IdahoBert

Deep thoughts with Jack Handy.

This. It’s not only good advice, it’s grounded in reality. I think this is how the organization is approaching things and they haven’t really done anything this off-season at variance with this statement. When Chris looked like a dancing leprechaun being sprayed with beer in the locker room, he had to be thinking “what we did worked.” I think the Tigers will stick with what’s worked and they will stray from this path only occasionally.

This is true. Fetch is not easily lassoed.

Two things. First, I have nothing against Austin Jackson, but I haven’t thought about him once in 10 years and I don’t know how much I actually have to infer from what he said. I mean, it’s not like he’s Joe Falls or something. <rimshot> Second, the reality of the situation is that the club probably doesn’t want JV blocking one of the new guys who might otherwise be having a breakout season. Someone else already mentioned the “blocking“ issue and I think that’s a salient insight. An adjacent issue is the whole camaraderie band of brothers thing which is a really fetch thing, but there’s not a lot of room for that or for nostalgia to be in play in this situation. He’s a grown man. The Tigers made their decision and he made his and that’s that.

A quote I grabbed off the Internet from the podcast — "Verlander... he puts his headphones on from the time he opened his car door to the time he got in... It's not intimidating, just more of like not as approachable as a guy like Miggy... The more I got to know Ver, we developed a coll little bond but Miggy was more approachable, but he was a jokester.” I’m wondering if JV is like this all the time or only on the days when he pitches and he’s hyper focused on staying in “the zone.”

I don’t have anything against Notre Dame. I grew up in Indiana and my parents lived in South Bend for much of their lives before they moved to the small town I grew up in so rooting for Notre Dame was never hard for me. A lot of ordinary people in South Bend, though, saw Notre Dame students as bratty, entitled rich kids, and while my parents agreed with that assessment they were tolerant of my childish enthusiasm for the team that made they themselves roll their eyes. But in the late 1950s and early 60s, when I became aware of sports, the befouling temper tantrums of Woody Hayes rubbed me the wrong way so I always rooted for Michigan against Ohio State — even though I didn’t technically have any skin in the game — and I will easily root for Notre Dame against Ohio State.

I don’t have any real skin in this contest and I don’t much like any team from Texas but anyone who beats Ohio State is OK to me.

At least they were able to contain the Sunset Fire in LA so my daughter and her fiancé can return to their apartment in West Hollywood. But they’re not going back until the air quality improves so I’m happy for them but feel really bad for all the other people that are suffering through this and have lost everything.

I just discovered that my daughter and her fiancé who had to flee their apartment because of the smoke in West Hollywood discovered one hour after they left that evacuation orders had been given because the hills 1 mile away are a blaze and it’s headed their direction. These dwellings were built in the 1920s and Charlie Chaplin‘s place is right next-door. They are devastated that they might lose everything although my daughter and her fiancé made sure that the wedding dress and the fiancé’s suit were already in San Diego where the wedding will take place in October. My daughter left her car behind because they thought there was no chance of the fire reaching them. Now she’s really worried about it.

My daughter and her fiancé live in West Hollywood and they have just left for San Diego. Not because West Hollywood is in danger but because the air quality is so bad and the fiancé‘s family are pretty well off and they have a place to stay at in San Diego but all the ordinary people are screwed. And I suppose that when Trump becomes president he will not allow federal aid to go to Los Angeles just out of spite.

A friend of mine asked if it would be good for him to watch it with his grandchildren, and I had to say no when I remembered the stripper pole part. And then it depends on how big of a stick someone has up their butt they might not like the idea of creatures made out of snow with boobs.

Another delay of game for the Vikings

Wow Gibbs!

Sack

I’m getting bored of waiting for something to happen. I watched the dreamy and inventive slap stick animated B/W 2022 silent film ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ on Prime yesterday and it was not boring. It was independently financed for $150,000 and everybody’s wearing beaver, raccoon and bunny suits and the graphics are like in silent films. It’s 1hr 42min long and it never drags. It even contains Rube Goldberg chain-reaction machines. And yes, there’s buzz saws and snow.

Reading all you talk about this makes me sentimental because I was radically disconnected back then from the team that had meant so much to me as a child. That 1975 season was a tough one, and living in the dramatic mountains and exotic desert landscape of Tucson, Arizona — and being a 23 year-old man — made the team easy for me to ignore because I had other things on my plate at the time. I basically missed out on Sutherland and pretty much everybody else of that time and felt no sense of lack in having little contact with the club of my childhood. 1968 had made my cup runneth over and baseball had done just about as much for me as it could ever possibly do. For one thing, I was 2000 driving miles away from Detroit and my only real way of contact with the team was through reading box scores, which with that 19-game losing streak, gave me an incentive to ignore the team. There was no way I could ever hear Ernie intoning on the radio and have him pluck my heart strings. I would go to Tucson Toro AAA PCL games wearing a Tigers cap and people would come up to me and sincerely offer condolences as only one real fan to another real fan can do without being snarky about it. It’s that whole W.P. Kinsella relation to the game that many of us have. The ballpark was surrounded by mountains and filled with palm trees, and it seemed like a paradise standing in stark contrast to how bad the Tigers were. I’m glad some of you were actual fans at the time and that you found sustenance in the midst of the heartbreak. There’s something noble about it. It’s like a vastly scaled down version of raising the flag on Iwo Jima and I’m glad some of you were doing that.

Whoop whoop!

Are you talking about the part where when he was on first base Cabrera would josh around with him and say “You should come and join the Tigers and be on a good team.”

Afraid not. I’ve pretty much exhausted my repertoire. Aside from Charlie’s three home runs in Chicago, being at the fifth game of the World Series in ‘68 and seeing Norm Cash hit one of his four homers over the right field roof at Tiger Stadium on one of those bat or ball days when I was a kid, everybody else here has seen a ton more games in Detroit than I have and I am envious. You have no idea how envious I really am.

Regarding Charlie Maxwell, on July 29, 1962 my dad’s Elks Club drove all of us kids from Auburn, Indiana in a rented school bus to Chicago to see a doubleheader vs. the Yankees, where the Sox’s player Charlie “Paw Paw” Maxwell hit three home runs in the split. I clearly remember him hitting at least one in each game and of my dad remarking upon it but I guess I lost interest and didn’t realize he’d actually hit three because I was 10 years old and I had to pee the whole time so my attention was somewhat scattered. I did get to see Mantle and Maris, which was a big deal although neither of them did anything memorable aside from batting practice, but I was pretty disappointed that my first game was not at Tiger Stadium and some woman sitting on the first base side constantly ringing a loud bell was extremely annoying, especially because I had to pee.

OK, I wondered about that because Hinch made a big deal about attitude at times and there has been talk about the clubhouse mentality or whatever you want call it changing if guys come in who are full of themselves and don’t mesh with the attitudinal gears already in play. I know there’s a tendency to think that something like this can’t be measured so it’s of no significance, but we’ve all been in situations where things just work better if there is a shared mentality.

Do you mean functionally, as parts related to each other, or as esprit de corps?

I just saw a Newsweek article gushing about it.

Gleyber Torres was only 17 years old in 2014 when I saw him playing for the Boise Hawks in the Northwest League as a part of the Chicago Cubs organization. He was the youngest player on the team, and he looked more refined than everybody else playing. He actually looked like a major league player in the field. At that level of play, you simply hold your breath when a ball player throws the ball to first base since you expect them to throw wild or bounce it and he was right on the money. He was honestly breathtaking for this level of play. I don’t know about his general deficiencies as a major league player but this move still makes me happy.