sabretooth

Cool

What the hell with these errors.

That single mistake on the basepaths wipes out the value of all of his aggressive baserunning gains.

Javy WTF?

Kreidler whiffs on two plays.....ack

Every game this year where he has had positive ratings on at least two pitches he has had a Quality Start. Every other game he has not.

Manning looking great tonight

Boy Schoop has such a nice arm. Gads.

When was Schoop's last 2-EBH day? Wow.

438 BABIP....I still think he looks like a slightly below average hitter going forward and a mediocre defensive SS, maybe above average 2Bman. I don't think he's going to be an above average player on either side of the ball as a SS.

Ugh, Javy

Tork! Boy does he look good now.

My problem is caused by watching this team curl up in a ball offensively this entire year, with only a couple of regulars showing even the slightest amount of power, and my increasing thought is that there is a systematic aspect to this failure that the deep CF fences reinforce. To be fair, I also wonder if guys were slumping early in 2022 for various reasons, then because Miggy was hitting for a little bit of batting average (and the media was clucking about how he was "their best hitter"), perhaps guys thought (and perhaps were coached) that they should "learn from the master" and emphasize contact and "giving in", forgetting that hitting is about driving the ball hard and yes that includes flyballs, HRs, and pull-hitting. Haase seems to be the only guy on the team that didn't give into that mode of hitting at all this year. He has been swinging hard and trying to drive the ball, even when he was slumping early on.

With 4 of the top 6 guys in the lineup being rookies who have been OPS+ing 120 - 180 for the last 30 days, watching them has been interesting. I also like Haase FWIW. The rest of the lineup is not worth watching at all, though naturally I really like what I've seen from Jiminez and Chafin in the BP.

It might have been too late WRT to the Cubs but that should not have foreclosed the possibility for a return a whole hell of a lot closer to what the White Sox claimed.

The media and FG chatter notwithstanding, JV was surging when he was traded, and if the proposed returns didn't represent his potential return to greatness, that's on AA for settling for whatever he could get at that time.

f'ing unreal. I said at the time that I hated the trade for every reason I could think of, principally because I thought trading JV was a stupid idea that was doomed to fail. I don't think that the lousy results are based on bad injury luck either. An 18 year old pitcher has a strong potential to get injured before making the big leagues, and even if you consider Rogers' injury to be unlucky, he and Daz and Perez could NEVER have been considered even a marginal return for JV. Just terrible, terrible, terrible. Terrible strategy to firesale and tank for 4+ years, terrible tactic to trade JV for the kind of return they apparently sought, and terrible mismatch between what was given and what was received.

I hope they don't change it again. They need to pick a specification and stick with it. The park factor stuff is susceptible to a whole range of inputs and assumptions that are difficult to unwind. I'm avoiding the whole discussion of park factor data because I think there's a whole ton of noise in that area that makes it hard to draw a clear objective conclusion, and ultimately, the conclusions wind up being applied to hitting plots and such to demonstrate that we lost 5 HRs in 2022 or 10 HRs in 2021 but we had more doubles and so and so forth. The configuration of CoPa might theoretically and even objectively lead to higher offensive output all things being equal. Regardless of what the objective reality of CoPa's park effects in a given period may be, it's **management's beliefs and conclusions** about CoPa's park effects that will determine their strategic response, even if their conclusions might happen to be wrong objectively, or out-of-date, or whatever. If **management believes** that we are playing in a large park with a deadened ball and they do not acquire top-end power hitters to compensate, then they are more likely (than I am comfortable with) to adapt their roster, development, coaching, and lineups around that idea, and that's bad for this team from a long-term/strategic standpoint, **whether or not they are right or wrong about the actual/objective park effects.** I don't know to what extent that **mentality and approach** has impacted the team's historically bad offense this year, apart from the injuries and individual skill issues and deadened ball and so on, but I am pretty sure that they have "managed themselves into a box", and I think they are coaching hitters into a low-power box, which if true would be the worst thing, especially for our young/developing hitters. If they juice the ball again and the shift-ban helps pull-happy hitters and mediocre/marginal guys like Renato Nunez can come back from Korea and hit 30+ HRs even in a big park for cheap $$ again, then they will be able to synthesize a power-hitting approach that will cover a multitude of sins.... .....even in that last scenario, where most of the team production concerns could be realisitically addressed, the CoPa dimensions will still be doing our young hitters a disservice by encouraging them to pull the ball too much in order to squeeze out more HRs. Yeah, anyway, it's a good discussion, I am sorry for beating it to death, that's what I do.

