sabretooth

Yeah, that sounds about right. Hes the new Jeff Smith.

There doesnt appear to be any approach difference that I can discern, other than he's swinging/missing less. Outcome wise, the one major difference, other than fewer Ks, is that *he's hitting the ball less hard on flyballs.* That seems to be the major difference.

Despite my opposition to Avila and my sense that Chris didn't have the heart for building a winner, I was happy with the change in trajectory last year and going into 2022, although I wasn't thrilled with Baez (I wanted Story, who I realize hasn't been great but at least he's been OK with the bat and glove this year overall), I liked the combination of Baez, Meadows, Tork, Greene, along with E. Rod and Pineda, and I thought we were on track to have a decent 500 team this year (as did the professional projection systems), and maybe we could luck into the playoffs this year or next. Despite the horrible start, I stuck to my guns against my friends and family that the players were slumping and skill levels would assert themselves for people like Tork, Schoop, Candy, Baez, and once Meadows, Manning, and others were healthy, we'd be on our way to at least 75 wins and probably more like 80+. After the horrible 9-23 start, we had a stretch of 15-11, even with a ton of injuries and with a bunch of hitters still underperforming....then after June 11, we have been playing .350 ball (24-43), and despite miraculous pitching and generally good defense, the hitting has just been beyond horrible. I really want to see signs of hope with the hitting but.....Greene is fun to watch but still puts up terrible numbers. Tork continues to suck at AAA. Meadows is a medical morass. I'd like to see what the other prospects can do, but we can't seriously count on these guys for 2023. I'm very open-minded to positive analysis, I would like to be a lot more hopeful about things; it's ridiculous and basically inexplicable that players with established skill levels should all crash and burn like this at the same time. I've never seen this in my 45 years of watching the Tigers, even the bad Randy Smith teams didn't have this kind of stink about them.

Despite my opposition to Avila and my sense that Chris didn't have the heart for building a winner, I was happy with the change in trajectory last year and going into 2022, although I wasn't thrilled with Baez (I wanted Story, who I realize hasn't been great but at least he's been OK with the bat and glove this year overall), I liked the combination of Baez, Meadows, Tork, Greene, along with E. Rod and Pineda, and I thought we were on track to have a decent 500 team this year (as did the professional projection systems), and maybe we could luck into the playoffs this year or next. Despite the horrible start, I stuck to my guns against my friends and family that the players were slumping and skill levels would assert themselves for people like Tork, Schoop, Candy, Baez, and once Meadows, Manning, and others were healthy, we'd be on our way to at least 75 wins and probably more like 80+. After the horrible 9-23 start, we had a stretch of 15-11, even with a ton of injuries and with a bunch of hitters still underperforming....then after June 11, we have been playing .350 ball (24-43), and despite miraculous pitching and generally good defense, the hitting has just been beyond horrible. I really want to see signs of hope with the hitting but there is almost nothing to be hopeful about. Greene is fun to watch but still puts up terrible numbers. Tork continues to suck at AAA. Meadows is a medical morass. I'd like to see what the other prospects can do, but we can't seriously count on these guys for 2023. I'm very open-minded to positive analysis, I would like to be a lot more hopeful about things; it's ridiculous and basically inexplicable that players with established skill levels should all crash and burn like this at the same time. I've never seen this in my 45 years of watching the Tigers, even the bad Randy Smith teams didn't have this kind of stink about them.

See the Game Thread. I have been promoting Baez's resurgence since June, but he has fallen apart again. Every way I look at it he appears to be falling off a cliff. I think it's reasonable to assume that he will have an OPS+ below 100 and poor defense to boot. 5 more years and $115M more salary for basically peak Niko Goodrum. My goodness, this team seems very deeply f'd in terms of positional talent and pitching injuries. What other than Fetters ability to make something out of trash pitching-wise do we have on our side? A new GM and more high draft picks I guess, though the new system possibly diminishes that.

I looked over the rest of the offense since the ASB and it's all abysmal. When the best you can say is that the Castros and Reyes are between 85-97 OPS+ since the ASB (Willi has been at 118 in the last 30 days). Kerry Carpenter had a nice week. Baddoo has had a 377 On-base Pct over the last 30 days and a 104 OPS+. That's all of the good news. Everybody else is below 80 OPS+ since the ASB, including Greene and Haase. WTF. The entire offense is stabilizing in worst-in-history territory. Never in my wildest nightmares did I think this outcome with the offense would happen this year.

