gehringer_2

you are right about the flagpole - I dont see it in the overhead shot - supposedly it's the same pole reinstalled at CoPa - or at least that was the plan at one point. But you can clearly see the straight wall and the space behind it. The other giveaway is that they never changed the warning track. Look at the overhead shot above and you can see it follows the contour of the original wall. Of course if you hit it to the upper deck, which I saw Dave Winfield do once, that was 440+!

Old friend Nick Castellanos got himself benched today for shooting off his mouth when he was taken out for a defensive replacement yesterday.

He sounded like one happy camper in the presser. I wonder when Alex Cora starts to build a rep for leaving destruction in his wake.

It's really hard to play .600+ baseball for a whole season. The exception might the NL West with Colorado being so bad. I could see two 100 win teams in that div.

well that's a good question, I can't date when the CF wall was put in. I know it was after Kaline started playing because I've heard him say the flagpole was still in play when he started playing and I even remember seeing games before it was there. Demeter played in Detroit 64-66. If you still saw the flagpole on the field, it was still 440. the only clue I found that may date the fence is the Detroit Historical story about the ball park says they put a score board in CF in 1961 but moved it to LF when hitters complained. If they had originally put the same aux scoreboard in CF that we used to see in LF, it's logical they would have had to have put a straight wall behind it - so 1961 is one possible dating.

well, it was true when the marker was first painted. 🤷‍♂️. The fence went in in the early 60's I think. Probably by that time "440 to straight-away center field" had become enough of a mantra the team just decided no-one would notice the difference. What I wonder is why they put up the fence. I suppose the straight wall was a cleaner look for TV, it made for a better batter's eye, and maybe there were complaints about the injury risk of the flagpole. Seems unlikely we will ever know.

I refuse to be optimistic, but Alex Lange right would be a huge add.

Casey is fine. He doesn't quite have Ace level command, maybe he never will, but he keeps us in the game most nights.

well, thereby hangs a tale. When the Briggs rebuild was done, the CF corner was more square, the flagpole was in play, and it was 440 right into to the corner where the flag pole was. But after some years they put a fence across the CF corner so there was 25-30 feet or so of fence square to home plate and the flag pole was behind it - no longer in play. the ground crew used it as a storage area. The distance to that fence was ~425, but they never took the old 440 marker off the wall and eventually just kept repainting their little fib. After the ball park closed, Google earth got a shot of the field after they had torn down the interior fence, you still see the warning track end at the line of the removed fence. Measured with GE, it was indeed 440 to the original wall, but 425 to where the fence was. And there is your Tiger Trivia for the day....

good to see him squaring a few up

Blast from the past!

I don't know if Briggs already had a bad rep when he bought the team or if in those days people just thought it too vain for him to rename the park after himself, or maybe just habit, but as little squirt in the late 50's, a lot of men in my father's cohort continued to call the ball park Navin Field.

If you can get a laser designator on a spot you can get close enough often enough.

If your intent is to sign the player, you deserve the leverage because you are going to spend a lot of money for it!

One thing I usually take as truth is that for whatever has become public (i.e. GBU-57) there is something next gen waiting to be "trialed." Probably as true about the IDF.

Once you decide you aren't going to pay the guy, it becomes 100% an exercise in getting what you can. The situation with Skubal is going to look pretty much the same. The only difference is that pitchers are so fragile today that every year they get through might be their last, so I'd lean more toward keeping him right through FA and taking the comp pick.

If I were trying to build a bunker buster but didn't have an aircraft capable of carrying a really heavy bomb, i'd build the biggest penetrator I could carry with a rocket booster that would drive it to supersonic velocity before it hit the ground. E=1/2MV^2. when it comes to penetration, you can get back with V what you can't carry in M.

Maybe they bought that thing the Wachowski's had built for tunnelling into Zion.

there are 4 leaders in the world today who stay in power by stoking conflict to keep their people unified against the "other": Putin, Khamenei, Netanyahu, and Trump.

TBF, the return for Betts wasn't that bad for a guy in his walk season that they weren't going to sign. Verdugo and Wong are at least useful major leaguers. It wasn't equal player value to Betts but he was on his way to FA so equal value was never on the table.

Not unlikely - did I read this is ranked choice election? That will probably play well for Coumo if he is everyone's 2nd choice.

She does focus too much on the messenger over the message, and her complaint that old pols cave is not really accurate. All pols cave, and it's because of the way campaign financing works.

Position side is as good as it's ever been, but is a pitching shortage looming around the corner? Hall isn't pitching and Hamm and Melton aren't particularly exciting.

this admin is one long slow motion train wreck.

WaPO is currently running this red "Breaking News" Banner on the site's front page: Breaking: Trump officials reverse guidance exempting farms, hotels from immigration raids. Sadly the link does not go anywhere yet. If the Taco has ReTaco'd, do you get a Chimi?