Tiger Injuries

[Sports_Freak]

No team can have enough depth to cover this many injuries. Making a list...who am I missing? I'm sure there has to be a couple more;

Jobe
JV
Melton
Olson
Mize
Skubal

Carpenter
Baez
Torres
Meadows

[gehringer_2]

5 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

No team can have enough depth to cover this many injuries. Making a list...who am I missing? I'm sure there has to be a couple more;

Jobe
JV
Melton
Olson
Mize
Skubal

Carpenter
Baez
Torres
Meadows

Vest, Brieske

Edited Sunday at 09:46 PM by gehringer_2

[Edman85]

Major League:

Javier Baez

Kerry Carpenter

Gleyber Torres

Casey Mize

Connor Seabold

Tarik Skubal

Will Vest

Beau Brieske

Bailey Horn

Jackson Jobe

Parker Meadows

Troy Melton

Reese Olson

Trey Sweeney

Justin Verlander

 

Minor League currently (Anderson and Watson just came back this week)

Trei Cruz

Sean Guenther

Preston Howey

Jake Miller

Max Alba

Colin Fields

Jaden Hamm

Andrew Sears

Seth Stephenson

Roberto Campos

Nick Dumesnil

Woody Hadeen

Patrick Lee

Nolan McCarthy

Franyerber Montilla

Alistair Tanner

Cale Wetwiska

Blake Dickerson

Jose Dickson

Kameron Douglas

Ryan Hall

Wanmer Ramirez

Zach Swanson

Danandres Colon

Dugan Darnell

Joe Ruzicka

Josue Briceno

Marco Jimenez

Joseph Montalvo

Jack Penney

Steven Hrustich

Antonio Florido

Michael Massey

Michael Oliveto

Shay Timmer

Paul Wilson

Guillermo Bautista

Eddy Felix

Garrett Burhenn

River Hamilton

Wuilberth Mendez

Jorger Pitre

Mitchell Evans

Nestor Miranda

Dawson Price

Ethan Schiefelbein

[casimir]

My left knee was a little sore this morning.

[Tenacious D]

Should we start a separate thread for dumbass suspensions?

[chasfh]

The Tigers' training staff compound:

[gehringer_2]

I think it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that all the tech that allows pitchers to learn to maximize velo and spin is also teaching them how to put maximum stress on their physiology. Seems almost an inescapable conclusion, but how does any team or even the game as a whole get out of the "arms" race they are in?

[chasfh]

2 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I think it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that all the tech that allows pitchers to learn to maximize velo and spin is also teaching them how to put maximum stress on their physiology. Seems almost an inescapable conclusion, but how does any team or even the game as a whole get out of the "arms" race they are in?

Change the ball to deaden it so as make contact less damaging than it is now?

[gehringer_2]

55 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Change the ball to deaden it so as make contact less damaging than it is now?

this seems like the only answer - you have to find a way to make swing and miss, and thus in turn pitching itself, a less important part of the game overall.

[chasfh]

5 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

this seems like the only answer - you have to find a way to make swing and miss, and thus in turn pitching itself, a less important part of the game overall.

That said, this would be a challenge because strikeouts for pitchers are as important to them (not to mention as marketable to the business) as home runs are for hitters. It's all about burnishing the personal brand. You don't get featured on Quick Pitch for inducing ground balls to second for an out.

[IdahoBert]

2 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That said, this would be a challenge because strikeouts for pitchers are as important to them (not to mention as marketable to the business) as home runs are for hitters. It's all about burnishing the personal brand. You don't get featured on Quick Pitch for inducing ground balls to second for an out.

The masses are asses as a professor of mine once said. 

[gehringer_2]

33 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That said, this would be a challenge because strikeouts for pitchers are as important to them (not to mention as marketable to the business) as home runs are for hitters. It's all about burnishing the personal brand. You don't get featured on Quick Pitch for inducing ground balls to second for an out.

The thing is, even if overcome that and you do restructure the game so that globally, a team would be more successful (and know it) over a season because it would have a clear improvement in injury experience that would be greater than the value of more K's to the staff, will the pitchers themselves still *always* see it in their *immediate* best interests to strike guys out if they can and damn the risk to themselves? Thus for instance even go to private coaches if their team decided not to do pitch maximizing work with its staff (just as an extreme theoretical example...).

So maybe to continue along where this reasoning leads, you have not only make contact less damaging, maybe you have to make strike-outs much harder to achieve - at least against a larger % of the batter population, so you'd be where the game was when you had to pitch to a Stan Musial and you knew you were wasting your time trying to K him - all you could do was try to keep him off balance enough so he didn't barrel it up well. Two possibilities come to my mind in this direction: moving the mound back to give hitters more time to see pitches; and lowering the stitches to reduce achievable break. Pitchers would have rely more on change of speed and location sequencing to keep guys of balance for barrels as opposed to 'here it is you can't hit it' swing and miss.

