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Tallest m*****s in the circus.

His voice is the least of my critiques of Monroe, behind his general lack of insights, his clubhouse-y rah-rah demeanor, and his inability to build on anything Dan says.

I know this is probably weird, but one of the things I am excited to see is whom Scott Harris will shitcan this winter. Almost as much as whom we will pick up to replace them. I think I might be disappointed if more than half the guys I named were on the 40-man next April.

QAnon.

Based on my understanding of the public information we all have, I agree with a few things in your post. For one, I agree that Baby Doc is a more hands-off owner than Pap Doc was, so he’s unlikely to force something silly like another 8/300 extension for Miggy. I also agree that obtaining impact free agents, as opposed to stopgap free agents, is something we can benefit from right away even if we believe this is not the year to contend. And I agree that even if they don’t make a move this winter, they can cobble together 70-75 wins assuming all the luck levels out on bouncing balls, injuries, and the like. I don’t agree that Miggy’s contract will be bought out and that he’ll be given the gate. Not only will a significant portion of revenue-producing fans object to that, I think a lot of the players, the Latin players in particular, may take a bad message from him being basically banished from the clubhouse. They may not play him, but I do think they’ll find either roster spot or an IL spot for him which will keep him in the dugout during games. So I think we can plan on zero wins from him, as opposed to -1 or -2, in 2023. As for who’s going to stay and who’s going to go … I need to think on that some. I think Brieske, Hill, Cisneros, Hutchinson, and Alexander might all be gone. Norris too, of course. On the bat side I see both Castros, Reyes, and of course, Tucker being shown the door. Maybe there will be more, I don’t know. But my impression of Scott Harris is that he will not be sparing when it comes to making decisions on who to cut and replace.

Most people are in bubbles, so your theory checks out.

Its hard for me to see how candidates can believe the majority of voters are so cruel that they’ll be motivated to go to the polls on statements like this.

We already have a bunch of guys who hit like Miguel Andujar. He’s been WAR-negative since he’s turned 24. Pass. Maybe he can land on the Rockies next year with Tucker Barnhart where they can both revive their chances for a career.

Well, there's no having to explain Barnhart since most of us knew he was terrible coming in. He had had exactly one season of better than 0.9 bWAR out of his eight total seasons coming into the year. Nobody who was paying attention before the season began who reasonably have expected him to contribute any wins to this team. So we can throw him out. As for the other three, the one that hurt us most was Candelario. He was a 3.8-win player last year and face-planted his way to 0.2 this year, so that's 3.6 wins he's lost us all on his own. Schoop lost a couple wins (2.0 last year, 0.0 so far this) and Baez's value was basically cut in half from 4.6 last year to 2.3 this year. Add them all up, and instead of 57-92, we get to 65-84. So even if they matched their performances of last season, or even elevated their performance by, say, two wins each—if Candy and Baez were six- or seven-win players, and Schoop earned us four wins—we'd still be solidly under .500. And the reason we'd be under .500 under any circumstance is that this roster is littered with the rookies and AAAA players that Al Avila acquired for us. There's that word again: "littered". How dare I use that word to describe our roster? Here's how I dare: The Tigers have had a total of 51 different players put on the uniform at game time during this season. Of those 51, sixteen have been rookies: Alex Faedo; Ángel De Jesus; Beau Brieske; Drew Carlton; Elvin Rodríguez; Garrett Hill; Jason Foley; Joey Wentz; Kody Clemens; Luis Castillo; Josh Lester; Kerry Carpenter; Kody Clemens; Riley Greene; Ryan Kreidler; and Spencer Torkelson. Of the remaining 35 players, there are 11 I would consider AAAA players, guys who have either bounced up and down between the majors and the minors throughout their careers, or guys at or near sub-replacement career WARs who would be bouncing up and down had they not spent their big-league careers exclusively with the Tigers. Those 11 are: Bryan Garcia; Daz Cameron; Derek Hill; Drew Hutchison; Dustin Garneau; Harold Castro; Jacob Barnes; Rony García; Víctor Reyes; Willi Castro; and Zack Short. That's 27 out of 51 Tiger players this year who were either rookies or AAAA players. More than half. And it's not as though these were emergency replacements who were coming in for someone who had to go on the IL and then turning right back down I-75 15 days later. These are guys who got oodles of playing time with this team. Of the 5,379 plate appearances the Tigers made going into tonight's game, these rookies and AAAA players had 42% of them. And of the 1,303 innings pitched by the team, 39% were by rookies and AAAA pitchers. I suppose one could debate whether someone like Victor Reyes (0.6 career WAR in five years) or Harold Castro (-1.2 WAR in five years) should be considered AAAA, given that they've basically maintained their spots on the big club for a few years each. I would counter that neither Reyes not Hackin' Harold would have an ongoing spot on any other roster, outside of Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Kansas City, or Miami, for the last five years running. The point is this: we can place blame on A.J. and the coaches for whatever their part is in the collapse of three of the four guys you named, if it makes us feel better. But I don't think there is any way we can blame them for not leading this same group of guys, handed to them by Al Avila and crew, and getting this same amount of playing time, to the winning record most of us imagined was gonna happen. As the guy here who arguably hates A.J. the most has said, anyone else would have ended up with basically the same result.