I have sliced and diced Baez's season every which way possible looking for something positive. The best that I can say is that he has cut down on his K's and might still be capable of hitting at an above average level for an entire season. However, it appears that he has gone through the following arc in OPS+ terms: - 2015 - 2017 age 22 - 24: 94 - 98 OPS+ - 2018 - 2021 age 25 - 28: 115 OPS+ - 2022 age 29: 80 OPS+ * April - June 14: 47 OPS+ (203 PA) * June 15 - July 10: 139 OPS+ (90 PA) * July 11 - Present: 90 OPS+ (154 PA) I looked his rolling two-week average OPS+ since the ASB and it's been right around 90 OPS+ throughout. Maybe the first bad period through June 14 could be the NL/AL league switch issue, and maybe the deadened balls could explain some of the difficulties this year, but.... ....his exit velocity has slowed by 3 MPH, his Max velocity has dropped by 5 MPH, and his HR/FB% has dropped from 25% to 6%. His hard-hit percentage is down, has only partially rebounded throughout the season, and is settling in at a poor level. It looks like he could be experiencing a major/permanent loss of bat speed and a power blackout. I think it's perfectly reasonable to fear that his age, loss of bat speed, and playing in a bigger home park may have turned him into a poor hitter. Combine that with a very poor set of advanced defensive metrics for 2022 at SS and you're looking at another 5 years of expensive crap. We were expecting 4+ WAR. Seems likely that we will be seeing more like 1-2 WAR, basically Niko Goodrum circa 2018 - 2019. Yuck. WTF

I am not watching this f'ing team next year if they still have Cabrera. Enough already.

Friggin Cabrera...at 2 strikes the best you could hope for against Doval was a strikeout.

That was against BOS

The only other thing I recall is the love-fest for Sergio Romo. Honestly I can't remember anything about the series.

It seems to me that as a rule MTS/MTF people have tended to be skeptical of the skills and/or value of management personnel. There has been a countervailing group who voice skepticism of fans perspective (MotownBombers, Shelton chief among them), but not necessarily to defend management, more as a counterpoint. It seems to me that Leyland got a couple of seasons of love around here, then after the disappointments of 2008-2010, a chorus emerged that thought he was either incompetent or overrated or whatever, either because they didnt like his approach, or they are the kinds of fans who like to rip on the Manager, or they feel that fans overrate the impact of Managers, etc. Hinch got about 1 season of love from late May last year to about mid-April this year. I am a little amused by those who demand that MTFers hold Hinch accountable, as if we have some kind of say. Whatever the case may be, I have seen little evidence of starry-eyed self-deception here, just the hope that despite everything else, maybe we have the right guy in the Managers seat.

The Grossman thing is a useful stand-in to highlight the overall failures of the offense this year. It may be indicative of what's going on, or it might be just blind luck/happenstance. My **guess** is that Hinch and his staff go through a process and execute their philosophy/approach, but it's fallen apart this year because of a number of factors: - the change in the baseball hurt this team more than others because our hitters were already worse/older/more marginally talented and thus were more impacted by a change in the baseballs; - the NL-to-AL switch kneecapped Baez for the first two months, he has since recovered his swing, but his overall stats still suck, his basic hitting approach looks bad, he makes too many throwing errors, and the rest of the team is so bad, that people don't feel like appreciating his recovery to normal since the middle of June. - Meadows having every medical issue under the Sun The first factor (baseballs) I don't think adequately explains Schoop, Candy, or Tork all imploding. They are not marginal talents nor does age (youth in Tork's case and age in Schoop's case) explain why they would be that bad, nor does Candy's up-and-down history explain why he would be this bad at the same time as the others. If Schoop, Candy, and Tork were OPS+ around 95-100 and just mediocre, that would be one thing. But being mired in the 50-70 range? All of them? AND Baez? AND the historically below-average Barnhart becomes a complete black hole? Certainly, these kinds of things happen to every team to some extent. Successful teams have good players who suddenly can't hit. Sometimes being a successful team gives you more options to deal with player failure, sometimes being a bad team gives you more options. And sometimes like the Tigers this year, the GM is unable for a host of reasons to do anything mid-season to correct things. If the GM/Front Office had remained frozen in indecision it would be so much worse -- at least firing AA creates a possible positive inflection point.

