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Well, this is healthy ...

Changed my mind. It's great. 😏

Late merge FTW! 🦆🦆🦆

The best part is that 1,500 years ago, he would have been four feet nine.

Flip side of this, though, is that Soto has been much better since June 19: 10.1 innings in 11 games, 14 strikeouts vs only three walks, 0.87 ERA, 1.86 FIP, and, if it matters, six saves. So if we can luck dealing with an organization that's into recency and doesn't dig too deeply behind the numbers, maybe we could unlock a decent get for him. Maybe the Phillies, who are on the bubble.

Three walks in 3-2/3 is not good.

Violence doesn't count unless it's perpetrated on the streets by BLM and Antifa, and according to their media, with zero evidence presented, that's exactly what we are awash in.

I'd be very surprised (and delighted) if we got even this good an offer for Soto.

Hader's not the Crew's #1 reliever anymore, but he does have an extra year of control that Taylor Rogers does not. It'll be interesting to see what the Padres see in Hader that the Brewers are missing. Apparently that extra year is more important to the Padres than the Brewers. Off the bat, this looks like a pretty decent swap for both sides.

It's pretty well reported how big a hockey fan Baby Doc is, to the point in which he plays in an adult league. No reporting on what the level of his baseball fandom is, but I gotta believe if he were as much a fan of baseball as he is of hockey, we'd be hearing a lot more about that in reporting about him. You might be right in that it's all the same to him, in that he regards his Detroit Tigers business unit in the same way he regards his real estate or parking business units, but that would be the wrong way to look at a business unit like the Tigers, since they have a public profile—practically a public trust—unlike any other of his other business units, including the pizza. The owner of a major sports franchise should not be treating their team in that way, in which profit trumps quality, because it is a de facto betrayal of that public trust. Now, I don't know for certain whether this situation applies to Baby Doc's ownership of the Tigers, but if we were to learn that he's not even an honest fan of his own team, let alone a fan of baseball itself, and as such he won't do the investment necessary to maintain that public trust and reward our fandom with honest efforts to put a quality product on the field, simply because he's still making a profit off the awful stewardship of the franchise—then why bother being a fan of the team at all? I myself am not at that point quite yet, but man, even the idea coming up at all ...

Maybe it's a case of, given how much money teams make from sources off the field and that are fixed—e.g., advertising, local and national broadcast. licensing, merchandising, digital—any marginal revenue they might make off investing in the product to get better would be so marginal that for owners who aren't particularly concerned about whether the team wins on the field, it doesn't make sense to them to do so. This could be especially true of teams that make up a relatively minor line item for the overall business, such as the Detroit Tigers (estimated revenue ~$268MM) in relation to all of LCE (estimated revenue ~$8,500MM). I add "might" because, as the reporting goes, they just put a quarter billion dollars into players to field a quality product, and instead they just got worse.

If the owner of our favorite baseball team isn't a baseball fan himself, then what are we doing here?

And that year would have been 2020.

I do wonder whether Avila’s front office and Hinch’s staff are on the same page, even if Avila did hire Hinch. Avila still has guys from the old managerial regime doing special scouting assignments for him, e.g., Leyland and Chadd and Pleis doing that one trip to the high school showcase just prior to the draft, and it’s pretty well known that Leyland still hangs around in the role of Avila Whisperer. Leyland’s baseball methods are not only very different from those Hinch subscribes to, they downright clash with each other. So the organization might be disintegrating within because of, or at least parallel to, Machiavellian moves being made behind the scenes by people jockeying for positions of influence. I don’t know that this is the case, but it is plausible enough to speculate on.

It is true to not everyone, even those born into a tycoon’s family, is cut out to be a top-level executive. To be successful at it, a TLE has to occasionally make hard decisions for the good of the business that affect people’s livelihoods and even reputations; sometimes, they make brutal decisions that cost the jobs or investments of thousands of people all at once; and still others make unethical decisions that are wildly profitable for them that necessarily impoverish or even destroy others. To be successful at being a TLE, you have to be comfortable making decisions like those, or at least be able to live with them. Maybe Baby Doc ins’t exactly that guy. No idea, just building on the topic.

I also believe it’s already been said that no coaches are getting fired during the season, since there’s nobody else waiting in the wings who’s any better anyway.

It might also be that when a high-profile business unit is still turning a profit regardless of how terrible they’re performing, it does not create much of an incentive to clean house.

I do wonder whether Tigers coaching has anything to do with his step back on fielding. As with pitching and hitting, I would bet that the defensive coaching varies from team and team, and that while some teams may have coaches that can effectively detect issues in someone’s approach to fielding and correct them, other teams may be well behind on that. I don’t know whether that’s the Tigers’ case, but it does make me wonder.

Which is why ...

I don’t agree. Bet you a toonie.

Assuming the Tigers remain hard on this approach, seeing as how Soto is the best reliever on the team basically only in the scaled eyes of the top of the front office, and is no better than fourth-best in just about everyone else’s eyes, Soto ain’t going nowhere.

They will—after August 2.

Three more years.

Because pitchers makes errors while they are fielding, not while they are pitching.

Fun fact: Rodney never did this, but widening out one of the qualifiers from pitcher’s own error to giving up at least one unearned run, Law accomplished what had been done only 81 other times since 1901. The only other Tigers pitcher to accomplish this was Bill Sherrer in 1986. The most recent 31 are screenshot below. Click the link for the rest. https://stathead.com/tiny/lXIH0 More fun facts: Four guys did it twice. One of them was Roger Craig, who in 1984 was Bill Scherrer’s pitching coach. Derek was not even the first Law to do this. Vern Law did it first.