gehringer_2

they can't manage to string together any kind of winning streak. Pretty much because they still aren't a very ball club.

playing the IF in there? Righhhhhht.

that should do it.

but that's what makes him so endearing...

Torkelson out of phase except on the one fly ball tonight. Hasn't looked for that 'hit me' breaking ball they keep throwing him on the 1st pitch.

It doesn't make much difference to platoon hitters that can't hit pitching from either side....

Same as it ever was.

If Turnbull had been able to make himself tradeable before the deadline I would have been OK with them paying Lorenzen and moving Turnbull, but it was not to be....

Probably as much for being a jerk about the hamburger

yup

Hunter had me peeved with him at the end. I believe he was hurt a lot worse when he went over the wall in Boston at the end of 2013 than anyone knew but he wouldn't admit it to anyone - net result he was real liability in the field all the next year. They won the division anyway but he remained a defensive liability.

it is a little ironic. I think Biden has been a better president by almost every policy and effectiveness measure (esp on foriegn policy - odds are that Russians would be burning Ukrainian language school books in Kyiv right now if Obama were still in office). But you still wish there was a way to splice BIden the political species, and Obama the public persona, together.

and not to lose the forest for the trees, I just read that by 11/2024, the 2016 electorate will have rolled over by 52 million voters. No matter what else is happening, for the R's to still have a shot you would have to assume that purple trending boomers are turning hard red as fast as hard blue millennials are entering the electorate, and I have my doubts that can be close to true. I know well enough that people have been predicting demographic armageddon for the GOP for a while now without it coming to pass, but we've never had the young side entering cohort be so monolithically on one side.

No heart check program at USC? It's a nit to pick but you'd think a guy at Shams' level could write a better lead sentence. That one is not only awkward but chonologically backward.

Yeah - Maton and Baddoo both seem to need more serious retooling right now that can happen on the fly at ML level.

It's not only that - I'm not that big on pitchers with his profile. His best pitch is that 2 seam FB that darts all over the place, but it's a double edged sword - but he doesn't really command it, it just goes where it goes, so depending of how it's flying, he's on that knife edge of either getting behind or not having good enough stuff on any given day. Wentz had that issue in his last start - when you don't have a FB you can't throw for a reliable strike it easy for the wheels to suddenly fall off.

just send a tape of last Saturday's game along with the offer sheet.

true. Maybe it's just inverse recency bias but my confidence in him is low.

IDK - how 'high level'? The risk trading a guy like Manning is that he's at a point where it's too hard to guess where his career is going - it's trying to decide if you are selling too low or not. I guess I'd rather buy talent on the FA market than make a trade with so much uncertainty around it, but YMMV. That and the fact that the pitching pipeline has gone from being very full to very empty since Manning, Skubal and Mize have been called up. Wentz had another good AAA outing, but that doesn't seem to translate for him. Faedo had a good start but his stuff is just not that good. - he basically has to be a Maddox type guy to succeed. His command might get there, might not. Maddnn and Jobe are about it in terms of high level potential that anywhere close.

A couple of differences in the respons dynamics could be: When you drink a bear, you are usually holding that logo in your hand. in a sense you are personally labeled by it in a way that you don't get by walking into and out of a store - so the ID factor is higher; the other would be that Target customers are mostly women, beer drinking is mostly men and MAGA is mostly a white male stance.

I'd guess the perception is driven by the fact that he doesn't play very well at the wall, and those plays have very high visibility and skew perception out of proportion to their numbers. Plus he didn't have a good defensive rep coming of the AAA. I'm usually skeptical that older players ever improve their fielding much but it does happen. Willi Castro improved more last season than I thought he could.

Interesting about the stance. He started out pretty conventional. I don't remember when he changed but this is Akil in 2021: If I had to guess it would be he/they made a change to something that they thought might improve his coverage against LHP??

If you look at the trend, April was his worst month - his OPS has increased every month since. So that is what you'd be betting on.

LOL - I've reached the age where I have to worry a lot more about keeping the brain working - baseball is good for that.....

Skubal does not have particularly great statcast spin numbers on his FB, but it's a very live FB none-the-less. He must have a really good spin axis or something for those rotation numbers to produce that kind of vertical break and the resulting whiff rates - and 98 doesn't hurt.