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LOLOLOL ... stop, Marco, you're killing me!

Duuuude ... it-quay saying the iet-quay art-pay out oud-lay ...

Just what we need: up to three more tossers who can't strike hitters out. I thought it was important to control the strike zone? Or maybe what we mean by that is pitchers who won't walk guys, which, these guys didn't last year. We'll see, if we end up signing any of these guys. Profar definitely takes walks and puts the ball in play—just not very hard when he does, and thus he's up and down from year to year. Plus, if we're going to hire more guys who can't strike hitters out, we should probably get someone out there who can defend. He's basically Curaçao Robbie Grossman.

I understand. The Baseball marketing machine thrives on home runs and strikeouts, and the increase of both is a direct result of the live ball. I'm just saying, if Baseball cared—I mean really cared—about protecting pitchers from injuries, instead of just letting it happen since it happily maintains the fungibility and thus cost control of the pitcher pool, I'm certain deadening the ball would accomplish that.

Deaden the ball, remove the fear of all nine guys in the order being able take you out of the park, and pitchers won't have to throw so hard with so much torque to get swing-and-miss. They can just heave it up there and say here you go, hit it and get yourself out. I don't understand why no one ever contemplates that idea except me.

It's been only a couple weeks since the moves on the training staff. It's only mid-November! I believe this is another hangover from the Avila era: the implicit assumption that any move the Tigers front office makes to address anything either won't make any difference, or is at best 50/50 due only to luck. I would agree that was true under the Avila regime, who simply didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Fans can believe going in that this will also be true under Harris because plus ça change and all that, and be as skeptical of him as they were of the former guy. And maybe that's totally fair to expect until he documents some success, I don't know. Perhaps I'm blindly checking my skepticism at the door and huffing some hopium, but as for me, I'm going to give Harris the benefit of the doubt that it will be fixed until we see that it isn't, because I trust his process based on his background and interviews. As for injuries throughout Baseball: I'm starting to wonder whether the Drivelining of the game in general—wherein the quest to add even a single tick and a little late movement to fastballs, in order to induce more swing-and-miss, leads to maxing out the stress on shoulders and elbows while training for it—isn't a factor leading to the injuries.

They've taken steps to address that.

This is how traumatized over the years we Tiger fans have become—we regard sub-replacement players we've seen losing games for us for years as acceptable pieces for the team going forward. I am so glad a new day has dawned when this kind of thinking will soon be relegated to the garbage can of low expectations.

If you're happy to have Bryan Garcia, then the season is way beyond a lost cause.

Bryan Garcia will never be anything more than he is right now: a seven-strikeout, five-walk thrower with a declining fastball who yields elevated contact and relies on low BABIP to get outs. The best we can hope for out of him is to be a sweetener in a deal that obtains us actual useful players in return, which is why I think he (plus Victor et al) are being optioned out to Toledo.

There’s probably gonna be an automatic recount in the Boebert race, right?

Maybe an entire political units’s population vacillates back and forth along the liberal-conservative spectrum, due to messaging unique to them at various times, and Wisconsin is simply on a different cycle from Michigan and the others …

I think Willi stays and Harold goes.

Because with it she'd look like this?

Not to me it wasn't! I had him going on Page 1.

Liberal tears keep turning to cheers … I wonder how Bunker is doing these days?

I don’t mean just the drafts. We were talking about trades, so I also mean the trades, as well as AFA signings and Rule 5 drafts. Anything in which acquiring prospects is concerned. I just said “draft” as a catch-all for player acquisition. And Avila is on record as valuing athleticism at the top of the Verlander trade statement.

I hope he signs with the Yankees so I don’t feel like I’m supposed to root for him anymore. 😏

Do you believe this? Not sure I do but maybe …

Gambling on pitchers—and position players—is what we are used to seeing. Basically every trade Al Avila made was a gamble, mainly on athleticism. Draft an athlete and make him into a ballplayer. That's fine in 1997. In 2017, that's asinine. I will expect a lot a lot less gambling out of Scott Harris.

I think we are moving past the era in which pitching is a gamble. I'm pretty sure what the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers are doing with their pitching is not gambling.

What’s Tammy Baldwin’s birth status?

The Republicans look to be in a very precarious position right now. They’ve gone all in on Trump for almost seven years. Trump all by himself drove to the polls millions of people who wouldn’t normally vote. They voted because he was on the ticket; they’ll avoid voting if he’s not. Once he leaves, Republicans probably won’t be able to bank on those voters anymore. I’m not talking about very conservative voters who will simply shift to DeSantis—that’s going to happen. I’m talking about the red hat wackaloons who spend all day on the Stormfront website and spout Qonsense on Truth Social and dress up for militia “practice” and agitate for book burnings at the local grade school and all that. There are a few million of those, and they’ll likely leave the electorate altogether. They also had gone all in on the #1 all-time issue for the religious right, No Abortion, Nosirree. After the mass repudiation of this idea at the polls, how can Republicans effectively continue pushing the notion of complete abortion bans and still expect to win elections? Even Kentucky voted against the ability of their government to strip the right to abortion from its citizens. Kentucky, for cry eye! BUT, if they ignore the abortion issue altogether, or even fail to pay homage to the idea that they might implement nothing short of a complete ban, they may have to kiss millions of evangelical votes buh-bye, too. But also, if they continue to spout insane conspiracy ideas and push to strip people of the freedom to abortions, and even more freedoms beyond that, they will continue to lose the conservative middle who want nothing to do with any of that garbage. So at this moment, anyway, it looks like damned if they do and damned if they don’t. 😁

I can’t remember to what degree we have ever discussed this, and I also can’t remember when or whether I’ve ever across any articles contemplating this, but I do wonder how much a … ahem … tsunami of one-sided coverage of either party’s electoral chances affects partisan turnout and thus election results. In this case, I could hypothesize that the coverage on all sides of the media spectrum was so completely tilted toward the red wave idea that it may have caused many D voters to freak out and storm the polls to do whatever they could to try to stop it; as well as many R voters to believe the win was so completely in the bag that they figured their vote wasn’t even needed so they just stayed home and waited around to enjoy the results. I guess the proof in that pudding would be any data comparing D turnout with R turnout in battleground districts and states, but absent that, It seems really possible to me something like that happens.