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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.

Yup. That kind of checks out ...

Can you provide any examples of vitriol, which my dictionary defines as “cruel or bitter criticism”?

Probably because they do not want the way they live to have to change even a little. They’re conservatives.

Last night, one of my softball teammates, who occupies some mythical “well-informed middle” on the whole thing (as though anyone well-informed would form no opinion on any of this), said he was unimpressed by the first hearing because he said we didn’t learn anything new. I mentioned how we learned that the violence was all pre-planned, and how Trump pushed the fraud claim even after he knew he had lost, and my teammate said well, we already knew this, didn’t we? What’s new about that? He had me for a minute because, yes, this had all been talked about for the last year and a half, ever since the Capitol attack happened, and it really does seem like old news—until I came to realize that the big difference now is that all this was just Twitter speculation before, whereas now, we have actual sworn testimony to all of this, which carries the imprimatur of legal truth. That’s the big difference. Once I shared this thought with him, he had an “aha” moment about it.

I think if they lay out all this evidence and then fail to indict Trump, basically making this whole thing a political stunt, he will become more popular with the red hats than ever, since it will show that he is indeed the most powerful person in the world, bulletproof and unable to be taken down by the woke radical left mob, and that he is the true North Star of the future of the world. It might even radicalize a few current moderate right-of-center conservatives who might look at all this pomp and circumstance, see how nothing actually happened, and conclude that we really do live in a Deep State Democrat tyranny that uses its power to punish their opponents politically. If Trump comes out of this unscathed, it’s not just that democracy would die. It’s also that the very idea of democracy will be completely discredited.

It looks for all the world that Ginsburg is hedging his bets that Trump might come out of this a winner, and he wants to reduce his sentence for treason when Trump does win.

This is not unlike the same psychology that leads to poor people playing the numbers, or scratch-offs, or convenience store slot machines, or those machines that look like they’re gonna slide a whole bunch of quarters to you if you put in just one more. Just risk a little money and you could hit it big.

Ginsburg just basically said on CNN that we have to hold Trump and his campaign accountable, not for the fraud, apparently, but basically for not accepting the decision of the courts and for trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. But Ginsburg also believes that the consequence should be, not an indictment and a conviction in any court of law, but some realization about “their role in history” and how they’re absolutely “torched” about it, and then Congress should “take a look” at legislation to “ensure nothing like this happens again”. So, basically, according to Ginsburg, any penalty for Trump should not happen now, but in some undefined future, and not anything in real terms, but something in ethereal terms, and presumably only after he’s dead and won’t be around to give a shit about any of this anymore. For the good of the country, I presume?

Trump raised almost $250 million, $150 million in the first week after the election, on claims of election fraud that they knew to be false. That sounds like fraud itself to me!