gehringer_2

Hit and walk seems to be Max's day at the office.

there are a lot things killing baseball for youth but the biggest is just that they don't play it, and that I think, is due largely to factors way beyond anyone in the sports control - namely low suburban housing density and small families. You need a bunch of kids closely matched in age to have any chance at a sand lot baseball culture - and it just doesn't exist in many places in the US today. I grew up in a city with lots of 4 kids to a household houses on 1/8 acre lots. We could raise 15 to 20 kids across only a couple of grades to play ball everyday after school. We had 4 diamonds at our Jr high, and 3 more within 1/2 mile of there. There were all full most days. Then we all grew up and played intramural and city league softball. That's where MLBs current fanbase came from. And I doubt that is ever coming back. So all they are left with is trying to make the game more of a spectacle (ie. the HR), to make it entertaining for people who don't have the experience based vicarious identification to what is happening on the field. But it will be a different kind of fan with a different kind of relation to what they are watching.

did you see the attendance? Pathetic. There is money to be made by facing up to sunk costs and putting a better product on the field.

I call oxymoron. There is no such thing as good process that produces consistently bad results. In pro sports the process can have no intrinsic value apart from its results.

I think the single most needful mindset in a sports general manager is the ability to see his own players objectively. There was no good reason to believe that a 30 yr old hitter with a sub 600 OPS, poor pitch recognition and a long swing who was not injured, was likely to be a better hitter on his return a year older - he put the evidence in front the Tigers over 550 PA and they pretty much decided to ignore it. The Mets were ancient history by last October.

Problem is Harris didn't find a SS to fill the hole even knowing that the single most probable outcome of Javy's terrible 2023 would be a terrible 2024. Management by wishful thinking? And don't bother mentioning Kreidler, whose most probable outcome based on his history would be right were he is, the DL.

The best HR hitters go about 1 HR in 15 AB. A decent hitter carries a better than 250 BA, which is one in 4. If you are playing for more than a single to get Riley in and extend the game you are playing to lose. This is not an intelligent batting team - whether it's the players or the management, something needs to change.

yup. Hinch is channeling his inner Earl Weaver - he apparently wants the guys playing for the long ball all the time. Problem is he doesn't have a HR hitting team.

Wenceel for hero tonight?

this isn't going to last long. walk the man and set up the force. But Hinch won't

Riley on a 1 for 24

the umps taketh away, the ump giveth back. Total gift to Canha

sounds good to me

LOL - this game could be over in 1:50 if someone had scored.

the thing is, the league is completely aware - all the data goes to the league, so you have to believe this is what the league wants. I can't imagine why, but it is what it is. If the Umps were being rung up for these zones in their internal evals, they wouldn't be calling them out there. And the give away is that it's not just misses at random, it's giving away the outside pitch in particular, so I don't believe it's general incompetence, though there is plenty of that. We are getting somebody's idea what they want.

another game with an ump calling strikes half a foot outside and nobody can score. Batters have no chance. These guys are pitching well but I'd wager with ABS this would not be a scoreless. game.

I'm sure some are more than others - which is the problem. But you also see umps not give away the outside and it's the same catchers behind the dish, so there is certainly an ability level to not being conned.

Newspapers used to make their money on want-ads, which had nothing to do with the news either, so maybe appropriate.

Haberman has not been the NYTs finest hour - but if IRCC, she started out as a freelancer - another symptom of a system making choices without money to back them. I'm fine with people lobbying the Times to change their coverage - I think a lot it has been silly, breathless, vapid, but people do have to remember that the bottom line matters there as much as at Fox, they write what sells to their readership. If you are selling writing that is always the bottom line.

Framing may matter at the the top/bottom of the zone, but any umpire worth his salt should not be influenced by where the mitt ends up inside/outside - he should have the line of the pitch judged before it's in the glove and it's mostly the outside pitch that umps are giving away - so I don't really think it's framing. I agree framing probably makes life harder for the ump, and when they first started doing it I remember saying the umps should tell the catcher that if he has to move the ball after catching it I'm just assuming it must have been a ball. That would have put an end to framing before it ever got off the ground. Water under the proverbial bridge today....

I guess the Times can view itself as having certain public service obligations - but they also have to stay afloat in a business whose economic model has pretty much collapsed in a generation. At 50,000 ft it's a little unfair to say newpapers have some greater obligation to political outcomes in a system that won't even make websites pay them for their content. The NYT has a reader base that knows they aren't going to vote for Trump, don't really care about him, have already dismissed him and the need to know anything more about him than they already do. If those are the people paying your monthly bills, those are the people you are writing for. And it's a false premise anyway. The low information voter, when they finally do start paying whatever attention they decide they should before they vote, is most definitely not going to be subscribeing to the NYT in any part of that effort.

It's quite possible that the Tigers approach to hitting can't work for Javy and on the wrong side of 30 he can't change - so he's is caught between trying to be a good trooper and do what his coaches want him to do because they think it will help him, and the fact that he's a pure reaction hitter and has to just clear his head and swing away. Plus the reality that with that long swing he may have been doomed at 30 anyway as soon as he lost a few milliseconds off his reaction time, whether he wants to change or not.

I don't know Hinch's dynamics in a this kind of situation. From my observation over the years, most players end up coming down on the Magglio side - you have to ease back and stop pressing - stop trying to "do too much" to break a slump, but Hinch has a level of subliminal intensity about him - which in most cases is probably a big virtue for him, but that make me wonder if doesn't put more pressure a young guy like Tork playing for him, even if he doesn't mean it to. For instance, does he have that gift for getting guys to loosen up that Leyland had - which can help when a player is slumping.

There was a lot of public push back over Afghanistan, but hard times after the Soviet collapse and 20 yrs of Putin have created a different Russia from that one. But that is not to say Putin cannot drive Russia to collapse. The problem for the West is that total collapse will not be a good outcome, you want the regime to collapse before the country does - not so easy to see the path to that. The West's strategy is based on the Russian army collapsing eventually - and any armed service will eventually, but of course that requires Ukraine not to collapse first. It's purely a political economics question. Modern warfare is foremost an economic battle and the West's resources dwarf Russia's, but Russia (well at least Putin) balances that by being willing to put all their resources into the fight while the West wants to win on the minimum required investment. Missing on that calculation is where disaster lurks for Ukraine.