gehringer_2

RIght, because it's not lack of bat speed, it's purely lack of barrels. Everyone knows (including the Tigers) that Javy's problem is less swinging out of the zone than just getting quicker to the ball. The fan focus on plate discipline is misguided in Javy's case. He needs to find a more compact approach so he can wait longer to commit, and obviously that isn't happening. Is that coaching, is that Javy? Maybe both? Is there some coach out there somewhere who could straighten him out? Maybe. OTOH, no coach has ever found a way to get Daniel Norris to throw a pitch without recoiling off the mound, and he's had a lot of coaches try. So who knows?

You do have to wonder if he wouldn't benefit from a different coaching approach since what the Tigers are doing isn't working. The thing that bothers me about just accepting that Javy's bat is just gone forever is that the continuing quality of his defense argues the reflex ability is still in there. He's not a guy who has just lost a step overall at 30.

Yup. What has happened is that people who are not big TV fans are saving money because they aren't paying for anything, and the folks who used to be subsidized by the those people are now paying more to get all the services they want. From a macro economics standpoint that's a reasonable outcome, but you wonder whether this system reduces overall potential future audiences for the industry or not.

or alternately, you'll find you don't miss it.

Bigbie hit 317 in his *worst* month this season. His has to be one of the longest sustained high average hitting performances in the system in recent years.

Yup. I agree that this big round of consolidation being followed by re-divisioning within whatever super conferences emerge is the likely scenario. And the wild card is still Congress if the public ever elects a less fractious version that would take up an issue like college sports. Not likely while they are still all at each other's throats every day.

Really - I don't know how it could have worked with the pre-war aircraft available. The post war piston craft based on the development of heavy bombers like the Constellation and DC-6 could fly cross country non-stop, which is no doubt what got teams thinking more seriously about moving by the 50's. Another example of the primary mover of history being technology, even though most historians largely ignore technology when they write their accounts.

well, the one thing that is certain, is that the NIL system is unworkable. The overall value of NCAA players is not in their NIL, it in their performance on the field, so paying them for NIL sets up the weird situation where the money the players are expecting has to come from sources that don't receive any part of the primary income they generate. That simply can't last. No number of big donors are going to keep paying College players out of the goodness of their hearts for very long. It's been a novelty for them so far but in general, donors want legacies - things where their name stays alive after they are gone. Paying a JJ McCarthy's salary for a year is ephemeral, the appeal of that won't last very long. These guys don't even like paying salaries to the people in the businesses they own!

The Dodgers 1st season in LA was 58? The 707 didn't enter commercial service until that October. Don't know if any jets were flying commercial in the US before that or not. I suppose travel-wise, a Lockheed Constellation from KC to LA would have been no worse a trip than a train from NYC to Missouri used to be.

So they just lose whatever rep they used to have for being a classier org?

do the Tigers at some point develop a rep for being abusive to players by signing so many guys with little or no intention to even given them a serious look?

right - but that is what is so dumb - it *should* not make sense for it make sense for UCLA to be in the B10 but not a Cal. Imagine you were starting major league baseball from scratch and you decided Pittsburg and Cincy and Det didn't have the revenue to play in the sandbox that NYC and LA did, but you were going to play a chunk of your games against games against those teams anyway even though they had to cobble together some secondary level league for themselves. It's totally goofball where NCAA sports are today. The second sister teams cooperate in their own debasement as they are bought off by accepting paydays for games against teams they have no business playing and who have no business playing them, and are not any kind of serious athletic competitions at all. Where else in the world do you have sports with paid patsies padding your schedule? It's watching the Globetrotters and the Senators but without Meadowlark Lemon. Pointless.

it make perfect sense, it makes no sense. NCAA football is an irrationality as a sports 'league' exactly because there is so little cooperative relationship between teams/conferences that still play against one another. Even baseball is evolving toward more revenue shared across the league. If NCAA football were a freestanding institution, half the teams would have folded because they make no money. But bad college football teams are like zombies, they can't die because schools like EMU will divert general revenues to them to keep them alive through periods when they have no business being alive. And of course if the weak teams actually would/could die, the rest of them would have developed some kind of reasonable overall shared revenue system a long time ago once the good teams saw they were going to loose too many of the teams they want to play. But teams don't die, the have's just get havier and the have not's remain marginal and you have 3-4 games each season they demand full price tickets for that are little more than glorified scrimmages for the power 5 teams that play in them. You'd be hard pressed to dream up such a warped overall organization if you tried.

So in the other thread it was reported they pulled both Perez and Lipcius from the game but only one was called up. What did they do, both go to Iapoce's office and he flipped a coin? 🤔

But you have to allow for the evolution between the exhilaration of the dreamt-of for-a-lifetime purchase, and the various degrees of buyer's remorse a decade or two later. Every owner buys with the idea of being Midas to his franchise. Too many turn into Bob Nutting soon enough.

or being traded

In a word, yes.

That would be a lot more meaningful if there was companion film showing that the magnetometer in question did go off on something at some point in the day to prove it was working.

still doesn't really capture it because you can fairly blame *all* the European casualties of WWII on Hitler.

I think there is also a difference between having a left and right handed player at a couple of positions who pretty much always play the same position when they play, (as did the 84 Tigers), and constantly moving multiple guys to a variety of different defensive positions where you never end up with a defensive team that is collectively sharp playing together. I don't see that as any kind of virtue at all and I don't believe for a minute that the tiny offensive mix/match gained (since you are talking mostly about players that are not very offensively productive under *any* circumstance anyway) is worth the general deterioration of defensive run prevention it creates.

all true. And the other thing we don't really have any insight into is the frustration level between javy, the coaching staff, and Hinch. They may all still be fine and just disappointed in the outcomes, or they could all be well into a blame game dynamic and done with each other, which would play a part.

If you grew up with siblings you'd know the basic answer in Ukraine to "why not peace?" is "He started it."

If they can make another pick-up like ERod and Mize comes back strong, they'd be in a nice place. If they pick up a Mike Pelfrey and Mize's FB is still flat, not so much. 😱

The sad part with Javy is that despite whatever the Tigers want him to do or are or are not effectively helping him to do, since he has come to the Tigers it's his Z-swing % which down and his O-swing has hardly changed at all. He not swinging fewer bad pitches but swinging at significantly fewer good ones, which could be why he's a less productive hitter now. It appears possible that whatever effort he is making at being more selective is simply resulting in taking more called strikes. That said, O and Z swing rates don't tell you whether the contact made was successful or not - so large grain of salt. https://www.fangraphs.com/players/javier-baez/12979/stats?position=2B/SS

Probably. But what is certainly true is that by now, it's clear that whatever the Tiger coaching staff has tried to offer Javy has been a total failure. Given that there has been at least some reportage that he is not an un-coachable player, maybe he does see getting out of Detroit into an org that may offer him some kind of help he can use as his only route to future success, because on the other hand, if I'm a player is also seems clear that Detroit is committed to what it believes and if it's not working for you, you must be the problem.