IdahoBert

Being an early out can happen to team. Just ask the Seattle Mariners.

Minus the music traditions, and the cars, and countless other things, and whereas there is a South Philly, there is no South Detroit.

Lynch spent the most formative years of his childhood in Boise where I now live between 1955 and 1960. I sometimes take a walk past his old house just for the fun of it and imagine what it was like when he set off a pipe bomb in the city pool across the street and how he’d roam around with his friends in the foothills and nearly drown in the canals that crisscross much of Boise. He talks about it in the HBO documentary “the art life.“

As an interesting aside the film maker David Lynch spent a good part of his early 20s in Philadelphia and had this to say about it: “Yes, Philadelphia is horrible, but in a very interesting way. There were places there that had been allowed to decay, where there was so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world. It was fear, but it was so strong, and so magical, like a magnet, that your imagination was always sparking in Philadelphia. I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I'm off into the darkness somewhere.” — David Lynch

We are living through the footballization of all sports programming. Everything is being reduced to Cub Scout virility rites re-imagined as combat between “real men,” and an appreciation for the graceful nuances of the game are trivialized to base spectacles because that’s what “the public” wants, allegedly.

He missed the first month of the season due to lower back strain so it’s too bad we didn’t try to trade for him. He would’ve fit in really well.

This three-game series is going to be tough. The three starting pitchers for Philadelphia the Tigers are facing are really good and used to going deep into games. And even though the White Sox just now took a series from the Phillies in Chicago, at home the Phillies have one of the very best records in baseball. The Tigers really have their work cut out for them here.

Now that the dust has settled overnight, the take away is that the people running this club really believe in the process they have set in motion, that the successes they’ve gained are not incidental, and that they’re not sacrificing the future for short term gains to please either low information fans or the many existing versions of the sports commentariat whether it be corporate or more casual. Other teams didn’t want to do the Detroit Tigers any favors, they were prepared for this, and the Tigers didn’t blink.

I like what Harris is doing in general, and we misunderstand him if we think he is undertaking this mission in Detroit as anything less than a vocation and a challenge to do something great where it’s not expected. If he were interested only in fame and money, he probably wouldn’t have come to Detroit and to an organization so long struggling. People who think he’s some kind of pris who will flee to the highest bidder for wine and cheese parties elsewhere really underestimate his seriousness. He’s not done yet and he proved that today whether any of us like the way he did it or not. It’s a privilege to have a front row seat in this unexpected spectacle that began to reap dividends after the deadline last year.

I’m disinterested in the opinions of the industrial sports media complex (to borrow and redefine a concept from President Eisenhower). It thrives on splash, attitude, big money, big stars, big talk… etc., etc.. It’s impatient and doing anything based on process that requires time to evolve is inimical to their model. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with what happened regarding the Tigers today. I’m not but I get it. They’re doing things differently. On purpose. I guess now we’ll see how it pans out.

I don’t know if I care all that much about what the players were saying, that they wanted Suarez, etc.. I look upon the players as athletes, not as masterminds of strategy and organization building. But ignoring their humbly conceived wishes seems like a double-edged sword too. It’s AJ‘s job to sell it.

I was wondering about the six man rotation thing. Maybe the organization’s x-ray specs have “seen something” in Morton they can fix.

Seems like it.

I’m glad that Johnny and Daniella aren’t expected to talk about this off the top of their heads right now. It’s a good thing it’s an off day.

Are they gonna use him in long relief?

Is this like a prank? Is Ashton Kutcher going to jump out of a Cadillac Escalade to laugh at us?

Oh, you beat me to it by seconds.

I guess they’re going for that “veteran presence” thing.

So was Ohtani acquired for the entire Seawolves roster?

In an hour and 21 minutes this will all be over and we’ll wake up and we’ll be back in black-and-white in Kansas and we’ll realize it had all been just a dream.

This is good news. Right now I’m just hoping we don’t get swept in Philadelphia.

It’s too bad there isn’t a game today because if there were a game at 6 PM Eastern when the trade deadline has passed, Tigers Live on FanDuel would be on the air and it’d be entertaining to witness the coverage of the - thus far - underwhelming though probably predictable results.

There’s times where I feel like I’m a street urchin in a Dickens novel, shivering in the cold and peering through the windows of the rich people’s homes, watching them dine and celebrate a Christmas dinner of roast pheasant and razzberry dressing.

Thx. I guess I could’ve just looked it up. Which I eventually did.