stella can jack 30 bombs in a year, something is seriously off. (He ended up with 16 that year because he got hurt.) I know I said so on the old site—I'd be linking that post here right were it available. Tommy is owed $11.5 million by the Giants in 2023, as the tail-end of a 3/18.75. Talk about irrational exuberance!

OK, so bottom line this for me: does it mean anything? Is it worthless? Can anything or nothing be taken away from this? Is there any point to any of this? Is the universe simply a series of random events? What is the meaning of life?

This struck me especially because it reminded me that tens of millions of people are descended of a region that believed that they were entitled to a specific kind of workforce, and by the grace of and with blessings from God. See Genesis 9;24-27; Genesis 21:9-10; Exodus 20:10, 17; Ephesians 6:5-8; and Philemon 1:12.