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Tigers, too.

Actually, duh, I know exactly what's going on: Jim Crane, the owner, is making all the GM decisions. I spaced out on that when I posted this. Thus, Click gone, Verlander gone, Abreu signed, who knows what's next. can't wait to find out. Crane is going to run the Astros back into the ground whence they sprung. Couldn't happen to a nicer team.

Old pictures of big cities always bring a smile to my face. This is looking down Woodward Avenue toward downtown in 1942. Great color.

I wonder whether there is something going on in Houston and that this is related to James Click leaving. Baseless speculation, just curious whether there’s a link.

But hey, they made an offer to Carlos Correa … 🦆🦆🦆

Lemonade out of lemons: I think this increases the chances that Verlander goes into the Hall in a Tigers cap.

I don’t positive whether this is real or fake—I’m leaning toward fake, but who knows—but this is pretty fun to watch.

Not sure whether you read the article Deleterious linked to, but it gives a pretty good overview of how the delicately-balanced scheduling of rail cargo more or less precludes generous sick leave for workers.

Just a coincidence, I'm sure ... 😁 I wonder whether stories will come out of the New York media about how they despise each other which, if true, would never have been reported in Detroit media.

That's a good point about the money, but I think the impediment is more the years, unless the team who trades for him would be willing going in to consider the possibility of cutting bait on him, like, midway through year 3 after a season and a half of well-below-average pitching and give him his remaining $40+MM as his parting gift. I believe that's different from Boyd, who got signed for only one year, and deGrom, who's never pitched like anything but one of the greatest pitchers in history. I'm pretty sure he'll be suiting up for us on March 30, provided we don't sign an ace over him (and also that he doesn't go dark on everyone again).

I do think there is not a small amount of underdogging going on, too, which ties into your pet thesis hypothesis.

I think the thing that might scare off suitors is the idea that Eduardo will not exercise his out clause and they will be stuck with him for four seasons. He's been a better-than-average pitcher at times, but I don't think he's good enough for someone to gladly carry him for the next four years at $60+ million, especially as he enters his 30s as an increasingly soft-tossing righty. I think the best we can hope for is he chews up a lot of innings this year, has a renaissance season, and then exercises his out.

There are so many major league teams among the big four sports now that 100 years from today, there will be at least a dozen franchises scattered among them who will not have won a championship for over 100 years. And the Lions will be one of them.

I guess the one other thing I want to stress here is that disco was never presented to us in the mainstream as part of a gay way of life. There was no gay lifestyle represented in the media of the 1970s. Homosexuality was something that existed only in some shadowy netherworld, and no details about it were made available to us throughout the mainstream media that I as a 15-year old suburban white kid was immersed in. Disco was presented to us as a heterosexual dancing lifestyle, populated by the Tony Maneros* of the world and their girlfriends. So at no point would I have been able to associate disco with the gay community at that time, which is why the idea that we hated disco because of homophobia rang so false to me once I first heard about it some 30 years after the fact. I can see now that it did have that association with some people and groups, and I can now acknowledge the pain and isolation that those people who clung to disco as a positive affirmation of their essential personhood felt when confronted with the agita wrought by the anti-disco "movement". But if I ever encountered the idea at the time through media vehicles like the Rolling Stone, I didn't commit it to memory. As far as I was concerned at the time, disco was so grounded as being a hetero trip that I never considered it otherwise. * To this day I have never seen Saturday Night Fever even once, so I had to look up the character's name for this post.

This is a fair response to my strongly-expressed opinion. Speaking only for myself, the "this" in "none of this" contemplates only my thoughts and feelings that I expressed as strictly my own in the preceding two paragraphs. I was responding more to an idea I have seen expressed that everybody who hated disco necessarily did so because they hated black and gay people. As an absolutist statement, it's garbage. (had I meant it as you interpreted it, I would probably have said "none of it" instead of "none of this".) By the same token, I would never stipulate that no one hated disco only because they hated black and gay people, which is also a garbage absolutist statement. I'm sure there were a lot of those people around, too. I was just saying that, from my own standpoint, that never occurred to me, or at least I don't recall that it did. My objection to disco was not because of its roots, but because of how completely it overwhelmed music culture at the time. It is difficult to overstate just how ubiquitous disco music was in the late 70s, and how completely it wiped out all vestiges of other music genres within popular culture for three solid years running. You couldn't go to school or flip on a TV or walk through a mall and not hear disco music playing either in the foreground or the background. To me, it wasn't simply a matter of letting people who enjoy it enjoy it. It was a matter of having it foisted upon me by disco culture at large in a truly relentless manner. I didn't like new wave music, either, because I think it was also superficial and weak as music goes, but in a way, thank god for new wave, because that's what finally put disco into its grave as THE dominant cultural force. (Disco enthusiasts could probably blame MTV, which has its own struggle with racial balance, for that.) FWIW, I loved Ice-T in the early to mid-90s, the days of The Iceberg and O.G. Original Gangster and Home Invasion. He was my go-to "gangsta rapper", and I started listening to several of the acts he name-checked in his work specifically because he name-checked them. When I have to remember some of the artists of that period, I actually replay a couple of his tracks in his head to do so.

Yeah, I’ve heard this as an adult, that people who hated disco did so because they were racist and/or homophobic, full stop. That’s horseshit. Black people were already all over top 40 radio, and gay people made glam rock cool even among straight teenage guys. I was in my late teens myself at the time, and the idea that disco was about black people or gay people never occurred to me. Far as I was concerned, disco was how white people ruined funk. I’d grown up on Ohio Players, and Earth Wind and Fire, and Kool & the Gang, and tough like that, because that’s what the hits were on CKLW and WDRQ. That stuff was great. Bee Gees and ABBA and KC and the Sunshine Band fell far short of great. I hated disco because disco wasn’t about the music—it was about everything attended to that lifestyle except the music which, for the most part, might as well have been written by computers. The music was merely background noise for the vapid, shallow, superficial lifestyle disco people led, and that stupid movie with Vinnie Barbarino cemented all that into the top of the culture for years. Disco is what drove me into the arms of chainsaw guitar rock and, regrettably, prog rock. (Later, new wave music drove me into the arms of the Beatles, the Who, and, regrettably, Jethro Tull.) None of this had anything to do with hating black people or gay people. Most people who insist this is the case were not even alive at the time disco dinosaurs roamed the earth, and it sounds for all the world like they are underdogging when they insist as much.

Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine was the bright red line after which American media turned to complete shit. Because stations were no longer required to provide balance to political or otherwise partisan speech, radio became the Internet before the Internet. Just one more way by which Ronald Reagan fucked future generations.

Disco sucks.

Maybe McGriff should send fruit baskets to Bonds, Clemens, Palmeiro, Belle, and Schilling.

Maybe they called Harold Baines and asked for his input.

I won't breathe a sigh of relief until Warnock is declared the winner.

Said nobody ever.

Nicely said. I also agree it would have been the riskier move to keep Candelario because the fans would have been howling about it all winter, creating more noise around the organization than stakeholders typically like. The far easier path with far less friction was to just let him go and take our chances on the open market, or even going with internal options that benefit from being known quantities that many fans will accept. Again, all moot if Harris has something up his sleeve for third base. Dumping Candelario for nothing because he had one bad year after two very good years is practically the very definition of selling low.

Has he been flat out talking about terminating the Constitution for a long time now? I’m not sure I’ve heard him be this direct about that, but I may have simply missed it while being sprayed with the fire hose.

Oooooh, that’s still close … what’s the plus/minus on that one?