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No, thank you. I like Tucker, maybe, for 7-or-8/sub-300 with team options, but definitely not 10+/400+ with player options. Too injured too recently for Sotobucks and Sotoyears.

I love this post except for the final sentence. Harris has not yet been able to establish the limits he will go to in the free agent market to bring top talent aboard. Sure, he didn’t get Soto or Ohtani. But remember, Detroit has never been a top destination for those guys during his tenure. He’s still working on building us up to being at that level, as much as he can. The time has not been right, either in the team he could field around a top tier guy, or in the perception among top tier guys of Detroit as a real destination. I think we’re closer than ever, and maybe Harris makes the move this winter that gets us firmly into that conversation. But we just haven’t been that yet.

I don’t think Bregman would want to have to hit in Comerica Park 81 games a year for the rest of his life. His career slash line here is .242/.309/.475, which runs 17% below his career average. If he has designs to get into the Hall of Fame—and I don’t see why he wouldn’t—he’ll probably want better back nine stats than that.

Murakami is not coming to Detroit anyway, so that works out fine.

I understand the desire many fans have to want eight solid starters, always healthy and strong in every facet of the game for their positions, and five solid bench guys, good enough in all facets to spell the starters for a game or two, or maybe a couple weeks in case of injury. I would like that, too. I’m just not expecting anything like that. Practically no team in history has ever had that.* Players are human, which means they have flaws, including physical flaws that impact their professional careers. Also, baseball is an exceedingly complex game requiring many disparate talents and skills, and it will always be true that the majority of big leaguers will be good in one or a few of those areas and be suboptimal or even bad in the rest. The trick for a team’s general manager and field manager is to assemble a roster that covers well enough all the major facets of the game with enough talent and skills with the highest potential to win, and to deploy them properly and in a timely fashion during games to turn that potential into actual wins. That’s what George Weiss and Casey Stengel did with the Yankees, and what Harry Dalton and Earl Weaver did with the Orioles. Beyond the few Hall of Famers they had were flawed players really good in certain aspects of the game, who they cobbled together into teams that excelled in enough facets to make those franchises perennial winners. Those are the footsteps Harris and Hinch are striving to follow. All they need now are a couple future Hall of Famers to cobble that team of flawed players around. We have one in-house now, at least for the moment. * - I should look up which teams in history came closest to that eight really good regulars/five good bench guys ideal.

I'm not even talking about putting the guy on a pedestal. I'm talking about the top tier of worldwide fame. If Taylor Swift wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. If Tom Hanks wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. If Ronaldo wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. If Barack Obama wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. I could name dozens more, but you get the point. These are all among the most famous people in the world right now. They are better than ratings gold—they are ratings platinum. If you can manage to book them as guests on your show, you get to tout that, the eyeballs roll in, the ratings go up, you get to charge more for commercials—it's just too good for the business, and only a fool passes that up. The President of the United States is, de facto, in the same category. But even without the trappings of the office, Trump himself is in that same category. So if Trump says he wants to come onto your show, there is no way you are saying no. That would be derelict of your responsibility to the business at the very least.

Calling him "dude" is too kind. How is this not de facto evidence that America is not first for him?

That is pretty horrific and you are right to hold ESPN responsible by refusing to consume their streams. That said, I don't blame Pat McAfee at all, regardless of whether he is pro- or anti-Trump, which I have no idea about either way. The fact is, it's not up to a sports pundit to fact-check politicians live on air. But when the president of the united shaysh wants to be interviewed on your network, you simply don't say no. It's kind of no win as far as that goes, and again, I have no idea where McAfee stands on Trump anyway. But the responsibility falls 100% to ESPN for allowing it to go unchecked on their air. As for Trump, it's a huge win for MAGA to get this messaging out on previously virgin media territory. He probably converted thousands of guys to red hats with that interview. Huge customer acquisition win.