Edited yesterday at 09:01 PM by gehringer_2

[NorthWoods]

A likely secondary effect of making the ball more hittable would be undoing at least some of the gains made in shortening the game.

[chasfh]

15 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

The thing is, even if overcome that and you do restructure the game so that globally, a team would be more successful (and know it) over a season because it would have a clear improvement in injury experience that would be greater than the value of more K's to the staff, will the pitchers themselves still *always* see it in their *immediate* best interests to strike guys out if they can and damn the risk to themselves? Thus for instance even go to private coaches if their team decided not to do pitch maximizing work with its staff (just as an extreme theoretical example...).

So maybe to continue along where this reasoning leads, you have not only make contact less damaging, maybe you have to make strike-outs much harder to achieve - at least against a larger % of the batter population, so you'd be where the game was when you had to pitch to a Stan Musial and you knew you were wasting your time trying to K him - all you could do was try to keep him off balance enough so he didn't barrel it up well. Two possibilities come to my mind in this direction: moving the mound back to give hitters more time to see pitches; and lowering the stitches to reduce achievable break. Pitchers would have rely more on change of speed and location sequencing to keep guys of balance for barrels as opposed to 'here it is you can't hit it' swing and miss.

Then how about changing the ball to limit spin? Lowering the seams would probably do that.

They could also consider changing the surface of the ball from leather to some synthetic, and maybe even include microtexturing to the ball, to produce more symmetric boundary-layer separation that suppresses seam-shifted wake effects.

Maybe another way to skin that cat would be to redistribute internal mass outward toward the cover of the ball, to increase rotational inertia without changing total mass.

One last way, which is probably the most radical, is increase the size of the ball itself, maybe by a quarter inch and a quarter ounce. But even without that, if you put all three of others together, you could probably reduce max spin by 500 or more RPM, with the effect of reducing strikeout rates, increase balls in play, and tilting the advantage away from flame-throwers and toward command pitchers.

If they coupled this set of changes with true robot umpiring on every pitch, which would force pitchers to have to come into the a hitter's zone to get strikes at some point, I bet they could move the K/9 rate from mid-eights to mid-sixes or less overnight.

Counterpoint: MLB Marketing and Players would both hate this.

[chasfh]

14 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

A likely secondary effect of making the ball more hittable would be undoing at least some of the gains made in shortening the game.

That might be countered by fewer pitches per at bat, which I believe is a worthy goal.

[Tiger337]

17 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

A likely secondary effect of making the ball more hittable would be undoing at least some of the gains made in shortening the game.

I don't think the goal has been so much to shorten the game as it is to speed the game up.  The pitch clock, which I think has made the game better, would still be effect.  If the added hits, increase the length of the gsame by a few minutes without slowing down the game, I don't think that would be a problem.  

[gehringer_2]

37 minutes ago, chasfh said:

redistribute internal mass outward toward the cover of the ball, to increase rotational inertia without changing total mass.

this is an interesting thought experiment. You have two effects to consider for two balls otherwise with equal size and weight but different spin moments, The first is that the ball with more spin moment will require more energy from the hand to impart a given revolution rate - more moment would mean less spin imparted *if* it is true that the rotational energy supplied by the hand is at saturation/max - I have no idea if it is or not. So now you look at the second effect, which is that the ball with higher moment will lose rotation more slowly in transit for an identical amount of surface drag (since the balls are otherwise the same), and thus will still be spinning faster, and still breaking more, out to 60' 6" ft. So one key is how much does the spind decay in transit with the current ball? Is it a significant % where a change could make a difference; and another possible key is whether a pitcher can spin a harder to spin ball just as fast at release or not, and if not how much less? (i.e. is the spin moment of the ball a limiting factor in the pitcher's ability to spin it or are other factors more significant) And then of course you have whole second set of questions as to what effect trying to spin a harder to spin ball has on arm health. Does the extra resistance protect the arm more or the extra stress applied damage it more? Highly multivariate system.

Edited yesterday at 10:13 PM by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

2 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

this is an interesting thought experiment. You have two effects to consider for two balls otherwise with equal size and weight but different spin moments, The first is that the ball with more spin moment will require more energy from the hand to impart a given revolution rate - more moment would mean less spin imparted *if* it is true that the rotational energy supplied by the hand is at saturation/max - I have no idea if it is or not. So now you look at the second effect, which is that the ball with higher moment will lose rotation more slowly in transit for an identical amount of surface drag (since the balls are otherwise the same), and thus will still be spinning faster, and still breaking more, out to 60' 6" ft. So the key is whether a pitcher can spin a harder to spin ball just as fast at release or not, and if not how much less? (i.e. is the spin moment of the ball a limiting factor in the pitcher's ability to spin it or are other factors more significant) And then of course you have whole second set of questions as to what effect trying to spin a harder to spin ball has on arm health. Does the extra resistance protect the arm more or the extra stress applied damage it more? Highly multivariate system.

