gehringer_2

Maybe there is a lession for the Tiger hitting brain trust here that one size does not fit all wrt hitting?

he's no fan of Trump the man, he was/is a fan of Trump as a right side President. He still wants to defend/protect that aspect of the brand and apparently sees them as separable.

Nice to see the trend finally turn. Of course there is still empty space for another million.....

I agree panic moves are always terrible - but the problem is worse than 3 guys. These are current OPS deficits with respect to career: Gio - -120 (granted very small sample - but not off to hot start) McKinstry - -80 Kelly - - 100 Jake - -150 Javy - -150 and this one is not even vs career - it's just compared to his already terrible last season Tork - -70 (but improving) Vierling - -30 and Riley started hot but is now slumping badly - 633 OPS for May. Keith is actually coming around a bit. OPS was 387 in April, 584 so far for May. Bottom line the team is trying to stay afloat with only Canha, Carpenter and Ibanez hitting their career averages and two of those are platoon bats. -- plus Perez. If Tork gets hot that will obviously help, but I need to see more before I believe he is out of the woods.

He's a peacock that has reached a point where no-one is looking, so he's fanning his 'look a me!" feathers.

and appears to be leaking crude oil.

Tiger offense has been terrible for 3 yrs under Hinch and there virtually no sign of improvement or cases of hitters making unexpected progress. It's hard to make a case for this management around the hitting. To me the issue is how to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water. The same people are running the pitching side very well. Can we get them to delegate to different sub-group who can bring more to the hitting without losing the rest? I really don't know - it's a muddle right now.

IDK - team change coaches mid season all the time when things aren't working. The hitters may be bad, but clearly whatever they are doing isn't helping them much, so try something different. What is there to lose? Look for a guy who has had concrete success somewhere else and give him a shot. The downside is exactly the situation with Harris and esp Hinch. If they are so totally committed to keep doing exactly what they they are doing, there is no point in making a change. If they can bring someone in who gets buy in from Harris and AJ to do it differently then it can make sense.

I don't see there can be much to lose by staring over with a new hitting staff and a different approach. If someone can come in and persuade AJ there are better methods I would not be averse.

If this gets much more desperate, the league offices will be watching for trash-can lids on Tigers purchasing cards statements....

I'm waiting to hear the mic buttons will be on automated timers.

I agree there isn't much they can do now, which is why my critique was more centered on their off-season inaction. Trades are possible even now, though the Tigers would be dealing out of desperation and that's a bad bargaining position to be in. The other it that as a general proposition you can't let yourself be frozen by the chance of a low probability event (Javy making a miracle recovery) occurring that might embarrass you. Anyone who believes in numbers has to suck it up and accept that sometimes a rare event can happen but you will be better off in the long run playing the better odds. I'll agree with you that such an event creates a PR hurdle to overcome, but if you are seriously hardheaded about building a winner that is exactly the kind of 'don't be swayed by the great washed opinion' decision you have to make. The fans will love you once you win. Ilitch would be wasting his money paying a GM who is swayed by fan opinion. And even if Javy were to be rejuvenated somewhere else, it will most likely only happen if he finds something that works for him there that he can't find here, so what skin is it off the Tigers' nose? I don't see any value in tying him down for spite. At his point, unless the Tigers are going to fire the hitting coaching staff and start over, the odds of him improving if they keep him are not good. If he goes somewhere else and lucks into coaching that works for him, the Tigers can't be swayed by that possibility - it's irrelevant to Tiger outcomes. They have to pay him anyway, be happy for the guy and pocket the refund on the ML minimum. 😇 Plus -- think about the joy you enable when McCoskey can report on his success somewhere else....

actually the post didn't say anything about the Tigers, only that it is pretty well accepted around the league that some teams are going to do what they can without spending big and whatever happens is what happens. And to make that specific to the Tigers, the whole push toward excelling at development is aimed at doing exactly that - winning without having to spend big. Of course the problem is that while it's a nice theory, history tell us it is a really hard way to win, not impossible, but spending correlates really well with progress to/through the playoffs. 🤷‍♀️ But those are all long term general considerations. The initial comment about Javy vs empty stands is a narrower situation about the human tendency to refuse to walk away from dead sunk cost. You are paying Javy either way - you can either pay him and have him be a drag on your ball club making it less a draw to fans, or pay him and still move on to a better player and get more fans in the stands with a better team. I would argue the former is the better strategy whether you are committed to being a low payroll team or not. My criticism of the Tigers was not to recognize that last off season when there was still a better chance to do something about it, because there was nothing but romantic thinking behind the idea that Javy would suddenly be better this season.