Houston is one of the highest payroll teams, and guys like to go where other players are getting paid because that means the team pays. They also have rings in their very recent history, and that's very attractive to players looking for rings of there own. As for Anaheim, like Detroit, they've had to overpay and overpromise to get top tier talent to sign there. They overpaid Rendon to go there (and, as it turns out, he doesn't even like baseball); and they were the only team on the west coast to promise Ohtani he could pitch. They also threw way too much money and years, probably unnecessarily, at Josh Hamilton and Albert Pujols. They also threw way too much money at Justin Upton, Jered Weaver, C.J. Wilson, and Mo Vaughn, and certainly didn't get their money's worth from any of them. If anything, I think they lucked out with Mike Trout already being there. I have long believed he is driven more by being in a comfortable situation toiling in relative quiet than he ever was in having a single-minded focus in winning. I think that deep down, he regarded winning a ring as nice to have, and not a necessity to cement his legacy, and if that's true, I'd bet as he's getting closer to the end, he's starting to rethink that approach. All this said, regardless of location, family atmosphere, and all that, I just don't regard the Angels as being a top destination for top tier free agents at this point in time, especially since none of the contracts I mentioned were signed even within the past decade. As for Detroit: I just don't think many guys, especially latin guys, would choose to come here for eight or ten years at a stretch just because we have decent suburbs, nice weather three months a year, and fishing and hunting up north. In addition to being a city with a decades-long reputation as being a dump, even despite the past couple of years, the organization has in their recent history the act of blowing it all up, and it's hard to get a guy to gamble on committing that many years to come here with that still in the rear-view mirror. Now, that said: I do believe that signing one guy, the right guy, could single-handedly do wonders to turn it around, at least for a little while. Twenty years ago it was the signing of Ivan Rodriguez that jump-started it. Signing Skubal to a long term deal next winter could very well serve the same purpose. If we put our money where our mouth is, then all of a sudden, top tier guys would see that we are serious about spending and contending, and that would instantly make us that much more attractive an option to commit to. But I would be surprised if we managed to do that this winter by signing someone like Kyle Tucker to break that seal. I put the odds against that as being at least 100 to 1.

No we don’t.

This should conclusively demonstrate to everyone once and for all that Trump cares not a whit about actual peace— he cares only about getting the credit for it. So he deliberately puts forward the directive to create peace without details on purpose, leaving those to others to figure out. That way, if the details don’t succeed—if peace doesn’t actually come—Trump can blame the others for it. But if the plan actually works and peace is achieved, Trump can take all the credit for it. You know, a lot like the way red hats view God. 😉 Pretty sweet deal for Trump, eh?

Also, I place "nothing burger" on the same level of argumentation trump card as "you do you".

Newsweek is not the MSM stalwart you remember it once being. Newsweek is to news as Sporting News is to sport.

Which they will blame Democrats for.

It's desperation. The world of explicit institutional preference for white men who profess to be Christias, a world in which everyone else lives to serve them, has just about faded out of view, and that generates a lot of resentment, because it's a world their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents enjoyed, but they don't get to. Trump is the last gasp for that world to make a comeback, and it has, although it doesn't have the kind of staying power red hats wish for. The older red hats may die before the comeback gets extinguished once and for all, and maybe their kids will live to see it linger for a little bit, but their grandkids will read about it and regard it on the same level we do when we read about Jim Crow America.

Sometimes a (usually left-handed hitting) player is so dominant from one side of the plate that teams will overlook how horrific they are from the other side. There are players who can get away with it more than other players. It's easy to overlook for Kurtz. It's harder to overlook for Carpenter. This is also the same principle as a player being worth so many runs and wins as a hitter that teams will practically overlook how much those players strike out.

I'm sure that will solve all the problems related to gambling on baseball.

Despite all that I just posted, I also believe signing Skubal long term would be a huge tipping point for moving Detroit into at least the bottom rung of top destinations, at least for a while. Also, I love Excalibur! HBO and The Movie Channel played the **** out of that movie when we first got cable in the early 80s (on a black and white TV, no less!), and I watched it over and over, to the point which I remember both the lines they delivered and the exact way they delivered them.

