gehringer_2

yesterday probably signals the high water for the obstructionists though. They either have to dump McCarthy now or see their threats of the last month exposed as toothless. And if they dump McCarthy now, sentiment against them is strong enough that some kind of consensus candidate is a much more likely result than them getting in one of their own.

Yeah - it's it's not going to be easy to upgrade the offense this off season in the FA market. If the team breaks through next season it will most likely be because the pitching remains a strength, Riley makes it through a full season, Meadows sticks, Keith comes up and they both hit well. They can try to swing a big pitching for hitting trade, but I not excited about moving Skubal and I don't see anyone else on the staff having enough value to another team to get back difference making players. Hinch and Fetter have a little magic going here now where they are getting a lot more out of a lot of pitchers whose trade value is probably less to other teams than what the two of them are getting out of them for us.

Sounds like the wheels are spinning in both chambers right now. House Dems stalling to read the bill, Senate Dems have started a parliamentary holding action in the Senate to slow things down there as well.

Yes, Miguel's mother was a ball player.

No question that two people with a relationship strong enough that they can tell each other to GTH when they are wrong can be a powerful force working together. The question is always how long that will hold as the stakes get higher.

Well, the end of Bo's career was set on a football field. But actually I meant more that the science for the training methods for each has probably diverged in recent years.

Dems frantically searching to see if the Reps have buried any land mines.

Heck, even if it went to court, this case would be classic he said/she said. Likely precious little trustworthy evidence available from either side.

I wonder if football experience is a plus or a minus for working in baseball? 🤷‍♂️

It's been gratifying to see Meadows come on strong at the finish - but he'll still end the season with <150 PA, so promising, but not bankable. Keith looks to be about as sure a thing as any minor leaguer ever is, but that is still something quite short of bankable also. If they sign hitters, I am not concerned with them ending up with too many good players, that's an easy problem to deal with, I am a little concerned that if they sign good players they won't commit to finding playing time for guys like Meadows and Keith. To me the org has already shown itself to be more conservative than I'd like.

Wouldn't they get more for Skubal alone?

As Edman has noted, the risk with Skubal remains more on the injury side than the performance side. OTOH, the docs should have just gotten a good look inside the elbow and one would assume the Tigers know what they saw.

Giants' problem isn't too unlike the Tigers' - they don't hit. How of much of that you can ever lay at a manager's door remains an open question.

I hope someone tracks down where his money is coming from. That should be a much more interesting story than his campaign.

but there is a point of decreasing returns here as well. If you spend 100 dollars, maybe you spend 5$ on controls to keep your losses to $5, so you have a spending efficiency of 90% and 5% residual losses. So if you spend $6 trillion, you should have $300 billion on the table to save right? But maybe you don't, because the reality is that you may already be at a point where it will cost you more than $1 dollar in additional controls to save each additional dollar, in fact you may be at at point where your last dollar in controls is already costing you more in paperwork and compliance reporting than the last dollars it's saving. When you spend 6 Trillion $ it's always easy to find the cracks that the dollars are seeping though, but it is not always true that they can be closed for less money than it cost to do it.

Or it's just that the Bush administration was one of the most generally incompetent and incoherent in ante-Trump memory. Bush's legacy is the beneficiary of Trump having redefined incompetence to a level that has pushed the Bush admin back to a perception of normalcy.

I've looked for anything about this more than once and never found anything more than it's the Umpires judgement whether the batter offered. The rule book offers no guidance on what a swing is. Conventional practice has coalesced around the bat crossing the plate, or angle of the wrist but none of that is actually in the book. https://theathletic.com/354170/2018/05/15/whats-the-rulebook-definition-of-a-swing-in-baseball-there-isnt-one-but-there-should-be/

I went to a MudHen's game when challenge was in effect. It went very fast. At first I had no idea what was initiating the challenges - it was the batter tapping on the top of his head. It's much less intrusive than the way they do replay. You could miss the whole process if you were eating a hot dog.

Angel could have claimed that he read 'intent' in Harper's overall actions and it wouldn't matter that his bat stayed back as far as it did, because that criteria is nowhere in the rule. That why it's a dumb rule. They should just define the swing as the bat crossing the plate, maybe with something about the wrist angle, and be done with it. But they never have. On the other side, the 'inverse' of the rule, where a guy's bat crosses the plate when he is bailing out at a pitch thrown at him and he takes a called strike for his effort to save his noggin to me is an even dumber application of a bad set of rules.

over 300 Senators have died while still in office. She must be one of the worse cases, but it's only a matter of degree, not type.

A robot could easily make the call if there was any objective, geometric definition of what constitutes a swing, but there isn't.

I've never liked the 'control the zone' mantra for hitters because it misses the point. That is the outcome you want, but you don't get there by telling guys to "swing at strikes." Every hitter thinks every pitch he swings at is going to be a strike - the problem is the pitch fools him. The last thing you want is to paralyze hitters having them wait too long to make a decision because they are trying not to be wrong. Then they miss everything - you get a tentative hitter like Tork was last season who couldn't pull the trigger on a middle-middle fastball. If you want control of the zone, you have to give guys tools to allow them to wait longer and still get the bat there in time. Or like Torkelson - just get them to where they slow the game down enough so the talent they have can work. Then you will get better control of the zone, and a hitter that is also less tentative instead of more. You never want the hitter thinking about his decision - it always has to be see ball/hit ball. Clearly the Tigers do coach guys on how to be quicker to the ball, so I suppose my compliant may be more the rhetoric than the reality, but it still bugs me when Hinch says a guy 'has to be more selective' like there was some kind of knob under the guy's cap he can just turn to the next setting to do that.

Let the extortion begin https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/38514196/mel-tucker-tells-msu-file-wrongful-termination-lawsuit

Still, something to be said for a guy that is actually doing it and not just projected to do it.

He was mostly a baseball guy but I'm not impressed with his homework anymore. Maybe I was not as deep into baseball then but I remember Pat as being pretty knowledgeable about baseball once. Not so much anymore. For various reasons I have been stuck in a car on Saturday mornings in recent years so I've had the 'opportunity' to listen to him again and I can't say I still think he is actually up to speed with Tiger issues. So hard to believe he's working any harder on Lion's issues.