2026 Exhibition Spring Games

[Cruzer1]

15 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

This DR team is not only an All-Star team. It’s an All-Star team culled from both leagues. I think they’ll cake walk-through the WBC.

 

The USA team is loaded at bat and pitching.

[monkeytargets39]

I’d be fine if Hurter and Hanifee didn’t make the team.  Go get Danny Coulombe.

[Tiger337]

4 minutes ago, monkeytargets39 said:

I’d be fine if Hurter and Hanifee didn’t make the team.  Go get Danny Coulombe.

Either they both make the team or neither makes the team. They go together.  

[monkeytargets39]

6 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Either they both make the team or neither makes the team. They go together.  

This eras Tram and Lou

[IdahoBert]

16 minutes ago, Cruzer1 said:

The USA team is loaded at bat and pitching.

Yeah, I was thinking of that and it’s probably true but looking at that DR team they just seem frightening. It might actually be interesting to see how this plays out.

[IdahoBert]

By the way, the Tigers play Panama at Joker Marchant tomorrow (Wed. March, 4) with Flaherty as the starting pitcher. AND… they play the Dominican Republic again in the DR w/ Burch Smith starting!

So it’s a split squad day and one of these depleted teams is playing the DR All-Star team.

The game against the Dominican Republic will be broadcast on TV at 2:05 EST and have a Tigers radio feed but the game at Joker Marchant starting at 1:05 EST has no live coverage.

Thursday is an off day. 

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, monkeytargets39 said:

I’d be fine if Hurter and Hanifee didn’t make the team.  Go get Danny Coulombe.

Today's pitching is more evidence that in baseball, quantity is pretty meaningless. Ten guys who can't get out majors leaguers are still worse to have than one who can.

[chasfh]

9 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Today's pitching is more evidence that in baseball, quantity is pretty meaningless. Ten guys who can't get out majors leaguers are still worse to have than one who can.

And yet teams still need more than ten guys on the pitching staff. No chance they’d be able to reduce a pitching staff to one. In this game, them’s the breaks. The important thing is not that teams have to figure out how to boil down their staff to only the one guy who can get out major leaguers so he can pitch every inning in a season, but to ensure that their ten guys who can’t get out major leaguers does at least a marginally better job at it than all the other teams’ ten guys who can’t get out major leaguers. That’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it’ll always be.

Edited 6 hours ago by chasfh

[diaspora04]

18 hours ago, IdahoBert said:

I want to reiterate that I do not “hate“ the WBC, even though I’m not interested in it in the least bit. But one of the things that makes me roll my eyes is how all the announcers are making a big deal about Skubal pitching “only once” in the WBC and explaining it because “he’s looking at a big payday.“

Maybe he sees it as an intrusion into his usual spring training regimen and that he’s actually focused on the Tigers just because that’s what he does. Full stop.

Although he probably wouldn’t look at it in this manner, because it’s the way I’m looking at it, it’s a corporate profit maximization scheme. Why sacrifice your health for the sake of a corporate spectacle? Of course, everything is a corporate spectacle for profit maximization, but this just strikes me as an egregious version of it.

I still blame the WBC for breaking Miggy for essentially the rest of his career in 2017.

[diaspora04]

11 hours ago, IdahoBert said:

By the way, the Tigers play Panama at Joker Marchant tomorrow (Wed. March, 4) with Flaherty as the starting pitcher. 

 

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

No chance they’d be able to reduce a pitching staff to one.

that's not what the post is about, but nevermind

[NorthWoods]

12 hours ago, Cruzer1 said:

The USA team is loaded at bat and pitching.

True.  And we invented baseball, some other country beating us at our own game would be like someone beating Canada at hockey......

[chasfh]

23 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

that's not what the post is about, but nevermind

That's fine, although I just don't think "kids these days" really applies here. Pitchers weren't necessarily better as a cohort when we were eleven years old. They may actually be far better as a cohort today than at any time in the history of baseball.

[Tiger337]

16 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That's fine, although I just don't think "kids these days" really applies here. 

Is that what he meant?  

My guess is he was talking about drafting hitters by quality and pitchers by quantity 

[gehringer_2]

4 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Is that what he meant?  

My guess is he was talking about drafting hitters by quality and pitchers by quantity 

what I meant was more along the lines that in baseball, when you have a hole to fill, bringing in 10 stiffs on the hope one of them is a diamond in the rough is generally not great strategy - the failure rate in baseball is so high that quantity does not  insure there is any quality to be found in a sample.

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

what I meant was more along the lines that in baseball, when you have a hole to fill, bringing in 10 stiffs on the hope one of them is a diamond in the rough is generally not great strategy - the failure rate in baseball is so high that quantity does not  insure there is any quality to be found in a sample.

Like third base for most of Tigers history?

[IdahoBert]

4 hours ago, diaspora04 said:

I still blame the WBC for breaking Miggy for essentially the rest of his career in 2017.

What happened? I don’t think I know about this. 

[IdahoBert]

So far in the March 4, game of the Tigers against Panama in Lakeland, Flaherty pitched three innings of shutout ball and struck out three and had a low pitch count of only 38 and Carpenter has hit a home run.

[diaspora04]

11 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

What happened? I don’t think I know about this. 

He injured his back.  Obviously age was also quickly catching up to him at that point in his career, but it seemed like he was never the same after that injury.

Edited 46 minutes ago by diaspora04
fix typos

[gehringer_2]

2 minutes ago, diaspora04 said:

He injured his back.  Obviously age was also quickly catch up on him at that point in his career, but it seemed like he was never the same after that injury.

Certainly didn't help but is was mostly his right knee that did him in. He simply couldn't drive off it in the last several seasons so he was getting by hitting only above the waist. You could see that once in a while the knee would feel better and take the weight and you could tell because he would pick up his left foot on his swing, the rest of the time he was batting flat footed. On those rare occasions he could still drive the ball.

[Motor City Sonics]

5 hours ago, diaspora04 said: