gehringer_2

Maybin could be pretty good if he just said half as much as does now.

Do you suppose Diane Sawyer or Gwen Eiffel ever thought to bring us the news of the day in a little off-one-shoulder frock?

QFT. If what we think didn't matter to us, none of us would be here!

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BR has him about neutral as well but his sample sizes for fielding are still too small to be meaningful. With Kerry it could be he looks worse by the eye test than maybe he is be because he is not good at all near the wall, and those are the plays that get replayed a lot. OTOH, he seems to do OK going to the line and coming in and he has thrown a couple of guys out so maybe on average he is average. Cumulative fielding stats take so long to be reliable that they aren't that useful when you have to decide how to play a guy now. You probably get a better idea of what a guy is capable of from individual play statcast data but even then just because a guy makes some good plays doesn't guarantee he is also reliable - a la Righanne Rheighbourne.

Fair point. Maybe it's a case where the rule doesn't really do what it was intended to do. The original idea was probably more to help guys who were major league ready get a chance to get out of an org where they were blocked, but in practice its operates more as a potential prospect cherry picking exercise on teams with global roster constraints unrelated to the particular players being left unprotected. When a team has a MLB ready minor leaguer that's blocked, they are still going to keep him as insurance or as trade capital and expose some guy so unready other teams will pass. And there we are.

Doesn't matter what you think of the rules - for sure a lot of them are dumb, but both these guys broke them in ways they knew/had to know were going to be unacceptable so no excuse for either of them. Hazing is out - period. Everyone knows/should know that by now. You can't spend 10 min at a US University and not understand that. Impeding, obstructing investigators will get you hammered under any and every enforcement regime. In Harbaugh's case it may be true that the NCAA is a joke 24 hr/day, but he was still a fool to thumb his nose at them unnecessarily as long as he was still subject to their decisions. Won't hurt Harbaugh though, part of his appeal is his weirdness/windmill tilting

The Ziesenheim twins were born identical, but politically they were night and day.....

Baddoo is becoming expert at the Willi Castro tease - will he or won't he ever be the player he shows you once in a while? TBF, I guess he's still short of 1000 MLB PAs, it just seems like he's been around forever.

you can put it that way, but willful ignorance has always been the go to defense for coaches, which is why 'institutional control' - that they are absolutely responsible for what other people are doing, is a concept that applies to them to a degree that doesn't apply to most people in normal society. So I get why Fitzgerald is being hammered. But I also agree on Harbaugh - that whole episode was an unforced error he put a lot of effort into committing, so he can go ahead and enjoy the V-days.

Vierling played about half his games at NotreDame at 3d in 2018 before he was drafted. Since then virtually none at all. Given his lack of time there he'd have to be a natural born glove to move over there now, but you sure couldn't tell by watching because he's looked fine there this week - I'd say better than McK or Maton. I don't know why you would play a guy in the OF if he could play IF, but maybe because they were figuring him initially as a CF and the his speed would be wasted at 3B? IDK but I really hope they give him a fair shot to see. Keith said his college coaches never cared about his fielding or asked him to work on it and he almost felt cheated when he found out it was going to matter as a pro big time. He has supposedly dedicated himself to working on his quickness, IIRC somewhere he said he lost some weight etc. I suppose if he's never worked at it that leaves reasonable possibility of upside improvement. Keith has played 16 games at 2B and 56 at 3B so far this season. He's only started one game at 2b this month so maybe that means he's holding his own at 3b.

Don't know, only that they've played him there and at 3rd. The question at 3rd is usually the arm - that did in Tork.

a bad day at Blackrock?

Vierling only played a few games at 3rd for the Phils last season - mostly OF, but he looks pretty decent over there. I'd give him as much time there as possible the rest of the way because if Vierling could stabilize 3b it would be a big get for the Tigers. It allows Keith to fall back to 2B if in the end he can't cut it at 3b.

Torkelson auditioning for 2B that inning.

Rogers has wheels.

Cabrera wants Beltre before the season ends.

ReTorque!

three out. Fly ball to CF on a full count for the last out. Congrats to Lorenzen

two down

one down

He's at 111 pitches after 8. Is he coming out in the 9th? EDIT: Yes

It's been reported that they are working with him to cut down on his whole body rotation to he can be shorter to the ball. It's pretty major surgery - if it works at all probably not until he can commit to it full time for a ST

right field. Just trust it Spencer.

This is a very mechanistic, analytics focused management team. That is probably a perfect match for supporting pitchers, not sure it's that much real help to hitters. At this level, hitting is as much between the ears as it is the mechanics. In Tork's case in particular, I think the idea of a few more days off here and there seems an obvious move to which Hinch seems oblivious. Just from his body language you see nights it looks like the game is wearing on him.