Vince Gilligan makes it clear within the article that Rhea Seehorn will be playing a hero, not an anti-hero.

A.J. Hinch helped hire Scott Harris, so he isn't going anywhere. You know the phrase, "To whom much is given, much is expected?" The flip side of that is that you can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit. When a manager a given a roster dominated by rookies and AAAA players, demanding him to turn that into a playoff contender is too much. It's a total O.G. move to blame the manager for the failures of an entire organization, but I think most people recognize that any manager can do only so much with a roster of ciphers given to him by an organization that has spent the last seven years spinning its tires in the mud. When the tunnel is completely dark, it's easy to understand how the human beings on the roster would mentally check out. People can blame the manager 100% for failing to turn that around and inspire a .400 team to run through the wall every single night to avoid losing this individual game, but I think most reasonable folks can see how mentally taxing, maybe even impossible, that is to expect over the course of 162 games played for six straight months. Now that we appear to have plugged the gaping hole in leadership at the top of front office, once Hinch is given a solid roster to contend with, if he falls well short of expectations, then he will deserve to be shit-canned. Now is not that time.

Fox doing god’s work, is god is the NRCC.

This segment is brought to you by the good folks at Maverick cigarettes and Busch Light beer.

Economic power is a precursor to political power.

I do think had Germany landed in the US with the goal of invading it, they would have gotten more collaboration from locals than if Japan had done the same.

I won't write off Putin until he's out for good. How many times have we prematurely danced on Trump's grave?

The thing that's most upsetting about it all is just how easily the US could have entered the war on the side of the Nazis, had someone like a Lindbergh won the presidency in 1940. A distressingly high percentage of people were sympathetic to Nazi values, and another high percentage were apathetic about it all because of our isolation. Even with Roosevelt in office, If I'm Hitler in 1941, I'm thinking, there is no way the United States, a country so obviously divided along these kinds of ideological lines, could ever pull together to effectively fight a European war against them. With American isolationism in the bag, Hitler could have continued to run roughshod over country after country in Europe, including the UK, before finally subduing the Soviet Union and having, what, half a billion or more subjects in their Reich, minus the Jews? Then they could have conscripted every man in the Reich to enter their armed forces and turned their sights on the US, a country of, what, 130 million? With a Reich four times the size of America, Hitler could have reasonably calculated that he could run roughshod over America as well—particularly given another reasonable calculation that maybe a quarter or more of all Americans at the time would have collaborated with the Nazis, given their like-mindedness on genocidal racism. The collaboration rate could easily have been much higher during an American invasion than in the invasion of any European country. What Hitler didn't bank on, however, was Japan attacking Pearl Harbor. That woke a lot of people up because here was a nation of "yellow bastards" trying to invade America, which people racist to their core would never withstand. And since the friend of my enemy is my enemy, and Germany was considered the friend of Japan, once they declared war on the US after the bombing, that was pretty much it for any idea Hitler could waltz in and take over America.

@Motor City Sonics? Where did you hear this?

Where are you hearing this?

I've been watching the US and the Holocaust, and as I do so, I'm becoming convinced that QAnon is quite literally the new Nazi party. They really believe in the same things: the anti-semitism and cultishness and dedication to white supremacy, yes, but also the Blood Libel, the "Jew control" of international finance and media, the need to cleanse the earth of their subhuman enemy scum—all of it. They are most responsive to rhetoric based on fear of an alien and unknowable other, they blame their eroding situation on racial and ideological scapegoats, and they yearn for a narcissistic demagogues to rescue them. This is exactly what Nazism was in the 1930s, and it is exactly what QAnon is today. This is what makes Trump's embrace of it last week actually dangerous, rather than silly. Trump is giving red hats permission to fully embrace QAnon and its genocidal philosophy, and I will bet that by the time Trump leaves the scene, QAnon will already have rushed in to replace him as the red hats' unifying principle. Once we start seeing people fly QAnon flags at their homes, farms and businesses, that's when we know shit's gonna really start getting real. I'm thinking within two years, tops.

Oh darn, if we’d only waited a few days, we could’ve had Dayton Moore … 😝

Don't look now, but since August 31, Javy Baez is slashing .352/.378/.563, good for a 169 wRC+ and enough to raise his season WAR by almost a full point. How he got there is kind of interesting, though. He's still striking out a lot and not walking enough—he was in the bottom sixth for BB/K ratio of all 161 qualifiers during that time frame. He was still a groundball machine, although he did up his line drive game. He crushed sliders better than 96% of other qualifiers, and clobbered curve balls, too. He had among the fewest soft hits, but he didn't hit the ball hard much, either. He still paced all qualifiers in chasing pitches and swinging and missing. So how did he get so much production these past three weeks? How about a .468 BABIP?

This one was ... wow. Wordle 459 3/6 🟨🟨🟨⬛🟨 🟨🟨🟩🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

What the Ford Frick is this about?

Wait a minute—is that for CarShield?