The idea would be to discourage the spin race by making it practically impossible to spin the ball as we see now. I might even say that spin rates have gotten so high that there must be pitchers who are overtly trying to break the record for highest-spin rate, just for the recognition.

[gehringer_2]

30 minutes ago, chasfh said:

The idea would be to discourage the spin race by making it practically impossible to spin the ball as we see now. I might even say that spin rates have gotten so high that there must be pitchers who are overtly trying to break the record for highest-spin rate, just for the recognition.

Along with the softer ball, probably keeping it simple and just lowering the stitching would be a nice incremental trial to do. And while I know this one gets little or no support, I would move the mound back the equivalent of maybe 3 mph which is about 18" (~10msec@97mph). If I've shuttled my digits right, that would make the time of flight of a 100mph pitch equal to the current time of flight of 97mph pitch across 55ft. Those things would just take you back part of the distance to conditions that already existed in past and so shouldn't create too huge a set of dislocations.

Edited yesterday at 10:45 PM by gehringer_2

[CMRivdogs]

2 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I don't think the goal has been so much to shorten the game as it is to speed the game up.  The pitch clock, which I think has made the game better, would still be effect.  If the added hits, increase the length of the gsame by a few minutes without slowing down the game, I don't think that would be a problem.  

I agree. It was what was happening between pitches that slowed the game. Pitchers gardening on the mound (so to speak)

Batters stepping out, straightening their batting gloves, etc. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s a few more hits, or strikeouts, as long as there is some sort of action

[chasfh]

13 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Along with the softer ball, probably keeping it simple and just lowering the stitching would be a nice incremental trial to do. And while I know this one gets little or no support, I would move the mound back the equivalent of maybe 3 mph which is about 18" (~10msec@97mph). If I've shuttled my digits right, that would make the time of flight of a 100mph pitch equal to the current time of flight of 97mph pitch across 55ft. Those things would just take you back part of the distance to conditions that already existed in past and so shouldn't create too huge a set of dislocations.

Theoretically, I’m not opposed to the idea of moving the mound back measurably, like a couple of feet or so, to provide extra time for the batter to react to the balls, although there would be a bunch of consequences to reckon with. One of the big consequences would occur when a pitcher moves up from a 60’ 6” league to a 62’ or 63’ league. Besides the extra strain that gets put on a pitcher’s arm as they try to make up the difference without losing their velocity (because pitchers are human and they’re going inherently to want to preserve that as is), they would also have to rework their entire repertoire of pitches to go 62’ or 63’ instead of 60’ 6”, and there are going to be casualties along the way, both in health and career terms.

Also, that would mean all the minor league teams would have to move their mounds back, as well all the independent pro teams that feed players into the systems, and probably all the college teams as well. Elite high school teams in California and the south, which feed pitchers into organized ball, would feel pressured to move their mounds back, too, which might force entire state high school athletic associations to mandate the move, which would cost taxpayer money. And if the Asian leagues don’t comply as well, that would reduce the amount of pitchers that could step right into a rotation or bullpen and contribute to a big league team. So all the mounds in Japan all the way down to the high school level (and HS ball is HUGE in Japan) might well have to make that move.

There are probably other consequences as well, but that’s one big one that occurs to me.

[Shelton]

I think if they want to tweak the settings they can just adjust the ball within their wide tolerance band a bit between seasons to account for the ebb and flow of the player pool. 
 

This is what they have already been doing to suit their desired outcomes already, isn’t it? If I remember correctly they did it midseason a few years back to juice homers. 

[chasfh]

8 hours ago, Shelton said:

I think if they want to tweak the settings they can just adjust the ball within their wide tolerance band a bit between seasons to account for the ebb and flow of the player pool. 
 

This is what they have already been doing to suit their desired outcomes already, isn’t it? If I remember correctly they did it midseason a few years back to juice homers. 

I suggested some time ago in one of these threads that the league should announce a year in advance that they're changing the ball the following season, then as soon as the season is over, give a few dozen of the new baseballs to every player who requests them so they can get used to them over the winter, and they can come into camp familiar with it if they want to make themselves so. Maybe I should suggest that to the commissioner. rmanfred@mlb.com—that should get there.

[oblong]

Was it ever alleged they did something when it seemed like we had a no hitter every night?

[Shelton]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

Was it ever alleged they did something when it seemed like we had a no hitter every night?

No, they just sent Jim Joyce out there to counter that.