gehringer_2

The common Aussie expression is "No worries", with or without "mate." That seems to be gaining some traction in the US.

I think if you have a FO that believes in what it's doing, the implication that because there is a consensus a team "has to" do something just isn't that determinative. The Tigers have made two recent picks that went strongly against conventional wisdom of what they 'should have' done, both in taking Jobe and Clark. Plus there have always been enough 1/1 busts - not even counting Mize or Tork - that a team shouldn't feel too bound by what conventional wisdom is.

I think you have to pretty much start being skeptical of anyone/everyone once they start getting a little famous or making big $$. It's a very distorting thing.

If teams didn't pick against consensus pretty regularly Langford would be a Tiger.

IIRC Tork'ss final year in college they didn't pitch to him much - he ended up taking a ton of walks. That certainly didn't help anyone see any weaknesses in his bat.

Has Madrigal ever played as well as he looked like he would be since his injury? Of course you can say Mize's value has been driven down by injuries too, but Madrigal may have been more promising before his than Mize ever was in the majors.

From the reporting there were custody issues in this divorce. That is always ripe for both the parents and/or kids to play games to get what they want.

I recently read that polling response rates are now under 1%. There is almost nothing 'random' about who and why some people still answer a phone or text. So they are no longer actually random sampling, what they are doing is regressing the survey data they can get to correlate well with what they expect as a reasonable outcome or past outcomes and then reporting that their poll is reproducing a reasonable outcome. But any idea that they are getting a representative sample of the population - which is the fundamental assumption undergirding sampled polling, is pure fantasy today. What they are doing will work as long as change remains incremental, because linearity will always hold well enough over small increments. But they are guaranteed to miss anything big happening. Which is not to argue that it is, only they the polls are locked into methodology making them likely to miss it.

Inflation is horrible. Used to be you reach about 13, pops might allow you to have a BB gun of your own.

LOL - The VFW logo is a Maltese Cross and in VFW installation rituals people march out (or at least use to back in the day) the pattern of the 'Cross of Malta'. I watched many of those as a kid and and only later as a adult wondered if any of the WWII guys had any idea who the Knights of Malta were. Probably not.

I'm not lying when I say I wasn't wild about Mize. IIRC, Brady lost some top end going into his last college year, so to still like him you had to assume he'd figure it out and get it back the stuff that made him the consensus preseason #1. Turns out he never has - he's just a low 90's guy, but he's still learned to pitch with that and give him team some innings - so he's still produced a lot more than Mize. OTOH, I've always thought you have to take it with a bigger grain of salt that most did when a breaking ball, and esp split finger pitcher, has big college success because a lot of it comes out of the zone, and MLB hitters aren't going to go out of the zone nearly as much, so I was at least a little skeptical of Mize. Sure enough once Casey started to get some innings in the MLB in '21 he had so little success with the split against MLB hitters that he cut it's use rate from 18% to 13% and threw sliders. This year he's trying to throw the split more again - probably getting some pointers from Kenta.

In 2018, if they were set on taking a pitcher, the other highly touted player was Brady Singer. He didn't have a good final college season and fell to the Royals at 18th, but he has 8.5 more WAR than Casey and has given the Royals 400 more IP than we've gotten from Mize.

dagnabit! The idea was not to have to face Merrill. EDIT: no harm, no foul!

Holton, Vest or Foley? EDIT: Holton it is.

Someone asked last night who on the Tigers can hit velo. Parker says "Me."

I just want to at least see some evidence he's becoming a smarter - as in higher OBP - hitter.

Yeah - He keeps teasing - he'll show some flashes, but at some point he's got to become a consistent difference maker and hope is getting harder to sustain. Still, you know like day follows night he'll have a couple of great years for someone else after they cut him loose.

Like his last start he did get a little better as he went but he needs to be better out of the gate.

I don't know if 3 games is enough to get them to reconsider their left-handed push but I hope so. It's too easy for your divisional rivals to load up on LH relievers. They can do that a lot faster than you can develop RH hitting once you go too far down that road. As always, the fact you think you can exploit a statistical advantage today doesn't mean your opponents are just going to stand still and not respond so you can beat them to tomorrow.

Dimitri Simes and his wife both indicted today https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/us/politics/russia-us-simes-indictment-election.html

Just no life/movement - esp on his FB. It's been an issue since the day he was drafted.

This guy is 15 yrs late for the vasectomy he's needed.

Meh. Overkill. Say anything with a smile and the right attitude and it's fine. It makes be feel guilty to accept service at a place where I feel a condition for employment by the staff is to be autonamatons.

It's not the speech, it's the law. You can't spread around foreign money without registering as a foreign agent and foreign money is about the only kind the law does say you can't spend on an US election - though there are even some loopholes there.

I suppose normalization of outright treason is the logical endpoint for the Trumplican program to normalize everything else that should be disqualifying.