gehringer_2

Among guys I saw a lot - which is to say Tigers, the two that really stand out were Magglio one seasaon and Cabrera. Maggs only did it once, but that year, it he just didn't miss, it was like he was in control of every AB. And the same with Cabrera - in his good years, you knew that even if he made an out, it was a BaBIP out - he could almost always hit the ball hard somewhere. I think ~400 is probably somewhere near the absolute limit for BA. You can hit the ball hard everytime and about 60% will still be fielded - so any time a BA starts getting into the 350 (or ~400 OBP) range and up, I think you are looking at a hitter pretty much in control of the large majority of his ABs. Kaline may have been as good as that, but I didn't see the beginning of his career, and he was in the middle of his career at the height of the pitcher's era when a mere 300 BA was winning batting championships. In that period nobody could get close enough to that 'hit it hard every time' level where as a fan, you knew that player was a threat to do something every time up the way Cabrera was.

they'll give Bassett two years and he'll be out of baseball at the end of '26.

can't argue with anything but this last line. If they are in contention they keep him. If they trade him when they are headed for the playoffs they might as well burn down the ballpark as well.

I don't think these numbers come out of thin air. You present a brief to the arbiter (it's a panel but I'm going to use singular anyway) - your arg for why your number is correct. The Tigers no doubt have a well laid out story that carefully works through all the comps and using perfectly reasonable logic, gets them exactly to $19M, and that is the set of assumptions and logic they will present to the arbiter. Of course Skubal and Boras will have done the same homework but with a different set of base axioms, and the logic there will lead to inexorably to $32M. Each side then hopes the base axioms the arbiter picks to start with are closer to the ones they used than the ones the other side used.

And that is the same risk a team faces if they want to set up on their own - i.e. they can't guarantee how much advertising and subscription revenue is going to be. Still, you would think that for an organization like ilitch's, that is already steeped in entertainment expertise, at some point they'd rather take it on themselves than keep negotiating give backs to the black hole of failure Fox/Bally/Diamond/Fanduel has been.

OTOH, players do get PO'd at their team over negotiations in general and have that motivate them to go somewhere else. We just need to look at the case of Scherzer in our own recent history but it's more likely to be over ham-handed public or private statements. The arbitration process itself is getting to be old hat at this point. Maybe when the process was new and players were unprepared for how it was going to work it was more of risk -- or someone on the team side is just obnoxious during the process etc. A owner or GM with an axe to grind with a player can always find a way to make a player mad easily enough whether inside or outside of the arb process.

well, it's turned into something, not sure if 'joke' quite captures it.

Trump admin against the Banksters should be lots of fireworks.

true. the availability of online course work has opened a whole additional universe of ways to have someone else do your work. So at UM, the Engineering School runs on a honor code system. A faculty member acquaintance recently told me that the honor council, which back in the day might have handled a mere handful of cases in semester, is currently buried in a huge number of cheating charges mostly originating about AI. While that's a very different student cohort and issue, it symptomatic of the growing difficulty in maintaining integrity in the system. I mean if you are losing the straight arrow engineers, who do you think you can still trust is doing their own work? 😱

Ha - I bet the truth is closer to the fact that the deaths of a large % of existing addicts in is probably what is driving that down. It sort of the natural course for fatal addictions. Fentanyl is so easy to produce illicitly that if the Chinese have cracked down someone else would be filling the void if the demand were not falling.

I guess until we hear differently, one would assume things like the progress toward degree rules are still in place, but good question. And what will happen the 1st time a guy getting big bucks loses his eligibility? You would think NIL contracts specify that it's the athlete's responsibility to maintain his eligibility. But that would be in a sane world. Are they going to demand those clauses when Sunshine State U is offering the $$ without them? Sure they are....🙄 Things change constantly, but at least relatively recently it was true that UM didn't have a lot of faculty in thrall to the athletic dept. Of course there were profs here and there that had reps for making life easy for the varsity but generally not enough that it wouldn't be hard to far a guy to dodge all the way through. Maybe that's changed/changing, I would doubt it though. Most of the faculty in A^2 have come from other places and worlds 180deg from sports, there isn't a lot of natural identification or sympathy compared to a place were you have more home grown faculty. But there has been so much trauma and upheavel in academic governance at UM in the last few years with Covid and two failed presidencies and since I'm a couple years out of the system now, I couldn't tell you anymore.

which also means they are all different. And that's the thing, you don't know what nerve you might hit with one guy which might not faze 99 other guys. So it's probably too variable to worry about that much.

the front of our house looks right out (/ in) into the street. We have a big picture window and we have always had some kind of drapes or blinds on it. But a funny thing is that a few years ago we were doing a bunch of redecorating and the we had taken down the drapery rods and had some work do to on the window, and it was probably like 18 month we had nothing on the window, and it became completely normal. Then eventually we put in a new blinds system, which we are back to closing pretty religiously when it gets dark. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

this. Was true from the beginning and remains so.

yes - There was a long stretch over which either because of Mr I or DD, the Tigers didn't have any cases ever get to the arbitrator. I don't remember for sure, there might have been one late in DD's tenure, but for the Tigers it was essentially - no cases go to arb.

have to agree. Pre-arb salaries are by definition completely divorced from any connection to a player's value. It would be an odd player evaluation system that gave them any weight. But then again, what's not odd about the way baseball players are paid? 🙄

maybe also notable that Price's number was a settlement, not the arbitrator's pick. Do we know what numbers the two sides submitted in 2015?

indeed. And the numbers aren't only for the arbitrator, they set the frame for any negotiations before the hearing. Once the numbers are public, each side has to evaluate if they think the other made the more reasonable proposal and how that affects the strength of their own position on settling before arbitration.

I heard a radio report today about a Gen Z survey - they aren't bothering to save because they don't believe they can ever afford a house and the ones that do invest like stuff like cryto.......🤷‍♀️

Skubal is better now than Price was then and there has been about 25% inflation since 2015, so Price's award was closer to $25M in today's dollars.

It's not like it will be his last. I think then it would have mattered more.

Canuck aren't very good, but these are the ones you have to win.

I do always wonder what Jordan's game would have looked like if he had played in today's defensive rules. I'm pretty sure he is probably the greatest one one one player ever, but would that still get you to GOAT status in today's game against the kind of doubling Cade regulary sees?

gamesmanship. I imagine the Tigers figure Slubal wins arbitration almost no matter what he submits, to the team is going to lowball just to encourage him not to get so greedy he could lose.

one thing they have to fix if US politics is ever going to get better is Sullivan, Which tragically isn't even on anyone's radar really. It has simply destroyed any standard of responsibility in US media and politics. It's one of those relatively obscure 'process' issues that sit below any public conciousness where the general public has no concept of the havoc it wreaks on responsible civil discourse. It was a poorly reasoned decision made for short term purposes in a highly stressed environment and it needs to be fixed. Probably worst in terms of ultimate impact than even CU, though I can go either way on that.....