Shelton

There is a fake Lynn Henning on Bluesky that is trying a bit too hard to mimic Lynn’s style and pass himself off as the real thing. Only true Henning scholars (like myself) may be able to notice.

I think Goldschmidt is trash. And we aren’t going to sign anyone as Tork insurance. They need to sign someone better than Tork. What’s the use of signing a 1B worse than Tork to use an insurance? Insurance for what? He’s already basically replacement level.

I think, for the most part, Malloy and Carpenter are sharing one lineup spot. Tork is extremely remotely/expendable if they bring in an actual 1B. No need to find him reps at DH.

I agree with you. I don’t think Scotty is going into 2025 with the idea that Tork is actually going to be their 1B. I think he’s saying exactly what needs to be said at this point in time, which is basically nothing, because he doesn’t need to actually say anything. I feel similarly about the idea that Báez is going to be the RH version of 2024 McKinstry and split time with the starting SS. He’s currently hurt and ineffective, and he’s not even taking up an active roster spot. He’s on the team until he isn’t, and therefore the story is “we are hopeful and he’s working hard and we need to get him back to being the Chicago Javy.” We all know that Scott Harris is not dumb, so why would we actually take that to mean anything more than he’s on the team until he isn’t. I’m not actually predicting anything. We have no idea which players are going to be added and how the team is going shake out in the spring. But I do think there is zero chance that Scotty has Báez written in pen on his 2025 depth chart. Same for Tork. Fortunately, decent backup SS and decent 1B are fairly easy to find. But if the right fit isn’t there, then sure. These guys could play a role to start.

Sign Bregman

I heard they moved the game to 1. Is it still ok to have Malloy DH?

A lot of us were at that game, but I think the number of folks to have been at that one plus last night’s game are few and far between. Pretty cool for you. Not surprisingly, that game/moment is being compared to last night by the local radio team and their callers this morning. It’s perfect radio fodder, because I really do think it’s a close call if you were forced to rank them. A home run in the ALCS to clinch a World Series spot carries a lot of weight. But it was also in the bottom of the ninth where a single would also have been enough. And the tigers were leading the series 3-0 at the time. Without it, worst case is a 3-1 series lead. Kerry’s 3-run shot in the top of the 9th effectively sealed the game and a 1-1 series. But it’s still only the ALDS. A single would have given a 1-0 lead, and still left the result up in the air. Without it, worst case is a 0-2 series and season on life support. Hard to say!

I have it on good authority that AJ paid the troll toll.

You obviously have to make a lot of assumptions when discussing this particular pitching strategy for a series. If the assumption is that Skubal will win both games, then it doesn’t really matter when he pitches. You only need to win one non-Skubal game to get to game 5, and it doesn’t matter which one it is. The key difference is that you win it in four game instead of five in the event you get that win in game 2 or 3 after winning game 1. In my opinion, the important thing is not leaving Cleveland down 2-0. I think pitching Skubal in game 2 was the move that maximizes that possibility. The way you leave down 2-0 is obviously if you lose the Skubal game and the other one, and putting Skubal in game 1 makes each game closer to a coin flip. That said, the skubal in game 1 strategy also increases your chances of being up 2-0 relative to the game 2 strategy. I guess my point is, even if he was on four days rest heading into game 1, it might have still made strategic sense to start him in game 2. Anyway, the short rest issue makes the whole argument moot, anyway, especially for a guy that was pitching on five days rest in September when possible already.

Game 2 to game 5 is still “normal” rest. Four days between them.

Orioles gonna hang a banner with Holliday, Mayo, and Basallo printed on it.

Ibanez definitely has value for a contender.

Seriously the guys behind me did the Jared Goff during the afterglow and I was displeased. Hope you had fun despite the young people having fun.

So, like a cubs game. Anyway, I had the same experience and it makes me wonder if we were in the same section. But I’m young at heart so whatever 🙂 That girl will not stop texting me tho.

Are they marrying each other?

That account is hardly just some random Twitter account. Anyway, seems like they are just pointing out how far over the fence it was going to be, seeing as he needed all of that 6-5 frame to reach it. We see way too many home run “robberies” that are wall scrapers (or possibly not even going out at all) and which almost any OF could catch.

I just checked today’s numbers. FG still thinks the current tigers team would play .496 against a neutral .500 team. FG also thinks the current twins would play .523 ball against a neutral .500 team. I’m sure the system has its reasons for this, but this does not pass the smell test to me.

FG system doesn’t actually use a projected starter for these projections. But they do use an overall projected playing time for each pitcher on the staff based on how many games are left. I don’t think this calculation, especially for the tigers, is very accurate. Objectively speaking, these guys should suck, and their system reflects that. Maybe they do suck and we’ve just gotten very lucky and FG is right. But if that’s the case, then just fire fetter and lund. It’s up to you to decide how much stock you want to put into the actual performance vs what these guys are objectively expected to do. At the end of the day, all of these projections and probabilities are just slightly different ways of weighting the coin you flip every game. It’s not that big of a deal.

That said, on August 1, in view of all the player movement that may have happened and with the benefit of having a third of the season still to project, the FG outlook is probably preferable.

Yeah, to me that’struing to be too cute. But nothing wrong with those that prefer it. I’m surely biased because it doesn’t appear to be crediting my favorite team with the performance they are getting from their pitching staff. No FG/zips/pecota projection system is going to rate the tigers well when the guys slotted into their playing time projection are the guys on our pitching staff. And to be fair, no projection system should be designed to do that. There are obviously different ways to get to the same result at the end of a season where you can say you hit your desired confidence interval and therefore your system is correct. But that also means that the different systems are going to miss in different ways. You look at roster resource and see who they have projected as tigers SPs, and it’s easy to see why that system is going to spit out a team that on balance will lose more than it wins. That doesn’t sit right with me in view their sustained success over the past 6 weeks. I also think the preseason projection bias being baked in doesn’t help a team like the tigers, who have already blown past the projected win totals. That doesn’t mean it is incorrectly designed, but I do think it is probably missing some of the quality that we currently have.

Yeah, to me it’s the sanity check. It’s easy to see two teams tied and think it’s close to 50/50. Obviously a team ahead in the standings has a better chance. But I think it is valuable and fun to know that a team might have a 1 in 5 chance of getting it done vs a 1 in 10 chance. a Seattle fan can look at say “crap we gotta go 8-1 and hope x y and z happen to have a chance.” I think it’s good to know that such a scenario might happen once every 20 seasons.

The tiebreaker dictates no such thing because there is no need for a tie to broken at this time. You are projecting a tie nine from games from now to order the teams. No need to do that. Essentially and factually, there is a tie. It’s right there in black and white.

Just a gut feeling, Eddie. I could try to rationalize why I think it’s worse. To be fair, the other methods are also projecting team quality, just with different inputs. When FG season-to-date method and bref SRS method both spit out similar odds, but the FG default based on zips/steamer is a big outlier, it makes me think there is something baked into the FG projection that is more slow to adjust. I do find it interesting that all the scribes just default to the FG odds and ignore the bref odds. But I also dislike FG in general these days for a number of reasons, so I’m likely allowing my bias to creep in.

Nah, just kidding. I didn’t actually parse all of that. I think what you are saying is that it’s hard to predict how each game will go, which no one disputes. Use whatever method you want to determine your own sense of what is likely to happen and to what degree. I prefer the baseball reference method that looks at the past 100 games and adds a regression factor. I don’t much like the FanGraphs method that is based on zips+steamer. The coin flip method is fairly clean and not bad, especially when it comes to this caliber of team. FG’s “season to date” stats is similar to the bref method I think.

Agreed