gehringer_2

His defense has improved this season without doubt. OTOH, if the swap is Meadows for Baddoo, you are probably still getting a defensive upgrade unless everyone has been blowing smoke about Parker for the last 5 yrs.

"The good GM" rule #1: if you are building a team, don't move guys you don't have replacements for. If you assume Riley is going to remain primarily a gap hitter, then Carpenter is your primary LH thumper and there aren't any LH power bats close other than Keith, who is unproven. P. Meadows' stock is high, he is showing some power, but even if he breaks through I think he profiles more like Riley. Of course if Austin Meadows ever played again he would be make Kerry more tradeable....doesn't seem likely though and certainly not this season.

His BaBIP could fall 50 pts and his results would still be pretty good. Bigbie->Toledo, Parker->Detroit. The problem is Baddoo. Strange season - he had a lousy April, a 900 OPS in May *without* having any extraordinary BaBIP luck, and then completely in the tank since coming back from the IL. It doesn't appear to be the injury lingering because he's running just fine. It's the age old baseball dilemma - what is the proper amount of rope to give an inconsistent player?

Battlefield Gadsden flag: >Further strikes were carried out on the mornings of February 8 and 9 on tribal militia members that had come to retrieve dead bodies

same deal though. JV's pitch data (it was at Brooks Baseball before Statcast) was already on the upswing by then. Fine, hold him till the offseason when he has just finished with 8 or 9 dominant starts. The deadline may often be the best time to deal, no law says there are not circumstances where it is not. Just failure of imagination to understand all the options that were really available. It's the same common logic fail you see all the time - a person or org starts out on a course of action that follows from a set of premises, then conditions change, the initial premises become void, but the course of action is on autopilot despite having become inappropriate. All Al knew is he had to sell by midnight. Wrong. Which in turn raises the question - as of 2017, did Al or whoever constituted the rest of the brain trust even understand what the data on Brooks should have been telling them that summer?

If indeed the market for his services was not that great at that point, they should have known they could sign him at a cost that would have actually increased his trade value later. If they had had to, they could have lived with the same 5/110 he got from Boston, but they wouldn't have had to because after a big 2018, a JD with 4 years left at $20M/yr would have been a much hotter trade commodity than JD the Rental.

Nothing Wagner has ever experienced in Africa or Ukraine could possibly have prepared them for fighting an enemy which has total air supremacy over their heads. Crazy people beginning to believe their own invented press clippings.

of course the bottom line physics is that anyone listening to vinyl in the digital age is deluding themselves.

Saw a speculation that Prigozhin may have bought off Putin by volunteering to take his army to Belarus in order to sieze a corridor from Belarus to Kaliningrad. If you think the Poles are mad now......

Avila was also bringing in technology as he went - the rapsodo's and other biometric systems. He was not tech averse nor unfamiliar with what was available and he brought a fair amount of it in. I'm not sure he personally understood all it was telling him. (I've noted before I think chasing pitching prospects with high breaking ball spin but flat [low spin] fastballs is a basic misunderstanding of how the best pitchers get guys out plus it sets up your favorite ortho-surgeons to stay really busy - with Jobe likely to be next for the Tigers.) But Al never semed to get the team all the way to the front of the curve on anything.

I don't remember Japanese pressings, but I was buying records mostly before your time, maybe they hadn't become current. Then it was DGG that used to be the gold standard for highest quality vinyl. Philips wasn't bad either IIRC. My recollection would be that US and Brit pop/rock labels were mostly just unpredictable. I don't know if somehow the artists could have a hand in enforcing quality on their stuff but LZep vinyls tended to be pretty good. But poor quality on a vinyl LP wasn't necessarily in the pressing, it could as easily be compromises made in the production and mastering such as compression range, play length etc.

I like the Hockey system better

This above all. The lack of value return on the dismemberment of the remnants of the 2014 playoff team put the Tigers below expansion team ground zero instead the good leg up into the future they should have had. Second would be he lack of urgency in reforming the org. Could have moved much faster. Now it's possible some of that was ownership resistance to too much change too fast, and sometimes you have to wait until people you want working somewhere else become available, no way to know much about those - so maybe some slack on that. Third would be that he wasn't a very astute sale rack shopper. They never should have wasted so much time trying to make primary pieces out of so many guys like Niko and JaCoby jones. They weren't good, weren't going to be good. Move on and do better.

No args about the nature of the trade possibly being hard to duplicate. The reference to Austin was less about the nature of the trade than that his was the profile of the player the Tigers are/should be targeting - i.e. no established MLB value but high up side and damn close to can't miss.

You can trade pitching for blocked position players that have no track record but may be able to help the Tigers now because improving offense on the Tigers is a low bar, but it's very unlikely any team that needs ERod or Lorenzen also has present tense usuable pitching being blocked, the two things are sort of mutually contradictory. So we are not getting replacement pitching back unless we deal our own good prospects, and that is counter productive for a team building long term. So I'm pretty much with Chasfh, I don't see any way to thread the needle of making the moves we need to make - which is Lorenzen and ERod and maybe Jose Cisnero, and still being a better team between now and the end of the season. The only conceivable way that happens would be for a combination of Turnbull, Faedo and maybe Wentz to perform as well the rest of the way as Lorenzen and ERod would have. I'm not putting any money on that. The play has to be for next season when you have the talent you got for Lorenzen and ERod and you go back into the FA market to re-acquire that equivalent amount of pitching to go with it.

At MotownForums, we'll go to any length to make our points!

pretty terrible, but Western music has been on one long slow slide downhill since 1750. We had a nice temporary reprieve from the oveall descent for about 35 yrs following 1960, but we're back on the downward trend with added acceleration since. 😱

And oddly enough, the way the races are shaking out, the team that should be the most desperate to make a move to solidify their position would be the Twins and sending Lorenzen or ERod there would seal our fate, though it probably does the same to Cleveland, which would go a long way to making it palatable.

Right, think Austin Jackson.

LOL - If Minny wins rest of the way at their pythagorean we have to make up more like 10 games in 65 remaining instead of 5, and hope Cleveland doesn't get hot either. I mean I suppose a Chinese spy balloon could fall out the sky during a Twins home game at Target, land over the bullpen and suffocate the whole staff. So watch us win it by a game and a half.....

It's true that Trump inherited a GOP foreign policy shop that was strongly anti-Russian. But his administration and the displacement of the old GOP with the new line MAGA party has largely put an end to the presence of those folks in high GOP circles. If Trump were to be re-elected we can count on a foreign policy being much more purely Trumpish/Tucker Carlsonesque and far less Tillersonesque or even Boltonesque

Diaz was efficiently bad, gave up 6 of those runs in only 31 pitches - and he's not a kid or anything at 28. Ronnie Garca finished up throwing another 19. I didn't even know he was still in the system. I thought both Garcias were history at the end of last yr but I guess Ronnie was just injured.

1) The interest cost of the debt is the same no matter who it is paid to. To whatever degree it is an issue, it's not because of who owns it. 2) The Chinese cannot cash out without bankrupting themselves. This stuff is econ 101.

Seriously? ERA is 12? Why even bother?

Old econ expression: When you owe a bank a little they own you. When you owe a bank enough, you own them. Possession of US Treasuries does not give China any usable leverage.