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Yeah, this is why I don’t get invited to parties, weddings, graduations, or funerals … 😏

If you’re saying the lesson to take from this is to “win”, as if he could flip a switch to do so, then by that logic that means Ilitch has not been trying to win, since he has been losing in historic fashion ever since taking control of the team.

While I believe it is a 100% certainty that he will be on the 40-man roster to start the season, I think it’s 50/50 that he will get even one game a series for the whole year. We all know that Miggy won’t retire and leave the money on the table, because duh, and we all are pretty certain that the Tigers would never DFA or otherwise cut him, because that would legitimately make the Tigers organization look bad in the court of public opinion, and would drive a pointless wedge between the player and the team that would last in perpetuity. Chris Ilitch to all appearances is not a smart baseball owner, but he’s definitely smart enough not to uselessly shoot his property in the foot. I think the Tigers will look for reasons to place Miggy on the IL as early and often as possible next season, and that there’s a very good chance he will end the year on the 60-day list. He will then have his big day at the stadium on October 1, last game of the year against the Guardians; ride off into the sunset in the relative good graces of the fans, the organization, and Baseball; and enter Cooperstown in a Tigers hat in 2029.

Yes, exactly! I’ve been trying to get a grip on my feelings every time I hear that Pujols has hit yet another home run. I knew I wasn’t feeling quite angry or upset, which were way too strong to describe it, but man, you nailed it: it depresses me, mainly because I want to be as happy about it as my Mets fan and Red Sox fan friends are, but I’m not, and I wish I were, which made me feel even worse about it, and I couldn’t quite articulate why. But you’re totally right: it’s totally depressing to see Pujols, whose record since 2017 through last season (.241/.290/.410, 87 OPS+ in 2,138 PA) was surprisingly far worse than Miggy’s (.264/.335/.401, 99 OPS+ In 1,992 PA), experience this amazing fountain of youth last act, while we Tiger fans know that it is literally completely impossible for Miggy to have that same last hurrah. GAAAH!

This post makes perfect sense as it stands. Counterpoint: Tigers increased their Opening Day payroll from $80 million to $135 million this year, and they are going to draw basically the same 1.5 million fans with their 100-loss product that they did in 2019 with their 114-loss product. What lesson is a conservative business tycoon to take from this?

Your keyboard to God’s monitor.

This is probably true, although I am under the general impression that the increase in revenue versus spend may not be enough to warrant the spend, nor would the increase be guaranteed.

It bears remembering that like every other federally-protected big league franchise, the Tigers are making money hand-over-fist in terms of direct and indirect income, national revenue sharing, and especially franchise valuation. So, from a strictly business standpoint, as long as they’re making good money and the franchise value is going up, there’s no incentive to spend on capital improvements such as expanding the analytics department, deepening coaching and training staffs and equipment, or spending on even effective free agents in order to win games now (as if any decent free agent would choose the Tigers over any number of contenders anyway). The Tigers will make money and increase in value even if they continue to field 100-loss teams year after year. The only reason an owner would direct the organization to invest heavily, despite the lack of business imperative, is if they have a burning personal desire to put a consistent winning team on the field.

1901 to present is considered modern baseball in terms of research, because of the game’s structural resemblance to today as well as the completeness of information that’s available to sift through. Within that time period, it’s appropriate to divide the game into eras to reflect the way it has changed over the decades. The most commonly-defined are live ball era (since 1920), integrated era (since 1947), expansion era (since 1961), divisional era (since 1969), and wild card era (since 1994 or 1995). I’ve also seen various names for the homer-happy era that’s existed since 1998—I like to call that the Chicks Dig The Long Ball Era—or even the millennial era (since 2000 or 2001). And of course, people like to divide the game into eras based on decades (“winningest pitcher of the 80s”) for none but calendarial reasons. All of these eras are subsumed into the broad designation of modern era (since 1901). This merely reflects a set of accepted definitions for the purposes of research nerdery, though. Fans are obviously free to divide baseball into any era they want for their own personal purposes. My personal live ball era starts in 1972, because that’s when I started seeing games live.

And if that happens, that’ll be the nail in the coffin for the Ilitch Tigers. It will be dead franchise walking until he sells.

Incredibly, yes. Anything 1901 or later is "modern baseball".

It's definitely not too soon for #irishtwitter. And this is one of the nicer ones.

