gehringer_2

LOL - worst looking 6 on 5 you'll see in a long time.

Call it time served I guess.

Panthers did a phenomenal job of denying Edmonton any shots from inside the circles in the 2nd despite the Oilers commanding possession.

It's hard to tell from start to start whether to be encouraged or depressed by Mize's starts. It's really been a mized bag of good and bad pitches.

He even stopped and looked, and still decided to come home. You can’t make it up.

What's with the goofy schedule where the Tigers keep playing on Monday anyway? I hate it when they get blown out on a Monday and there aren't even any MiLB gamedays to follow.

I have no idea why, but ever since Mize came to the majors, he has had the problem that he can throw a sinker right at the bottom edge of the zone, which for most pitchers is a good pitch, but Casey gets hammered. Happens all the time. He has to keep to the inside/outside or his stuff low in the zone doesn't play.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

I don't like the position coaches being off limits. At this point he's been here long enough that everything Hinch says is response tested boilerplate, It would be a lot more interesting to hear what the coaches are working on with players, but that appears to be verboten under this regime.

We had some kick ass schools in Detroit once.

209 at AA? Harris might as well buy his ticket to the land failed GMs. That’s a NYC centric proposal if I ever heard one.

then again, Malloy's joy may also be short lived...

This. I think Piston fans are much too sanguine about Cade re-upping. Sure it may cost him a little money to win his freedom sooner, but I find it hard to believe a quality player with the option isn't looking hard at getting out of the worst org and owner in the league as fast as he can.

Probalby what keeps them going against the general exodus of their educated young people are businesses that keep restocking the pipeline of reasonably high performing people by transferring operations there to capture low wage costs.

I was completely crushed when they traded Bunning. It was one of first traumatic experiences of my childhood where the adults in my life failed me. And WTF good was a greek goddess supposed to do for a baseball team?

I'm not sure how you could ever do any kind of double blind study with validity. We do know that almost every left hander that does hit LHP tells a story of having drilled against it to a degree beyond what appeared to be any reason at the time so I think you can say with some confidence that you won't succeed if you don' try, but proving that trying improves the odds of succeeding across a wide cohort would not be easy. You could do the inverse - track whether guys that got put into platoon service got even worse against LHP when they when back to playing everyday, but I'm not sure that's the quite the same question as the developmental one.

Yup - that's what pitchers do. If they never flashed all-start stuff at all, they'd have never been on anyones radar to begin with. I think that's true more often then not for a pro athlete. The difference often is not the highest level they can achieve when everything is right, it's how high the lowest level they fall to is when everything is wrong. A lot of guys can be great occasionally, very few can be consistently great. We see the former and hope they turn into the later, but if they always did it would be too easy, right?.....🌈🦃

Looked through the gamecast. Pretty much everything he threw got hit, but mostly his FB, which started out with decent velo (~95) but by the fifth when he was lifted was down to ~92. The kid does not seem to be developing the endurance to go deep into games (though we can probably say that about Skubal as well, but less so). Sometimes Manning has enough life on his FB to be able to throw it without spotting it well, but not today - he threw a lot over the middle and a lot got hit.

Sure - bit everything tells you something. K rate can also be deceptive if taken too simply. As I noted yesterday, Riley has a higher K rate than most of the current Tigers roster but makes a lot more useful contact.

I agree that BA has been replaced by better measures of a hitter's *productivity* but BA still measures an important skill, especially for a young player who has not grown into his full power potential. Contact skill is still fundamental to every other productive thing that happens on offense. So to me a young hittter's ability to maintain a good average is still important. And I think that is born out by what we are seeing in Malloy. In the minors his excellent walk rate pumped up his projection by higher level measures, but his inability to put the bat on good pitches in the zone is a problem for him against MLB pitching.

The next dilemma is what to do with the OF. Perez deserves to stay but it looks like Parker will be back. Gio is so good at 3B you're not going to give Vierling as much time there as maybe was planned in the off-season, but he's your 2nd best hitter so that means he plays more OF so you will have Parker, Green, Perez, Vierling and then you get Carpenter back from the DL, plus Canha rotating through DH.

people need to re-orient expectation (including myself) given the drop in league BA. Keith just pulled his BA to a point above league average today. He still has plenty to work on but there's nothing to panic about with Colt. Perez has also been a bright spot. I suppose to be fair, if you had added Perez and Keith to a lineup with Carpenter and a Meadows and Tork that hadn't backslid, we probably wouldn't be having 10 run weeks. OTOH, every team suffers injures and guys that slump - you have to have the depth to manage it.

Up until this season, Wenceel Perez has had Isaac Paredes V2.0 written all over him as the next guy a long time in the system the Tigers would give up on. Maybe they dodged that bullet.

Kreidler starts out with a miss on his right, comes back with a miss on his left. Maybe all the injuries have taken their toll, but we're not really seeing that great a glove.

Vierling with a loud out there. 107 off the bat on a line. 640 XBA