LOL and the the beauty for Wentz on Sunday is that he only got charged with one run. Reliever performance evaluation is interesting because getting lit up once can skew a relievers numbers for months, when as a manager you might well prefer a guy who is lights out 9 days and gets lit up on the 10th to a guy that lets in one inherited runner every time out but has better seasonal numbers.....

I don't doubt for a second that there are teams who have decided: "Better to take whatever record comes at ~$100 million spent and turn a profit, than win with a >$250M payroll and lose money" Baseball has moved toward some revenue sharing, but the winning incentives are still very non-uniform for baseball teams as compared to NFL teams.

Maybe Haley's continuing 20%s have him nervous.

Hmm- The box score from Sunday just called to say "Liars, dammed liars, and statisticians!"

which raises a question: Is Elmer still on the radar or is the view that he has plateaued short of the NHL?

But I do have a problem with people like reactionary NFL owners wrapping themselves in the flag by fawning over vets in their venues to try to polish their 1%er PR while being generally destructive political forces towards the general welfare and even those Vets. That's not the Vets' fault of course, but it makes me cringe at a sporting event when it happens because of the subtext of what is really going on.

I'm skeptical any debates will happen.

and MSM reported remains ridiculous. Huge headline in WaPo this morning from W.VA that GOP chances of holding the Senate "SKYROCKET!" with the Jim Justice win. Sorry, no, the probability of the Dems holding W.Va didn't change at all last night, they changed the day Manchin announced his retirement and nothing last night changed anything at all. The Justice win was a completely foregone conclusion.

In all likelihood the detail would be just murky enough that it would have changed nothing - a scenario where he went down the stairwell head first and one side maintains he was pushed/murdered and the other than he just tripped and fell so the prosecution is a which hunt....etc., etc.,,,,,,,

IDK - The link to Trump seems the most solid thing in the case. The weakest link in the case is proving the payments can't be construed as something other than a campaign expense. The financial records are only fraudulent if the money was spent "for the campaign." If a juror thinks he would have spent the money to suppress the story for personal reasons anyway rather than campaign reasons, the premise of the case collapses. That seems like most effective appeal to make to the jury: That to Trump the money was small potatoes and he would have done it anyway even if he weren't running for office.

right - as a spectator sport it has never provided the drama or football or the speed of hockey and that's why to me it comes down to the experience. I enjoy basketball as a spectator sport though I never played it at all. I have a hard time imagining I would ever watch a baseball game if I hadn't played at it so much. The appeal (to me) is watching a SS snare a liner and knowing exactly what that felt like, or knowing the unique feeling when you have hit the ball dead on. I can't bring that level of 'intimacy' to watching any other sport - so the bar for those sports to be interesting to me as a spectator is higher, and they provide that in a way that baseball really didn't have to for it's 1st 100 years or so. Or maybe another analogy would be that I think musicians themselves are the core group of jazz fans - because they are better able to experience what an improv player is doing at more levels, while the rest of us can only hear it.

what else is a message board for than to swap opinions/speculation? 🤷‍♂️ I do think about baseball more than any other sport though because to me the way baseball has changed and evolved is such a marker for how the larger society has changed. I think it is - at least was, more significant than other sports in that regard because it was so much a part of the culture. Some played football, some basketball, a few hockey, but up to and including the boomers everyone played baseball (and/or their girlfriends came and watched). So it was more a common point of shared experience than almost anything else. But that pretty much ended with the boomers and maybe a few Gen Xers, since we were the last cohort to grow up in that sand-lot youth culture that had existed for maybe 80 yrs prior. Everything changes, that's given, but as it happens to things you are so close to it is hard to look away.