gehringer_2

What was weird is that he had a great May (and without any great BaBIP luck), then the quad - rehab - and poof, it was just gone.

Parker is getting awfully close --- working on a 920 OPS this month.

I've wondered the same thing. It is possible to tie yourself up too much to play this game but you'd think with all the training knowledge, tech and supervision guys would know how not to do that anymore.

Baddoo has 5 hits since Jun 1. Not looking at all like the hitter he teased he might be. Many big slow swings and misses, the short fast bat seems AWOL.

yeah - I'd rather see one big trade for maximum return on a well researched piece that's going to have an impact than the std 'let's bring in a many bodies as we can get and hope one hits" approach that we've seen fail so much.

Beer is a tough market. Brand loyalty is really thin, with food and drink there is always a tendency for people to get bored of doing the same thing, and of course major corporate management today is too greedy to just be satisfied to coast along with any normal ebb and flow of market share. So not surprised they were willing to make a drastic marketing shift, maybe surprised they hadn't pretested it better. Even if you believe they were shifting for purely principled reasons (does anyone?), you then have an obligation to be sure you help your cause rather than hurt it.

Cisnergooooooone.

Is this Giants' road uni the closest in the league to the Tigers road uni?

Man - such a world of difference when you can put even three decent hitters in a row in a lineup. Get that to maybe six......

If he'd quit bouncing up and down on his delivery he'd probably have less trouble wit his hips. Then again, he spent so much time pitching from the stretch he didn't have the opportunity to bounce that much Saturday... Drives me crazy watching pitchers do that. How can all that extra motion possibly help them keep reproducible mechanics???

If it's on the internet it must be true? (j/k) I'm sure the term 'virgin' vinyl has an underlying meaning related to it's quality, but what exactly that means is probably squishy. But seriously, you have to remain a little skeptical though, knowledge of chemical and polymer processing tech is extremely esoteric, and the vast majority of sources are just regurgitating things 2nd, 3rd, 4th hand or worse. Plus the plastics industry is part of the oil and chemicals sector, where lying through their teeth to the public is matter of course so there is always a lot of misinformation out there even from 'official' sources. The industry would love people to believe they do things like recycle PVC without actually doing it. Could a record company recycle just its own stock to its presses - yeah but delabeling and handling might not save them much money - PVC isn't an expensive material. I worked in the book business when I was in college and publishers usually took overstock books back for some level of credit. The books didn't get recycled, they were destroyed (or resold to other stores where there was demand) to prevent them ending up in discount bins and undercutting new sale prices. In fact with paperback trade books, they didn't even want to pay for the return shipping of the whole book, you could get credit for just tearing the covers off and returning those as proof the stock was no longer merchantable! Given the chemical issues in actually reprocessing PVC, I wouldn't discount that motivation for record companies wanting unsold stock back as well regardless of what they claimed about what they did with the returned stock. 😱

just for a base point - if you look at league batters with an OPS+ right about 100, their averages run from 230-280 with most around 250 - so you can sort of take that as your average value hitter's BA range in '23. not running any quantitative comparison but just eyeballing the same list in 2014/2015 it does look like averages were running higher for OPS+=100.

LOL - Quoth Chuck Grassley "We aren't interested in whether or not the accusations against Vice President Biden are accurate or not"

'Virgin' is sort of misnomer to ever apply to vinyl. And vinyl is almost never recycled. And certainly in the early days there probably wasn't much recycled material of any kind around. But recyclers generally don't take vinyl because vinyl is never a pure material to begin with, it always contains various chemical fillers know as plasticizers to prevent it from being brittle, so if even if you want to reprocess it you don't know what you are going to end up with, and the other big problem is that it emits lots of acid when you start reprocessing it - bad for your equipment! But that doesn't mean you didn't have vinyl with other recycled materials materials added to it. And like most polymers, even with 'virgin' material there are big differences in original production chemistry, mechanical properties and quality available on the market. *https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2023/01/pvc-plastics-now-recyclable-after-breakthrough-by-michigan-scientists.html

Even if you don't have a great musical ear, it's easy to hear the noise type and level of vinyl by listening to the run-out grooves. Whatever you hear there exists under all the music as well. But that isn't even the last word. What you really care about signal to noise ratio. You can put a recording on quiet vinyl and still have a worse S/N ratio if the producers crammed too much time on the side and sacrificed signal level to do it, which was not uncommon. This was a bigger issue with classical recordings because the music doesn't always divide into convenient chunks for ~18 minute sides, but pop/rock groups also occasionally had their reasons for wanting to push the times up on their releases.

They can always move a player to Detroit. ....Just sayin'

I wonder where they will have Wenceel playing. He's been all over the field recently for Erie. Obviously grooming him as a utility guy at this point. Utility guy that can't play SS a little bit limited though.

We talked about him and he goes 0/4 for the first time in recent memory....

Since Jun 1, Akil in a 5 for his last 51 freefall. He does have 7 BB in that stretch but even with that the OBP is only 215. That just doesn't cut it. Whatever he had going in May left the bldg with Elvis.

I think usage patterns matter, how you sequence guys and how you schedule their work. Unless one of them happens to talk about it in some interview I guess we aren't likely to know how Fetter and Hinch split up planning those aspects other than being familiar enough with Hinch's managing in Houston to recognize whether he is doing things differently with Fetter on board. I think it's possible for a manager to have a lot of insidious bad effects - particularly on young hitters, if he pushes them into or makes their playing time contingent on taking approaches that don't work for them. Again I don't know any a fan would ever know - at least not until long after the fact of a player leaving and going public with his grievances, which you can't necessarily believe either. And of course what an activst manager does might also work for a lot of guys. But that is the downside risk I worry about with a guy like Hinch who clearly has a more "interventionsist" kind of mindset around the how and what he want his hitters to be doing than for instance Jim Leyland ever showed.

Mangers don't win games, but they can lose them.

other half of the Faedo move I assume.....

I'd almost like to see the admin tell NK "he's a criminal and a deserter, if you want him, you can have him" and see if they call the bet.

Well Austin goes 6' 3" 225, if we ever see him play.

Check that - as per statcast almost all the hits were given up on his slider. guess he should have thrown the FB more even if they didn't feel it was very good tonight.