gehringer_2

I call oxymoron. There is no such thing as good process that produces consistently bad results. In pro sports the process can have no intrinsic value apart from its results.

I think the single most needful mindset in a sports general manager is the ability to see his own players objectively. There was no good reason to believe that a 30 yr old hitter with a sub 600 OPS, poor pitch recognition and a long swing who was not injured, was likely to be a better hitter on his return a year older - he put the evidence in front the Tigers over 550 PA and they pretty much decided to ignore it. The Mets were ancient history by last October.

Problem is Harris didn't find a SS to fill the hole even knowing that the single most probable outcome of Javy's terrible 2023 would be a terrible 2024. Management by wishful thinking? And don't bother mentioning Kreidler, whose most probable outcome based on his history would be right were he is, the DL.

The best HR hitters go about 1 HR in 15 AB. A decent hitter carries a better than 250 BA, which is one in 4. If you are playing for more than a single to get Riley in and extend the game you are playing to lose. This is not an intelligent batting team - whether it's the players or the management, something needs to change.

yup. Hinch is channeling his inner Earl Weaver - he apparently wants the guys playing for the long ball all the time. Problem is he doesn't have a HR hitting team.

Wenceel for hero tonight?

this isn't going to last long. walk the man and set up the force. But Hinch won't

Riley on a 1 for 24

the umps taketh away, the ump giveth back. Total gift to Canha

sounds good to me

LOL - this game could be over in 1:50 if someone had scored.

the thing is, the league is completely aware - all the data goes to the league, so you have to believe this is what the league wants. I can't imagine why, but it is what it is. If the Umps were being rung up for these zones in their internal evals, they wouldn't be calling them out there. And the give away is that it's not just misses at random, it's giving away the outside pitch in particular, so I don't believe it's general incompetence, though there is plenty of that. We are getting somebody's idea what they want.

another game with an ump calling strikes half a foot outside and nobody can score. Batters have no chance. These guys are pitching well but I'd wager with ABS this would not be a scoreless. game.

I'm sure some are more than others - which is the problem. But you also see umps not give away the outside and it's the same catchers behind the dish, so there is certainly an ability level to not being conned.

Newspapers used to make their money on want-ads, which had nothing to do with the news either, so maybe appropriate.

Haberman has not been the NYTs finest hour - but if IRCC, she started out as a freelancer - another symptom of a system making choices without money to back them. I'm fine with people lobbying the Times to change their coverage - I think a lot it has been silly, breathless, vapid, but people do have to remember that the bottom line matters there as much as at Fox, they write what sells to their readership. If you are selling writing that is always the bottom line.

Framing may matter at the the top/bottom of the zone, but any umpire worth his salt should not be influenced by where the mitt ends up inside/outside - he should have the line of the pitch judged before it's in the glove and it's mostly the outside pitch that umps are giving away - so I don't really think it's framing. I agree framing probably makes life harder for the ump, and when they first started doing it I remember saying the umps should tell the catcher that if he has to move the ball after catching it I'm just assuming it must have been a ball. That would have put an end to framing before it ever got off the ground. Water under the proverbial bridge today....

I guess the Times can view itself as having certain public service obligations - but they also have to stay afloat in a business whose economic model has pretty much collapsed in a generation. At 50,000 ft it's a little unfair to say newpapers have some greater obligation to political outcomes in a system that won't even make websites pay them for their content. The NYT has a reader base that knows they aren't going to vote for Trump, don't really care about him, have already dismissed him and the need to know anything more about him than they already do. If those are the people paying your monthly bills, those are the people you are writing for. And it's a false premise anyway. The low information voter, when they finally do start paying whatever attention they decide they should before they vote, is most definitely not going to be subscribeing to the NYT in any part of that effort.

It's quite possible that the Tigers approach to hitting can't work for Javy and on the wrong side of 30 he can't change - so he's is caught between trying to be a good trooper and do what his coaches want him to do because they think it will help him, and the fact that he's a pure reaction hitter and has to just clear his head and swing away. Plus the reality that with that long swing he may have been doomed at 30 anyway as soon as he lost a few milliseconds off his reaction time, whether he wants to change or not.

I don't know Hinch's dynamics in a this kind of situation. From my observation over the years, most players end up coming down on the Magglio side - you have to ease back and stop pressing - stop trying to "do too much" to break a slump, but Hinch has a level of subliminal intensity about him - which in most cases is probably a big virtue for him, but that make me wonder if doesn't put more pressure a young guy like Tork playing for him, even if he doesn't mean it to. For instance, does he have that gift for getting guys to loosen up that Leyland had - which can help when a player is slumping.

There was a lot of public push back over Afghanistan, but hard times after the Soviet collapse and 20 yrs of Putin have created a different Russia from that one. But that is not to say Putin cannot drive Russia to collapse. The problem for the West is that total collapse will not be a good outcome, you want the regime to collapse before the country does - not so easy to see the path to that. The West's strategy is based on the Russian army collapsing eventually - and any armed service will eventually, but of course that requires Ukraine not to collapse first. It's purely a political economics question. Modern warfare is foremost an economic battle and the West's resources dwarf Russia's, but Russia (well at least Putin) balances that by being willing to put all their resources into the fight while the West wants to win on the minimum required investment. Missing on that calculation is where disaster lurks for Ukraine.

this bothered me though: this was Tork, quoted by Petzold last week. I don't think you can give away any AB where a pitcher can hit his spot 3 times. That's a solid recipe for only winning games against the worst pitchers. Sure, you hunt zone when you are ahead in the count, but you have to start adjusting your approach from 0-1, at two strikes you've given the pitcher too many ways to get you out. And if you watch the Tigers, they seem to fail on an inordinate number of AB where they are up 2-0, because they are looking for perfect and pretty soon they are 2-2 and then out of the AB. Your BA when you get to 2-0 should be huge. And it's especially dumb for Tork, because he has the power to "do damage" just fine on an outer third FB (IIRC, 6 opposite field HR last season) if he sat on one at 0-1 when he *knows* that is where he is going to be pitched. But so far he won't. The 'approach' doesn't even give himself enough credit. Everything you do in a AB has to be directed at not getting to two strikes, esp 0-2. All the numbers tell you that. If the Tiger's are willing to go to 0-2 to swing the bat at a strike, that is why they are an inept offense.

I have to think the wide zone is driving down scoring. I don't think is was any accident that in the Yankees series there were almost no runs scored in the two games where the K zone was 30" wide while the one game with a normal zone generated a dozen runs.

is the sclerotic nature of Russian command and control going to be able to adjust to improving resourcing of the opposition, or are they in effect going to get rope-a-doped - committed to a set of objectives that will become untenable?