Well I hope it will remain deader, because I certainly don't want to see equipment changes imposed on a routine basis. Once every 10 or 20 years is one thing, but if they are going to start going live/dead/live/dead every couple of years that would have a pretty chaotic effect on player performance.

I think the only way I can make my point clearer is to say that I do not care at all about these tactical considerations about how many HRs or how many warning track FBs or the marginal effects of HRs allowed by Tiger pitchers. Those are marginal considerations at best. To the best of my knowledge they have never tried to gear their pitching staff or pitching style to suit the park, and I don't really think that's practicable. I've named the talented young hitters, Tork, Greene, Carpenter, Kriedler at this time, and hopefully more to come. I have said that I want our hitters to hit effectively to all fields. Having a deep CF configuration does not foster that IMO. I agree with that 100%, and it would be nice if the veterans started working out better, but I am less sure about the effect that changing OF dimensions would have on veteran hitters at this point. I don't feel as positive that the downward shift for Candy/Schoop/Baez can be positively impacted at this point by a change in the OF dimensions. I'm hoping for this as part of a larger effort to eliminate potential stumbling blocks (esp. with the deader ball) in the way of the development and coaching of young position players, and the acquisition of more effective and affordable veteran hitters, and I really think the outfield dimensions are likely to skew both efforts and make them less able to compete.

Again, this has nothing to do with helping the mediocre to poor hitters on this team at this time. I am looking to give our talented young hitters a more standard environment to develop to the fullest extent. If the team moved the fences to a more normal depth, that would also allay my concerns that they would focus on a narrower band of underperforming defense-oriented players suited more to the park, rather than truly being competitive.

Again, if anyone thinks that I'm wanting them to engineer better outcomes by moving fences, you're wrong. My desire is to eliminate a markedly unconventional park feature that has the very strong potential to skew their entire organizational approach, especially with the deadened ball and the continued prevalence of super-high-velocity fastballs and hard sliders.

What is the worry with regards to the pitchers? They are enjoying an advantage right now that they would not enjoy with more normal dimensions. If we are getting decent pitchers then they will pitch decently in a normal park. And this has nothing to do with the players they have. This has to do with making sure that this organization doesn't skew it's approach to players and performance based on having dimensions that are markedly unconventional.

I realize that people are going to say "wait, the shift is being outlawed, that should help", but the benefit of that is slanted towards pull-happy sluggers. I hope our young sluggers aren't looking to be pull-happy, even Carpenter has flashed all-fields power.

The Tigers used to rely on the following for their lineup needs (before they started tanking in 2017): - big owner spend on sluggers like Miggy, Prince, Hunter, and VMart. Except where Miggy and VMart were too injured to perform well, that worked. - a couple of mediocre complimentary players contributing above-average performance. Then came the prevalence of super-high-velocity pitching, hard-sliders, and the shift. They juiced the ball from the 2015 ASB to somewhere around 2021 or so, but since they were tanking for four of those years they kinda missed out on the benefits (except from Niko LOL). Now in 2022, they don't have the big owner spend, and the complimentary players that fill the lineup are no longer able to get it done with the emergence of a more pitcher-friendly environment as indicated above, and their own skill defects/decline. Moving the fences in I strongly believe will allow the Tigers brass to focus on acquiring a broader range of more affordable hitters who will be able to produce nominal or better offense for us without being primarily very good groundball hitters (L. Arreaz types, who are very hard to find) or high-priced sluggers who can overcome the park dimensions with the deadened ball. I also believe that young hitters like Tork, Greene, Carpenter, or Kriedler will be less likely to fully develop their power hitting potential playing in a park with such an unusual and HR-unfriendly CF configuration. To hit for power they will have to pull the ball more, and that is not conducive to strong all-fields power hitting, which is key for the best hitters.