gehringer_2

Today we face the classic statistical paradox. For Seattle - a 90 win team, assuming just an average opponent, the odds of winning any three consecutive games is only about 17% but the odds of them winning today are 55%.

Is Blumenthal running for anything anyone here is voting for? What do I care what he did? Or what Dubya did or didn't do - his last election was 20 yrs ago. The guys in the present tense are all bad enough. We haven't actually had a combat vet in the WH since GHWB and most of the country wasn't even born then. And the one combat vet who has run since then had a couple of slightly loose screws (John "I'm suspending my Campaign and Sarah Palin is a great pick" McCain) And we've had two guys that ducked service completely since. Let's stipulate a lot of jerks have been elected, that military service doesn't necessarily improve a president anyway, and then maybe resolve to do better?

I don't know if you need a batting superstar, but you need some pretty good guys who are at least consistent at the whatever level they play - i.e. don't slump much/often. Ramirez is only an 850 OPS - that's borderline "great hitter", but his worst month was 715 and he has virtually no platoon split (being a SH helps there but is still no guarantee) - so he always shows up and he's a threat against all pitching. The Tigers absolutely are missing that. Torkleson has probably been the most consistent Tiger hitter, but he's not a good enough hitter overall to carry things. The rest of them either are slump prone or have big platoon splits - making them neutralizable when needed.

We are so screwed. Just saw an interview with SF Fed Pres Daly on Axios. She's gung ho to lower rates - chasing higher employment. It's like we never learn anything. Using interest rates to chase employment is exactly what created the mess in the 70's - exactly. There is almost nothing I ever agreed with Milton Freedman about politically, except that he and the 'monetarists' are 100% right about money supply and inflation. It's trivially simple - so simple that is why 'sophisticated' people think they must be able to maneuver around it, but you can't. Inflation is the rate of change in the value of money, and the value of money is determined by the supply of money - how fast the Fed Reserve adds money to the economy. It really is that simple. If inflation is already above target and the Fed increases the rate of supply of money (decreases interest rates or increases their bond holdings) - inflation is going to get worse. There is no hocus-pocus that can change that inevitability. The fools in Congress that tasked the Fed Reserve to pay attention to employment in the first place where just that. The only goal of the Federal Reserve should be stable money because you don't really control employment with the money supply anyway - that part is a mirage (as should have been understood by 1980). Or a short term transient at best.

well not unless that team from June shows up.

appropriate to end on a BaBIP.

Tork seems to be the only guy who can do anything and he's only doing it when it's too late.

the one truth in sports team management is that if you aren't moving forward, you are moving backward. If you aren't getting better you are getting worse. Stasis is not an option.

Hard to compare generations in any sport. You could ask whether Shanahan would have enough speed to keep up in today's league.

I believe the challenge system is going to give a lot of hitters a boost next season, but while that may be good for our hitters, it's only going to exacerbate the problems this pitching staff has throwing strikes.

be that as it may, if they go down in this series without being any more competitive than they have been so far, that plus Sept in general will stand a as huge black mark for the organization that will take some serious future winning to live down, and as thin as the pitching pipeline is, they probably only have until Skubal and Mize walk to do it.

they need a run for every out they have left.

IDK, I'm not sure I could hear that over the sounds of a plus-sized soprano wafting in over the horizon.

well, now they need a Bert.

well, we got.....1

so you just make whoever you bring in an 'interim' to freeze your players? Or do they limit the 'interim' designation to a current staffer to prevent that?

I don't know if I buy the illiteracy piece more than in part. I do believe a lot of it is because the numbers tell teams that all-out hitting is the way to go, but there is some kind of fallacy lurking somewhere under all the data, which I think is that at some point a hitter who doesn't concentrate on his contact skill loses everything else along with it - e.g. Riley Greene.

The other disappointment is that the commitment to continuous improvement has absolutely stalled with the young hitters this year. Colt has been a bit better overall but really no better than he already was in last season's 2nd half. Tork is basically back to where he was in 2023, but not much better than that. Dingler is pretty much the season's only real hitting success story, and one guy per year aint enough.

they have been for a while. All we can hope is that somehow they snap out of it before they run out of games, but time is getting damn short. And clock just ticked a minute closer to midnight.

No, they aren't all this bad, but they are in a rut and the staff hasn't known how to get them out or what to offer to break the downward spiral. This is basically a technocrat staff that finds itself with a big human factors engineering problem on their hands.

It's actually pretty amazing you can go 6 weeks without one hitter on your team getting red hot just by random chance.

TTBDNS ☠️

Tigers need to be ready to swing and run to first on one of Gilberts 0-2 wild pitches.

and they never completed the strike out with the throw to 1st.

Jack is freezing up, can't throw strikes. Luckily someone chased a ball.