The thing with Grossman aren't the numbers per se, it's the fact that Grossman said that he was fixed by the Braves' staff and wished that he could have had that kind of help in Detroit. It's a PR problem for Hinch, who up to this point has had no answers for the Tigers incredibly bad hitting this year. Grossman has always been a specialist against LHP, and at his age that's what will keep him around if he does last. As with all LHP hitting specialists, he has to be able to hit against RHP half-way decently to warrant a roster spot. He always did that before 2022. He couldn't hit RHP at all in 2022 before ATL, and now he is hitting them a little bit. It's probably a combination of his state of mind with a change of scenery and a new ballclub, a helpful tip from the ATL staff, and some luck. As RandyMarsh suggested, let's check back in a couple of weeks and see what it all looks like. Probably will look more like Paredes did after he came back to Earth.

I was neutral on Hinch to begin with, given his blowup with the Astros cheating scandal, but he made a believer out of me with their marked improvement in 2021 and 2022 with the BP and now the starting pitching, but oy the injury mystery. I think he has really created a stink about himself and Coolbaugh regadring the extremely anemic offense, esp. after the Grossman debacle. The Manager and his staff must be up to speed on the latest techniques, and the Tigers are clearly way behind the curve, so to speak. It seems to be the Tiger way to be behind the curve, and it's embarrassing. The next GM needs to permanently change the way everybody throughout the organization thinks about, analyzes, impacts, and talks about player development and performance, and that needs to start with Hinch. I don't think anyone wants or needs to hear Hinch publicly discuss the particulars of analytics, but I would like to see him at least discuss the subject in a manner that reassures the fans that he and his staff are comfortable and engaged with winning approaches across the board.

I was thinking more of the generic "how important is a Manager anyway" debate rather than Hinch in your case. Maybe bias is too loaded a term, but I think it's fair to say that I view the Manager as more important and impactful than you do.

I think I would liken it to a race car team, where a particular car always ran in the back of the pack over a number of seasons, and then a new driver had the car up in the middle of the pack heading towards the front of the pack near the end of the season. Then this year the car hit the wall. Was it the drivers fault or the team or the owner or what? Hard to say. In any case if Hinch supporters were or are guilty of being too hopeful or of crediting Hinch too much, it is possible to be bias in the other direction, too.

Yeah, given that we are middle-of-the-pack with 10 pitching WAR with 40 games to go with our top available starting pitcher sitting at about 60 IP so far (even if you add back Skubal's 140 IP that's still amazing)...the pitching outcomes are nothing short of a ****miracle****....maybe it will all flame out by seasons end, but if not, AJ and Fetters deserve commendation for that alone. More to the point, there has got to be some useable/marketable pitching talent in there for a new GM to begin to construct a sustainable situation through trades/development and some savvy FA plug-ins sooner rather than later.

I still think it's pretty obvious that AJ and Fetters have done an outstanding job putting together a decent pitching staff with almost nothing to work with this year. It is possible that their handling has contributed to the injury situation but that is speculation that has not been established yet. From where I stand AJ has clearly added major positive value since his acquisition, but I think he has made a mistake by keeping coolbaugh and/or not directing him to use advanced resources effectively. The one thing that I'm going to call bs on is this polarizing approach where Hinch supporters are supposedly stooges, and who allegedly cast blame everybody but Hinch. I have not seen this...MTS seems capable of a balanced perspective without this kind of strawmen construction. For myself, I'm capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. I have been able to view Hinch as a value added proposition for this club while also remaining objective about his apparent shortcomings and his potential shortcomings. Ive seen this from lots of other folks here too.

I did last year but I have since picked them up 😀

I have not seen this. You and Jim Cowan keep talking about this so I have no doubt that you guys have seen this, but I havent.

We seemed to have leapt from mocking the Manager to mocking anyone who ever liked the Manager all in one thread, based on resting the incredible Baddoo against a LHP. Let me know when the tar, feathers, and rail are prepared for AJ, his evil cadre, and his oh so foolish supporters.

Because they improved a lot?

I am fine giving AJ another shot, but if it keeps up like this they will obviously need to move on.

Yep. Maybe teams dont care yet, but I would hope that at some point we will see a return to curveballs and sinkers out of a sense of survival for/by pitchers.