The Tigers are simply not on par as a consideration as are the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, or Giants, and Detroit as a city is simply not as attractive a destination as New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Five of those teams have had championships within living memory of ballplayers, who grew up with all of those teams being dominant at one point or another, and the Mets are a NYC team with a huge cultural footprint befitting their location. You can't wish away the huge advantage these teams have in attracting top tier talent. Detroit is also not as attractive a destination as San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas, or Houston, which are all warm-weather cities with very prominent Spanish-speaking communities, as well as being close to offseason homes for a lot of guys (although if they ever wanted to spend as a franchise, non-destination Miami could easily blow all four of those out of the water), so it's easy for their families and long-time friends to travel to watch them play at home. Seattle also has a leg up over Detroit as a destination both for its youthful coolness and its proximity to Japan. Of the remaining destinations, I would say Detroit also firmly lags behind Toronto (recent WS team, Vlad is there); Philadelphia (solid contender on the east coast, lots of superstars already there); and Atlanta (legacy franchise with a recent ring that is also close to home for many guys). Despite their recent run of Central Division titles, I don't think I would include Milwaukee, since beyond playing in a dumpy town just like Detroit, the Brewers are also known to be in the 15th to 20th range in payroll. Speaking of payroll, the 14 teams I have named as destinations are all in the top 15 in payroll. Only the Angels are up there with them, and they are not a destination because players can easily see how they can't win as a team even with Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout. I think the Tigers could be very competitive for second-tier free agents with any of the remaining 16 teams. Players want to go where the money and action is, and they also like to go where there are paid superstars already on long term deals. That last part was Detroit once, but then they famously blew it all up. What top-tier superstar would want to commit to a team that would do something like that?

1988 East German Map of West Berlin

None of The Countries That Bordered Poland In 1989 Exist Today

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/father-speaks-after-family-pepper-sprayed-in-little-village/

Trace it back even further to the election of Reagan in the wake of an ineffectual Carter presidency that itself was supposed to be the moral and ethical antidote to the brazen criminality of the Nixon/Ford run. The whole thing was set in motion at the polls by the Silent Majority still sore that LBJ was such a race traitor.

I'm highlighting this part to remind everyone to be careful what you wish for when you cross your fingers and hope Trump dies.

I don't think "defund the police" was ever a serious movement. First of all, it was never a starve-the-police-of-all-funds-and-then-disband-them movement. The goal was to recognize that a lot of what police do today is really social services, in particular mental health, and that it makes more sense they be handled by people specifically trained for that kind of support, and so, some funding should be shifted from policing into social/mental health services to properly address the problem. Whether the money would still be earmarked for the police and re-expressed into mental health personnel on the force, or shifted away from police departments into mental health departments, was supposed to be immaterial. The point was to stop requiring police to perform services they were not specifically trained for, and to fund the proper performance of these functions by trained professional instead. It's a very reasonable and, I believe, noble approach. Instead, the RWM and their Russian benefactors seized on the unorganized nature of the movement by highlighting the phrase itself and recasting it as "ban all police and let criminals roam free". That's not anything like a brilliant re-interpretation of the phrase because as fruit, it just hung so low, a high-schooler could have come up with it. But the brilliant part was how they were coached to hang the phrase on the entire Democratic Party, everyone in it, and anyone who ever voted for them. And perhaps because of the unorganized nature of the original idea, Democrats could not effectively fight that off, in no small part because they do not have a left-wing media ecosystem with nearly as much reach to help them out of it. I think it's still a great idea to shift responsibility and its commensurate funding for social and metal health services away from police and toward trained and educated professionals who specialize in them, but the damage from that phrase was so total, we may never see that happen in any of our lifetimes, even you young guys. Given the MAGA takeover of the nature of governing (i.e., ruling) nationwide, it seems more likely we would see police be tasked with solving mental health crises by simply shooting the people involved dead, than we would be to see a shift in responsibility for mental health issues encountered in the street from cops to trained professionals. Neither one will happen, of course, but given the current climate, one is at slightly more likely than the other.