gehringer_2

Jung has shown fair power in the minors but it hasn't translated. He's not a high enough contact guy to make it unless he can hit for some power against MLB pitching. That's his hurdle.

yeah - I really wish the Wings had leaned on him not to go. A team would not normally be on fair ground doing that but given what happened last season the Wings would be completely justified.

that's the thing though. If you are going to capture and try Maduro, do it for stealing the electoral process in Venezuela, not a bunch of garbage stuff. But Trump would never do that because stealing the next US election is exactly what he dreams about every night.

Using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Hopefully the poor fool Venezuelans hunkered down and didn't suffer many casualties.

this should be funny, but it's not.

it just stands as confirmation of what people all the way back to Schembechler had long known but found it pointless to carry on about - which was the traditional powers in the South were powers because they were spending money on players. When that option was made available to everyone, that advantage disappeared and that's why the dynasties in Alabama like Georgia are struggling. A good marker was Nick Saban. He knew which side his bread was buttered on, and when he saw he was going to have to settle for same toast as everyone else, he bailed.

You surely jest.

Jung has spent more time in the minors as a 2B than a 3B. They started giving him more time at 3rd after they had to move Colt to 2nd to protect his injured arm. Last season at Toledo they played him about 50/50 2B/3B.

Losing most or all of one their college seasons was still a loss for some guys coming out in 21 or 22.

just for clarity here - you are using "#1 pick" for Sweeney because he was picked in the 1st round, at #20. #1 pick could also be taken to mean the 1/1 pick (i.e. Torkelson or Mize). The counter point on Sweeney would be that the Yankees and Dodgers had both already had him and been willing to give him up. I think given his age and his pedigree he was a reasonable pick-up that still had a chance to make it, and we needed a SS with some likelihood of having at least a high floor, which fit Sweeney. FTM, in his favor he is still under 500 MLB PA, but on the down side there didn't seem to be any sign of improvement last season either.

and why is he wearing a sheer dress shirt?

Yeah - sometimes it's the supposed 'good guys' on a team that create the toxicity for everyone else who sees things a little differently. For instance, I don't necessarily see James McCann as the good guy in his altercation with Iglesias. Jose had had hardships and taken real risks in his life McCann couldn't dream of and if Jose didn't look at a baseball game as life and death he had earned that right. Didn't mean he wasn't giving you his best on the field.

there are of course two possible sides to that result - that Harris hasn't done much to rebuild the team, or that he has but while he was rebuilding the offense the pitching behind Skubal has gotten weaker, so that better starting line-up is still laboring at 500 playing in front of the rest of a worse staff. The reality is somewhere on that continuum. And TBH, all the debate about how good Harris is as a trade and FA manager isn't going to matter a spit if the org can't also start spitting out pitchers who are also of the calibre of McGonigle and Co.

It's certainly an object lesson in the limits of major league coaching in baseball. Unless all the guys who didn't hit at the end of last season never recover and their careers are all down the tubes (not very likely) we are faced with the reality that even though the talent continued to be there, the coaching couldn't get the team out of the funk it was in.

I had no problem with the value proposition per se. They could not have gotten any more for Isaac. My complaint was that they mishandled Paredes to where he never had a chance to show us - or potential trade partners, that he might have had more value, which he subsequently did.

Certainly possible. And AJ always knows enough to say a lot of nice things about the people he works for, so you wouldn't necessarily find out he didn't wanted their advice if he didn't.....

I think you can separate a couple of different aspect here though. You are talking about the long term health of the org issues - the tech, the data flow etc., but I think most of us looking at the situation at the end of '24 are asking the question did he have any input over that period in particular that helped them win - that's a more dubious proposition, and I think the conclusion that he absolutely was not working to make the playoffs that year as of his trade deadline moves is inarguable. I'm sure he was pitching in with whatever help he could offer once they started winning, I just don't think there was much specific other than those general kinds of support and managing the Toledo shuttle, that he could provide. He cast the die, if didn't come up as he had to have expected because his team and his manager exceeded his expectations. I don't know how much credit you can give a guy for that.

Once the players are on the roster how much input does a GM have on what happens on the field? It would be managing the rotation of guys up and down from Toledo. That's a task that certainly affects outcome and where a manager and GM are cooperating. Now we don't really know how the org handles that. I'm sure there are orgs where the manager simply calls the GM and tells him who he wants when, and there are probably some where the GM provides a lot more input into the decisions. So Maybe Harris gets a lot of credit here, maybe 95% belonged to Hinch.

IDK what the 'right' answer is. We point to the NFL as the model for parity, and the one virtue in the NFL is that good ownership wins by being good ownership, without having to worry about the other guys having more resources. The Lions have been the poster child for this - years of failure under WCF because he didn't know or maybe just wouldn't run his football team the way it needed to be run to win. Shiela comes in, cleans house, and puts a winning team on the field with exactly the same resource base. Now the question is, if you are a fan, is it any worse to live in a major market NFL city and be doomed by a bad ownership (say the NYG) or be a baseball fan in a small market city doomed because despite good management your team doesn't have the resources to compete? It's futility for the fan either way. And in at least one sense you can argue that the MLB system is better because by making fans in big markets happy more often you are making more fans happy. That is an argument, but of course that the NFL's cash flow now dwarfs MLB's that argument hasn't really proven out overall.

Correct. Among other things the collapse at the end of 25 exposed an apparent weakness in AJ's managerial toolbox - he apparently doesn't have the gift that a guy like Leland had for loosening up a tight clubhouse. There were all pressing that last month and he didn't find the key to break them out of it. Hinch has a lot of strengths but nobody is good at everything and he didn't succeed there where someone else might have. Once 1st place was lost and the long slow train wreck was in the rear view mirror, they recovered enough to get within a run of the ALCS.

the numbers floating around for Framber Valdez have been 5/$160. Tigers could certainly afford that but I haven't seen them listed as in the hunt even once.

just for context, ESPN is reporting that 9 teams are paying at total of ~$400M in luxury tax this season, led by the Dodgers with a $169M levy. What I didn't know about the LuxTax is that the first 50% goes to the MLBPA pension funds, not the low revenue teams. So that only leaves about $9M per team in LuxTax revenue payments, and even that money is distributed not equally, but based on some formula by the commissioners office that rewards teams that are building their fan base. (See Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_luxury_tax ). Basically LuxTax transfers amount to about 1 WAR of payroll per receiving team. IOW - hardly moves the needle. According to the same Wiki, MLB's main revenue share system requires teams to pool 48% of their non-media income (basically gate revenues) after deducting "stadium expenses" and that is then split equally 30 ways. Very roughly, a team that sells 3M ~$50 tickets would have $75M more gross gate revenue, maybe call it $100M since rich teams probably make a bundle more on luxury boxes as well, than a team that sell 1.5M tickets, but who knows what is left net after what the teams are allowed to deduct as 'stadium expenses'.

I hate shoot outs too.

likewise. One of the dumbest rules in the NHL. If a linesman misses an offside just play on - it was probably so close that overturning a goal because of it is just negating a good play that didn't get any material advantage by being off side by so little the linesman couldn't see it.

So is M fan taking a moment to thank Oklahoma for keeping Alabama in the playoff long enough for them to have to hire Wittingham?