IdahoBert

It makes me more optimistic to hear that Hinch holds Bregman in high regard. I wasn’t sure if that was the case after all the bad stuff that happened in Houston. I thought there might be something lingering in the air from back then I like Hinch and I trust him, even though I’m only sold on Hinch the same way I’m sold on breathing, thinking both are pretty good things. I don’t have solid reasons to back up my support for what he does. He “looks” like he knows what he’s doing. I’m sort of like one of the kids on D*ck Clark’s old TV show American Bandstand in the ‘60s that would say stuff like "It's got a good beat and it’s easy to dance to.” If Hinch thinks Bregman is a good dance partner, then good.

Eh, what do I know to have an opinion on Bregman… not much. But I think he would only come here as a last resort. I can’t see the Tigers offering him something better than the Astros did which he refused. The ballpark isn’t good for him. His HR numbers in a ballpark that I think should play to his abilities better than Comerica have not been outstanding in his last three full seasons. And he walked half as much this last season than he has before. When the Reds traded Frank Robinson to the Orioles they said they did it because he was “an old 30” and they were wrong. I think there’s decent reason to believe this might be true of Bregman. The club’s existing dynamics also seem at variance with his presence in it. The Tigers Way and all that. And I’m also not sure that he and Hinch have a kissy face every day is Christmas kind of relationship that makes up for everything else. I think he would only come here if he were desperate or if he truly believed this was a club with a future that it would be fun to play for, but I don’t put a lot of stake in those sorts of emotional intangibles. The truth be told he probably should’ve accepted that offer from the Astros.

Just saw that. Bumped into him when I lived in Tucson and attended Cleveland Indians spring training there. Bumped into Joe Garagiola too, and another time at the same ballpark sat behind James Garner, who was just enjoying a minor-league baseball game and he was exactly like you’d expect. The guy was the master of the “all you have to do is act naturally“ form of acting.

Getting back to delivering newspapers, in the late 1960s I had one for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in my small town of Auburn, Indiana and I would get up at 1:30 in the morning and deliver my 140 papers on my bike and get back to sleep by 3-3:30 AM and never had a hard time going back to sleep, even though I drank a Pepsi I would listen to a transistor radio and I remember hearing live just as I was leaving the house one morning that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and I ran back into the house and woke up my parents to tell them. When it was -20° it was tough to be doing this job, or when it was raining hard. On Sundays when I had 220 papers to deliver my dad would drive me around and we wouldn’t get up until 5:30 AM or six, and when we finished, we would go to the grocery store and get cheese danishes.

I made $1.60 an hour minimum wage for a summer job in 1969 when I worked at the newspaper plant in my small town of Auburn Indiana. It was hot and dangerous work. And no, I didn’t love it or feel grateful for it. I melted down the Linotype cold type used on printing presses into 50 lb. bars that could then be fed back into the Linotypes. (by the next year they switched to offset printing in these machines were eliminated). It was one of the few times in my life when I was really ripped after lifting those bars all day long all summer long.

On MLB yesterday when I clicked on it and scanned the words “return” and “Flaherty” adjacent to each other I gasped thinking “Oh my God they pulled the trigger on something big and surprising and re-signed Flaherty! They’ve become BIG SPENDAHS!” No, they didn’t. It’s not like I ever wanted or expected them to. But I guess I learned that I harbor some of that “Evelyn Wood Speed Reading“ technique inside me where you grasp an entire paragraph at a glance instead of reading word for word.

I found one thing that said Rodriguez was born in 2016 and would be eligible for the MLB draft in 2038. I think that might be wrong.

Can anybody tell me anything about Cris Rodriguez that isn’t behind a paywall or about somebody with a similar name?

I know, right? I’m no real football fan by any means, but I would really like to see the Lions run the bases more aggressively in this match.

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.