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Three position players pitched to preserve a nine-man bullpen. Welcome to Baseball 2022.

Don’t know if you’re missing anything, per se, but you might be forgetting that local sports media rely on access to the team, their players, their coaches, and their officials, to produce their product. Go against that as a beat reporter and you lose that access. For proof of that, see Fenech, Anthony.

I was just coming in here to ask that!

Would you keep Al?

This is becoming a more common adjective to describe the broadcast.

Not you or me.

If they were to fire Hinch and keep Al, that would eliminate the last remaining shred of hope I have for the future of this organization. I really doubt that would happen, but that does seen to be what a few folks here would like to see.

Part of the reason Candelario, Baez, and TORK! are not getting batted balls to fall in is that they aren’t hitting the ball hard. Statcast has them all clustered around 25th percentile for hard hit percentage. Schoop is truly the unlucky one: 61st hard hit percentile, still low BABIP. I saw this first-hand in Tampa on a screaming line out to short. The look on Schoop’s face … Haase doesn’t have a Statcast percentile, but his 31.3% hard hit rate on Baseball Reference doesn’t pair up very well with the American League average of 39.5%, never mind his own 47.9% from last year.

One more thing about roster stability: The current team with the greatest roster stability (as it were) is the Twins, who have five guys on the team right now who are in their eighth season together with that franchise. The five guys are: Jorge Polanco in his ninth year; and Max Kepler, Miguel Sano, Tyley Duffey, and Byron Buxton, all in their eighth. I would never have recalled in an unaided way that some of those guys have been with that team for eight years now!

Thinking about those 1960s-1970s Tiger teams, maybe a couple of months ago, and how long so many of those guys stayed together with the franchise, I wondered how unique that situation was in history, so many guys playing on the same team for so many years. So I put together a spreadsheet of the teams in history who had the most players who were together on their team for a lot of years. The 1972 Tigers had nine guys on the team who had been together for nine entire seasons. The nine guys were: Kaline (on the team since 1953); Cash (1960); McAuliffe (1960); Gates Brown (1963); Freehan (1963); Horton (1963); Lolich (1963); Northrup (1964); and Stanley (1964). That is an incredible run of roster stability for a single franchise. That is tied for the most in history, tied with ... well, the 1973 Tigers. Same nine guys, only now on the team for 10 entire seasons together. The next most guys together nine years on the same team is seven, shared by the 1974 Tigers (McAuliffe went to Boston before the season and Northrup was traded midway through), along with the 1942 Yankees, 1956 Dodgers, 1971 Tigers (surprise!), 1980 Dodgers, 1984 Orioles, 1984 Royals, and 1985 Orioles. Those '73 Tigers had the most guys together for 10 entire seasons, of course, but they also had the most guys together for 11 entire seasons (along with the '74 squad). The '74 Tigers had six guys together for 12 entire seasons, which is the most; the 1975 Tigers had five. The 1975 Tigers is the only team in history to have as many as four guys on the team together for 13 whole seasons. Eleven different teams had three guys together for 14 whole seasons, of which the 1973 and 1990 Tigers are two. The team that had the same three guys for the most entire seasons was the 2011 Yankees: Jeter, Posada, and Rivera played together for 16 years. And the most entire seasons two guys played on the same squad together was 19. One was the 2013 Yankees (Jeter and Rivera). The other team? The 1995 Tigers. Guess who. 😁

I can see how organization of religious precepts into easy-to-understand and -follow pieces can be a helpful guide for the individual who works best within a predefined structure. That's kind of how I saw it back in the days I was practicing Catholic. They provided the structure and it worked for me. Organized religion, as an incorporated body, strikes me as basically a bureaucracy mostly concerned with issues like rules and regulations and planning and growth and marketing and revenue and lobbying and damage control and all those other worldly concerns that incorporated bodies are created to deal with. That's also how I thought of the Catholic Church even at that time. I was listening to a podcast discussing sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention and they pointed out how religion is especially ripe for predators, whether sexual or financial or whatever, in part because the structure of any church is most concerned with preserving the appearance of its moral authority as a force for good, which revelations of widespread predatory behavior would undermine. So accusations of abuse get swept aside, or worse, the accuser themself is accused of being the Satanic force in the story, for their efforts to, I guess, disrupt or upend or even destroy the church. Churches want nothing to do with confronting accusations of abuse within their ranks. But another part, which I hadn't considered before and find fascinating, is the idea of what sexual predators understand about churches. They think of churches as being "soft targets", because they understand that there's a lot of focus in churches, evangelical churches especially, on repentance and forgiveness, and that, coupled with this loose structure that is at the core of the SBC, has really allowed a lot of these predators to abuse, repent, and then abuse again, sometimes at another church just down the street.

I assumed he meant vitriol in this specific thread, versus the board in general, and I was interested in him providing an example of that, because I'm not sure I'm seeing it. You could probably point out something you think you see, but I asked him because he brought up the idea.

Sparky Anderson and Bobby Cox. #21 is Whitey Herzog.

I get the playoff crapshoot element as well as you do, but it's really only 50/50 when the teams are evenly-matched, and those teams were not evenly matched. It's true that any team can beat any other team on any given day. Even the Tigers beat the Yankees in one game in 2003, but it wasn't a 50-50 proposition every time they matched up. Just flipping a weighted coin based on Pythag, as a blunt way to determine how teams matched up to one another, and holding other things equal, the 1987 Tigers had a 61-39 chance to beat the Twins each game, and the 2006 Tigers had a 58-42 chance to beat the Cardinals each game. You may strongly disagree with looking at it this way, but this basically why I was disappointed the better Tigers team lost in each case.

There is something I did learn this year, though: Gameday audio (radio-only) is a good minute or so behind MLB.tv (with radio overlay). So when I am out on my bike and I want to listen to Dan and Jim, I will put on MLB.tv to hear the radio overlay to stay closer to the live action.

You sure about this? Because I have been able to pause Gameday audio (on my phone) to synch up with TV broadcasts pretty well. Or are you talking about something else here?

I was very disappointed by 1987, in part because the Tigers were the far better team (the Twins were outscored that season!), and in part because I had never seen a Tigers playoff team not win the World Series before. I was disappointed by the 2006 World Series for the same better-team reason, and disappointed by 2013 because that was the best team of that whole run, and in general we outplayed the Red Sox in that ALCS.

Here are the slowest career starts for Hall of Famers during the post-WWII era, based strictly on OPS (OPS+ is not available to this query). Vast majority of these guys went into the Hall specifically for their hitting. I had to blur out a few guys who went into the Hall for their managing. The benchmark I used was first 81 career games, minimum 250 plate appearances. Look who's at the "top" of this list.

Wow, I did not realize Trout had so many minor league ABs by age 19!

😏

At age 19. At age 20 he slashed .326/.399/.564 with 30 bombs, 49 steals (only 5 CS!), a 168 OPS+, and 10.5 WAR.

Yemen is second to the US in terms of private gun ownership? They must really love Jesus there.

Contract on America, baby.

Whatever his "personal matters" may be, it's important enough for him to forgo his paycheck for it. This is a very 2022 Tigers thing to happen to us.