gehringer_2

People keep getting dumber. I'm old and when we were kids we knew Jingle Bells was not a Christmas Carol.

I suppose it might make a difference whether you know your are going to the next base or not. If you are going 1st to 3rd and you try to run that as a smooth arc at max speed, you are probably better off hitting 2nd with which ever foot keeps you on stride. If I'm going straight to 2nd, then decide or am waved to 3rd, I need to make a sharper pivot and if you go inside foot to the bag you get more leverage to make the sharper turn?

People mostly 'believe' lies that make them comfortable in their pre-existing prejudices. To a degree I will defend and agree with '84 that there is a level of dishonesty at work where people are claiming 'belief' because they willfully refuse to 'let' themselves know/learn what is true. They make a conscious choice to protect themselves from the truth. I wouldn't justify people like that either.

The SO just got an all day run around from Amazon customer service on an error on a book order. The normal routine of web pages that just went in circles and chat bots that just disappeared mid-contact. Ironically enough, the last few times I dealt with ATT, which used to be totally terrible, they actually tried pretty hard. Their service people don't know what they are doing half the time, but were at least trying. 🙄

Interesting to see a story in the NYT today about Fetterman deciding he's no longer a 'progressive' and he's OK with taking flak from the left - mostly about Israel but also immigration. The Dems do need to jettison the progressive approach on immigration and make a deal on the border - the current stance hurts them a lot with voters. There are very few voters anywhere happy with a chaotic situation at the border, and there is a broad public understanding that asylum rules passed with the intent of protecting political refugees are now being routinely abused by economic advantage seekers. You can have sympathy for economic advantage seekers and still understand that the law as it exists requires a process and limits and the practical outcome of letting people into the country as political refugees when they are not is an abuse of the law. The US political consensus has not produced legal sanction to an open border and regardless of one's sympathies, it is true that for the left to try to force the border open by normalizing abuse of asylum claims is just as much an end around of the democratic process as anything the right does and it ticks off large numbers of voters in the same way.

They sucked you in and bided their time, then POW!

you have learned the hard way why you Never, Ever put any bill on autopay.

The thing that makes it look worse for Cade is that if he’s a difference maker player, the team should at least be better this year than it was without him last year- on the assumption of other things being equal. So you have to accept that the roster below Cade got materially worse, or that Williams is a disaster - but there may easily be enough truth to both to have hope for Cade.

There are two ways of looking at it, and until Weaver is gone and the roster turns over (and assuming Cade doesn't bolt) we won't be able to prove it either way: 1) Cade is great but despite that Weaver has assembled such a historically bad roster than even a great player can't lift it above a 0.100% win rate. B) If Cade were as good as his backers claim, the Piston's couldn't be this bad even if you invited 4 other guys off the street to play with him - i.e. every great NBA player lifts his team. Time will tell. I am sympathetic to the idea that Weaver has been multiple steps beyond total incompetence, and given the obviousness of that fact, it's beyond depressing that he is still employed because it means the owner is just as lost.

Same list but only 4 regular starters. Most teams can't get to 5 reliable guys anyway.

Has there ever been a GM in any big 4 sport that still had a job after 4 of 49?

polling is close to useless anymore. everyone measures the same numbers and then has to apply huge normalization factors that swamp any signal in the real data. Bottom line is all the polling is anymore is the pollster's assumptions about who is answering the poll and who is likely to turnout, and they really don't have more than a clue about either.

Good. Now lets see him do it when the Pistons are in competitive games and the other team is trying.

Can a whole team be mentall fragile? This is a weird group. Every night it's like Forest Gump's box of chocolates.

So the basic charge here is that Thomas is a 'kept Justice' by white conservative economic interests? A man willing to keep doing the right wing's bidding as long as the pay and perks are good enough? IIRC there is a term for that in the American lexicon

The question is where is the overall trade-off sweet spot between giving up a little in recovery optimization and using more relievers, which is definitely moving into sub-optimal territory.

I think part of the reluctance is that for all the science being applied, teams still don't know enough about recovery cycles to know what is safe to do, probably because no-one wants to take the risk and maybe do it wrong, which is probably the only way the data ever eventually emerges. They know the five day cycle, they think they know that if they keep a guy to 20 pitches or so he can go 2 days out of 3 or maybe the occasional 3 out of 4 (though I have my doubt about this given that reliever wastage rates seem to be worse than starters!). But they just don't have any confidence to say "we can bring a guy back after 3 days if he throws 50" or whatever the case may be - or even how he should train on the differing cycles.

Correct - you can't just go to a six man rotation, that just cuts all your starter innings even more. You have to find a way to block more longer pitching appearances - more in the range of 4 IP average, and then have a starter take those spots instead of 2-4 relievers. For the Tiger the obvious 1st move would be to coordinate use of Mize and Manning on the same game so they average 4 IP each - though it wouldn't have to be evenly split starts. They might split 6/2 on day and 2/6 another. If each made 30 appearances that averaged 4 IP, they'd be a nearly the perfect work load and you would have saved the BP over 100 IP.

Well, it's about time some clever manager figures out a way to reverse the trend of more and more innings being shifted from starting staffs to bullpens. If you can distribute 150+ IP to a 6th starter over a season that probably replaces 3 relievers- allows you to lengthen your hitting bench etc. Only a matter of time until teams figure out ways to do it.

Temptation to make a bad move probably isn't that high yet. It will probably get worse as the team gets better and the allure of deal that could get them 'over the top' grows stronger. That's when we find out if ownership is in it to be good over the long haul or will cash out for one big season.

He probably won't work much more than 100 innings or so, but 20-25 5 inning starts is still potentially a big contribution. The big question to me is his stuff. Before the injury his FB needed to improve and the happy talk is saying that with the the back issue fixed the FB is improved. If that's true, maybe we'll see more of what made him a 1/1.

IIRC the second one hit him in the side of the foot didn't it? Whatever - but on the spectrum of things that that might give a guy the yips hopefully getting hit in the foot is fairly far down the list since it's not particularly 'scary' when it happens like getting bonked in the head, even if it did produce a longer term injury...

🙋‍♂️ Only risk in that he's more expensive than the typical lower cost tiger rehab signing, even for the one year - I suppose whether possibly wasting 14M for a year is risk or not is of course in the eye of the beholder.... It's not a sub replacement Cabrera for 5 years at $40M risk, but it is 65% more on the table than in the Lorenzen signing, which was more along the line of where I thought they would end up. Of course, inflation has affected pitching.....

What did they expect? What's his strength off the ball? He's not a slasher, he's not a great 3pt threat.

Lions were hoping for that waaaay back in '68 with Mel Farr and Nick Eddy but never actually got close.