gehringer_2

I wasn't a big fan of Willi, but no doubt his game was improving last season in the 2nd half playing mostly LF. You could have decided to bank on that. OTOH, he'd also been treading water long enough in a career that you could have assumed that as well. Coin toss kind of decision.

Manning is basically a FB pitcher and it's not uncommon for FB guys to develop their K potential a little deeper into their experience. Verlander and Scherzer were both 3 yrs into regular starting before their K rates hit 9/9IP consistently. If you hit the league as a breaking ball guy, you may get out of the gate with a more impressive early K rate, but your skill set is probably going to be more ephemeral.

Maybe worse. Rupert had grown to dislike Trump, don't know if that's true of Lachan or not.

He's made a lot of progress. He can still work on getting out of long ABs a little better. One other place he could get even better is if he can move the breaking ball inside/outside a little more. He threw a lot of his sliders properly low but maybe too much down the middle. It was a slider low but in the middle of zone that Muncie sat on that left the yard.

A question with Lange is why he doesn't dump the 2 seamer for a 4 seamer. if you are throwing it against a curve, a 4 seamer will give you just as good deception and it's generally more controllable. Could be the answer is that is that he throws a very flat 4 seamer,

Same old story, same old song and dance?

I don't think it's an accident either. The society preaches cowboy individualism and to admit your dependency, even to yourself, is to admit to failure or resentment over your need. So you intellectually dissociate/compartmentalize your lived reality from your fantasy politics and you preserve that ego myth that's ingrained in your psyche.

Maybe. Do you suppose your glove hand elbow under any more stress fielding than your front arm elbow is swinging a bat? Less predictable I suppose.

did the grifters get grifted?

well, equally not to be snide () that is why they publish the game scores. Players don't really become individuals in the minors until they distinguish themselves enough to be noticed as individuals. So you can follow the general outlines of what the minor league system is doing without having memorized many of the names. You start remembering the names when they start doing memorable stuff. Turn it around, how many Dodger bios do you need to know on a one to one basis to understand those are good players, a good team, and a good system? Hanifee is another in a line of injury rehab guys they've picked up hoping he might end up better than he was before the arm trouble. He's another roll of the dice until he proves he's more.

I'm going to take a guess that Meta is going to soft pedal threads for a while to keep from adding to their anti-trust target cross-section.

remember, this is McCosky, who doesn't know a Tibia from a Fibula. Stand by for revisions to the story... At least it's not his throwing arm, not that he ever had much of an arm to risk.

Speaking of the Ray, news out today that they are going nowhere - literally. Plan to put the new ball park exactly right where the old one is now.

well, you get what you train to. If you start platooning guys in the minors, you're going to produce hitters with a big platoon splits because you will never get better at what you don't do more of. Isn't Riley's story that he hits left handers because his father always pitched to him left handed?

That's one good possibility. There are some others as well. One would be that they were targeting a particular group or commander now in Sudan who was responsible for something previously in Ukraine. Another would be that they were attacking a Russian income source. And it was probably low risk/low cost, the Russian in Sudan probably weren't expecting to have to take on any well trained adversaries.

And to think John Boehner's only ambition on leaving was good wine, good leaf, and improving his tan. What a loser.

or "rupture." But let's not go there.....😟

Yeah - if you enter a topic from the outside with a google search I think you probably get more unbiased results.

Basically true, but there are guys who are good over an extended time - again, Chapman, who was good over about 12 yrs, comes to mind. But there you are talking about the one true weapon - a really great fastball. So I think the pitch profile matters. I think historically it's just harder to maintain command of a better than average breaking ball from year to year than to keep throwing a great fastball if you have the arm to do it. To me, on this staff that means I like the odds better that Foley - basically a high nineties fastball pitcher, will be more consistent over time at the level you expect from him, than Lange - even if Lange, when he is 'on' may be more dominant in stretches. In general I'm just not a big fan of guys who pitch backwards from their breaking ball even though you seem to see more of it now.

Well exactly. But that doesn't mean I have to like it, or believe that a pretty non-standard pitch profile like Lange's has a high probability of being a consistent answer. He's an outlier to the usual successful reliever, so when he falters, I think skepticism is maybe more warranted than with a guy like - say, Aroldis Chapman (who even earlier in his career was a little up and down....) whose tools are those that are traditionally successful in the role. If the Tigers want to give him all the rope in the world, go for it, but I'm reserving the right to say "I told you so" if it doesn't work out.

the fun thing with Mariano was to look at his strike zone heat maps. Always a big white hole in the middle-middle. He just didn't miss over the middle of the plate very often.

It's more than narrative when twitter's search engine won't find return a hit on a well respected poster like Thomas Thiener even when you include his middle initial.

I hadn't remembered that they actually got to an owners vote on contraction. I remembered all the talk about it but not that they actually voted to boot the Expos and Twins. And the Twins won the division a year later!

Yes.

Right, your average reliever doesn't have a third pitch, which usually either results in a bad platoon split or just inability to show a batter anything 2nd or 3rd time through. Problem for Lange is that he is down to ONE pitch. Now if the one pitch is a fastball or cutter and you can command so well that you never miss hitting only the corners, (looking at you Mariano) then you can get away with one pitch, otherwise, not so much!