Interesting thing I noticed just now playing with B-Ref data: In 2006, 89% of the $76 million payroll went to free agents (57%), while guys picked by us in the draft or the AFA market made just 7% of the payroll. In 2012, the share of the $118 million payroll going to free agents was 38%, while 24% went to guys we either drafted or got via AFA. Spoiler alert: 17 points out of that 24% went to Justin Verlander alone.

Most predictable thing ever.

And communing with her horses, which is the job she really wanted in life ...

I agree with the conclusion of this post, but I am also struck by the irony that Al Avila did work in a front office for a team that went from historically bad to winning a couple of pennants. So, technically, he had previous experience ... 😏 Of course, that team bought their way to those pennants instead of building their way to them.

That puts these LA Dodgers in the conversation of greatest team of the modern era: Team W L Pct Start Finish CHC 621 295 .678 1905 1910 CHC 621 296 .677 1906 1911 CHC 610 305 .667 1904 1909 STL 606 319 .655 1941 1946 CHC 588 312 .653 1903 1908 NYY 599 320 .652 1937 1942 CHC 597 319 .652 1907 1912 NYY 598 320 .651 1936 1941 PHA 596 321 .650 1927 1932 NYY 592 321 .648 1934 1939 NYY 595 324 .647 1938 1943 STL 598 328 .646 1942 1947 LAD 545 300 .645 2017 2022 STL 592 330 .642 1940 1945 NYY 586 327 .642 1935 1940 PHA 585 328 .641 1926 1931 NYY 590 331 .641 1949 1954 NYY 585 329 .640 1932 1937 PHA 582 328 .640 1909 1914 STL 589 332 .640 1939 1944 NYY 589 332 .640 1950 1955 What makes them more remarkable is that they are the most recent team on this list by some seven decades. Every other team listed here played in an eight-team league, not a fifteen-team league.

If we are looking for a guy who is going to come in and break things, remake the entire front office, and implement a system that's roughly 180 degrees opposite from the scout-centric, analytics-phobic approach they were doing before, I have my doubts that we're going to get that from Mike Slater, again, based just on the topline info we all have available to us. I'm not saying Slater would be exactly like Al, but by the same token, I'm also not engaging in the magical thinking that because he's following Al, he will necessarily turn everything upside down and rebuild it all from scratch as an analytics-forward organization competitive on that front with the best in the game. Nothing I have seen in his background, or in that video for that matter, suggests that's much of a possibility. I'm eager to see any evidence to the contrary. That all said, there could also be a certain comfort level Chris Ilitch would feel by hiring a guy who works much the same way as the guy he was publicly pressured to let go, due to the unfortunate circumstance that his moves happened to just not work and he eventually needed to pay the price. Ilitch doesn't seem like the kind of person who will obliterate something that's working poorly and then rebuild it from the ground up into a completely different structure. In that sense, he strikes me as a business conservative. If that's true, that might make Mike Slater one of the early front-runners for the chair as of today.

lol dick morris giving the red hats stiffies with this Synopsis: Dick Morris: The Republicans will win both houses of Congress in 2022 and the resulting shock will force Biden to announce that he's not going to run. That will open the door for other Democratic candidates for president. The ensuing panic among Democratic leaders will lead them to beg Hillary to save the party from the extreme left. It will be Trump versus Hillary all over again and, as in 2016, Trump will win — but this time it will be a resounding victory.

I find it amazing that no one on Earth under the age of 70 has ever lived at the same time as a King of England.

Sure, and we don't know where Slater fits into that equation. He has a scouts background, like Al, so he may be the scouts advocate, like Al, when it comes to discussing player acquisitions. Slater talked in the video about blending scouts and analysts and boiling it all down to a single number. Al had also talked about taking analytics and scouts reports and boiling it down into one list. https://www.mlb.com/tigers/news/tigers-blend-analytics-scouting-roster-moves-c261965660 Based on his topline resume and this video, Slater sounds enough like Al that he could slide right into the GM chair and the ship and its crew will keep humming along with minimum disruption. I can envision Sartori and Menzin, both of whom were hired by Al, pulling for his hire as their last best hope to stay aboard.

What, so the great system Slater talked about where they take the analytics and the scouting number and plug it into a spreadsheet to come up with one big number failed them? Huh.

OK, this is pretty good ... Didn't know where else to put it

Making a bid to leave the interstate …

It wasn’t easy—it almost never is—but Soto had just enough for the save.