gehringer_2

Did you know Anderson had remade himself as a pitcher in Korea?

Jack is a guy I'd like to see Hinch give a less rope than he usually does. Sure he works his way out sometimes, but I think the probability of an inning going south for Jack in a hurry is high enough I'd be willing to give up the times he gets out of it. Esp when he's at his third or 4th jam.

Kerry just hit it out opposite field on a half checked swing. That's why he's hard to get out of the lineup.

this game starting out a little sloppy. As long as the Cards are sloppier...

weird inning for Jack. He would have been in even worse trouble if Walker had had the confidence to challenge the 2nd strike call. It was absolutely a miss.

It goes both ways though. I remember when playing with Pavel Datsyuk earned Abdelkater a contract that we found out was a mistake once Pavel went back to Russia. If he's not good enough to be at least somewhat productive without a lot of help then he's probably not a building block.

easy to assume, more difficult to prove. I'd be interested to see some controlled work that shows how well the brain actually does avoid crossing itself up. You certainly do see the issue in industrial safety incidents where context has changed.

I think the more technical term for what happened to Philips is 'a bender.'

Hitting side good, Madden throwing 30 pitches and not getting out of the 1st not so good.

Summer evenings in the Twin Cities are pretty nice. Sure you are at risk at the beginning and end of the season but the rest of the summer outside is a pretty nice payoff. They could have tried for retractable but they didn't have the room at that site, the $$ probably weren't available, and the easiest retractable designs are open air so they don't keep in heat which is probably a bigger issue than precipitation.

Not a terrible send with 2 out, but OTOH, the Tigers have been hitting the ball hard.

trump only likes pilots who don't get shot down.

F15 was shot down.

Classic L/R alternation.

It's not only the Dmen learning when to do it. It's also the whether team supports it. I think one of the great failings of the Wings as team is that their two big D men are two of the best puck possession talents on the team, but the lack of ability of the wing's forwards as a group to rotate and back check in any useful way means the Wings can never let those two play to their full potential. McLellan has them playing a little freer, but not all that much. Of course you generally need speed and size in your forwards for them to be good 200 ft players (even if DeBrincat is the exception) .....

'bout time Hinch stopped trying to outsmart himself.

I don't argue the idea that there is an optimum glove for each position, what I'm speculating about is how well the brain copes with using two different gloves that are relatively close to each other from day to day. Seems like you are working against your brain's ability to key into 'knowing' the glove as an extension of your hand. If you are going from an IF to and OF glove, that's a big difference, less chance of mental 'template' confusion I would think. But I wonder about the ability to mentally resolve a relatively small difference as successfully under pressure. The idea being that if you are charging to scoop a slow roller and your brain has got the wrong finger length dialed in -> probability increase for booted ball?

Right - a corporate NDA can only lead at most to a civil suit. If you are dealing with classified information you are subject to criminal sanctions under various Federal Statutes. FTM even if you never signed anything!

I imagine you might play 3rd with a slightly larger glove than SS but I have to wonder if switching gloves for that small a difference is even a good idea if you are playing both position a lot. The human brain is really good at learning things like how long the fingers of a glove are if you give it a lot of reps. You are giving something up to not take advantage of that spatial learning. Is that more or less advantage than the other glove can give you? I'd like to believe teams/players really know the correct answer to that, but baseball has been based on so much incorrect lore/conventional wisdom in the past for so long it's enough to give you doubts.

What's worse, they have yet to a single player to the roster who is as good a forechecker as Luke was. Again, where is the overall concept behind what players they add vs let go?

Tackiest lectern in the Western Hemisphere there.

it's coming down to the question of 'do you know how to build a winning team?' Does wings management AKA SY, actually have a plan for what properties he needs in what proportions to build a team that doesn't collapse in March, of has he just been going along collecting as much talent as he could without having a plan how the various pieces need to fit together? Sort of like Randy Smith, or generations of Lions GMS who collected players but never built a team.

is it just HR hitting or is it the more elusive capability to hang tough against good pitching as opposed to feasting periodically on bad pitching? The two things are probably correlates of one another, but I don't know they are the completely the same thing.

Back in the day you still had some huge ball parks, Cleveland, Polo grounds in center, Tigers in CF, the original LF at Yankee stadium, Fenway in RC, There was a lot more opportunity to hit balls a long way that were going to stay in play, and for those teams in those parks big OF arms were more important. And I think it's also true that guys did a lot less power training. I think the rise of cookie cutter short OF ballparks and the change in training toward pure power lifting for HR hitting just eliminated throwing as skill for most OFs for a long period. I think today with much more sophisticated training, we again see more guys who train for HR strength but maintain the elasticity needed to keep their throwing arms. And my very casual impression is that there has almost been a renaissance in the number of guys out there today who do throw well from the OF. The Tigers just don't have any of them - beyond maybe Kerry or when we put a regular SS/3B out there, and even then its not quite the same kind of throw.

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