gehringer_2

Not a bad idea. Considering that the cost of Urshela is only a fraction of the investment in Baez they need to get a better return on, it's a reasonable strategy. The Tigers have gone from a team where most of the onfield chatter was in Spanish a few seasons ago to pretty much the opposite.

seriously bent.

That's the problem. The big money interests need the cult because that is were the voters are to keep them in power - they certainly can't run on the popularity of being robber barons. But the robber barons don't care really care about liberty or justice or good schools or even good roads, they will always be insulated against those things by their wealth, so they are perfectly happy to appease the cult in way that are destructive to the overall society. So their motivation is immaterial to whether the damage done is real. Back in the day - in the post WWII era, there was a concept that had some currency that the rich should be interested in good public policy because to invert the phrase - "what was good for the US was good for GM", that in a heathy society business ultimately does better. But that has broken down because we have a capital class today that doesn't even really care if their businesses to well, as long as they can squeeze all the value out out them, then buy up and squeeze another one dry. Any remaining idea of 'Noblesse Oblige" is dead in America today. Trump is a great fit in that milieu since he cares about nothing but himself anyway.

It actually a good question, but the cross over I think is Racially Pure Patriarchy. The ascendancy of the tribally empowered white male is threatened by female power (sex) and circumscribed by the power of the organized masses (democracy and majority government of the great unwashed). That mindset lets you be puritanical and anti government.

Thinking is hard. Easier to sub-contract that stuff to the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, or just Fox.

Still, MLB pitching is big step up from AA - he hasn't done much to prove his odds of hitting adequately in the majors are very high yet. Keith has done a lot more and he's not a certainty by any means either. We need these guys to make it if the Tigers are going to be good, but sadly need is not enough to make it happen.

No one ever said it better than Gene Wilder: "The common clay of the West....you know.....Morons...."

There oughta be a law..... (we have that one in MI and the stores keep trying to get it repealed)

I've always assumed that when the writer of Ecclesiastes was writing about 'vanity and striving after wind' he was thinking about theology.

Who knows, maybe Lyon is a guy who's never had the right coaches or lockerroom, or maybe he's fortifying his Wheaties, and he can keep playing like this for 40 or so more games, but that is what it's going to take unless Yzerman pulls a rabbit out of his hat ....that just happens to also be a right shot Dman.

Two periods for Lyon, one for Larkin and Kane. When Veleno's group went out there in OT you knew it would be touch and go to survive until the next shift and Lyon saved it for them again.

A good part of that was that the teams in the East were better than our divisional rivals, so the differential in results was just another marker for the team's talent level.

Would be Tuberville's most appropriate campaign slogan.

a blue parking permit for UM lots would only cost you $781/season, if they would sell you one, which they won't.

Boras is playing a long game on his big 4 this year and I guess I don't blame any mid-market team for not wanting to get into the middle of it just to be a stalking horse adding to the ultimate cost for the high $$ team that will eventually outbid them. I don't know how much I'd like being a Boras client knowing I might be a guy that gets sacrificed even if he succeeds in driving up net salaries for his clients collectively. I sometimes wonder if the Boras agency makes guarantees to players to keep them on-board and actually pays off and we never hear about it when one of his clients ends up out in the cold.

I think the Ilitch record is a mixed bag. They have definitely been a catalyst for the area around the ballpark and they have put in as big a share or more of their own money as sports ownership anywhere else. What they are guilty of is overpromising on secondary development projects they never had any particular interest in but signed up for to oil the political skids on the projects they wanted. The other big knock is that that don't want to see the parking lots developed. Well, d'OH! If I had direct interest in filling 3,500,000 seats downtown every 12months in a city where everyone has to drive to my venues, because public transit is non-existent and the population is all over 3 counties, I think I'd want to be forgiven for wanting to keep a lot of parking available. That just the reality of operating those venues in Detroit. It's not NYC with a subway line or even Minneapolis with trolley busses and light rail all around the park.

'22 WS was salary #4 vs #8, '23 WS was #4 vs #21. Mets and the Yankees spent a combined $600M to both miss the playoffs last season. Spending done well certainly improves your odds, but spending per se is no guarantee of anything.

I think this is certainly a possibility. IMO McKinstry was not good there, tho maybe he's better with a better knee, Ibanez I don't think has the arm, I thought Vierling had looked decent there but maybe they don't agree. If whoever is there is just a place-holder for Jung at the ASB, then you might as well play a real 3B whose cost you don't mind and who you might even move at the deadline if he does hit some.

I'm not sure now is the time that is the test for how much the team is willing to spend - the test comes if the young core start having success and the team either has to pay to tie them up or face letting them walk. You can argue they shouldn't be committing much in the way of long term dollars on FA (ie.typical older) players when they have large payroll liabilities looming before FA contracts proffered today would be off the books.

I'd guess part of this is McHenry's way of saying, "You could have had me and I would know what I was doing.:

True enough, all we have is what he is saying now, how ever colored by time that has become. I just think it's interesting that he doesn't remember his coaching from any team as having been good. A lot of players will have at least one coach that leaves a positive impression.

did you see Alito's latest complaint about a decision where counsel pretty much challenged anyone in a jury pool who had a religious belief that the defendent was sinful? He thought that amounted to society labeling the religious as bigots. Well, Jeez Louise, he only has it completely backwards. If you are going to tell me that you think legal behavior of a defendant is sinful - then your *are* a prejudiced juror! The man can't reason his way out of a paper bag without invoking half a dozen logical fallacies. No-one's religion deserves or can or should be given special status. That just frosts the hell out of *bigots* like Alito (yes it is a *bigot* you see in the mirror every morning Sam) that people challenge their bigotry in the name of the very freedom and constitutional order they want to wrap themselves in while maintaining those prejudices.

Turner pretty much said that no-one on any of this teams worked with him on mechanics. His hindsight might be colored at this point, but certainly none of the teams he played for impressed him enough to him to bother noting that they were ever helpful.

I'll put this here because Turner used to be a Tiger cub... Henning tracked down Jacob Turner to write a story about his 'recovery' from his baseball career, which has gone fine for him and if you are interested the story is here. But what I though was interesting wasn't the focus of the story. It was how Turner found and lost his fastball without ever knowing how or why. Turner had been a low 90s guy in high school and then his junior year he suddenly had 98. That got everyone excited, including the Tigers, who drafted him. But then the 98 just disappeared and pretty much never came back, even under the coaching of the 4 different teams he played for (I'd note he wasn't impressed with the state of pitching management at any of his career stops. Apparently the Tigers weren't the only team that didn't even have video of their pitchers). So you wonder (as it appears Jacob does a little even now), if he played today would all the biomechanics analysis and tech available today gotten that FB fastball back and turned a marginal career into the one closer to the one that was projected for him when he was drafted? I suppose the other possibility with a <20 yr old that it was just bad luck on the genes. That a player might be blessed/cursed with a body that reaches a point in physical development where muscle tone, bone geometry and ligature elasticity just happen to combine to create arm with the right balance of speed, strength and whip to produce that 98 but then all those growth process push right past that sweet spot in less favorable directions and a year or two later it's a different enough body that 98 is no longer in there.

GOP lawyers are stuck in a sepia toned 1950's world where everything looks sort of brown?