gehringer_2

Team driven results for a pitcher can't mean a whole lot in HS. Part of why it takes a big committment to be good drafting preps - you have to go see, gather, verify for yourself. You can sit in the Front Office and collect stats and film of a college kid playing in a major conference and have some idea about the value of his stats before you ever decide to scout him yourself, but there is no way around all that being more work for preps.

Wings do have the personnel in the system to provide upside surprise if one or two more guys breakthrough, but that would be gravy.

the 'cork' season for short.

Meh - even if he succeeds with the Sharks the Wings weren't wrong about him. He wasn't succeeding here and he had the chance to play under two very different coaches so you it not like you blame it all on Blashill for not liking him or the like.

and Biden is correct because if Ukraine joins NATO the US is immediately obligated to put US troops on the ground in Ukraine and US pilots in the air face to face with the Russians and I don't think too many sane people on the planet want to see the Russian rat backed into that corner. That was avoided in Vietnam, in the Middle East (multiple times), in Afghanistan, and it will be avoided in Ukraine. Either article 5 means something or it doesn't. NATO will help Ukraine fight this war but they will not fight it for them. And that is the right policy. When the war is over, the NATO security umbrella can be extended over Ukraine then its becomes Russia's choice to precipitate a direct conflict with AFUSA.

I'm less on board with taking HS pitchers. Just my overall impression but I think the projectability of pitchers improves more from 18 to 20 with pitchers than hitters so I don't see as much motivation to shop prep pitchers. Plus only a few guys (Eury Perez excepted) are physcially mature enough or have commmand enough to successfully throw starter's innings in the majors until they are 22-24 anyway so they aren't going to be ready much sooner for being drafted sooner. I remember the Dodgers had everyone hyped up about Urias at 19 and he still didn't find success until 24.

The core of a baseball team is about 15 guys who average at leat 5 yrs per career. So all you really need is 2 to 3 core level players per year combined from the US draft plus the international draft and the occasional undrafted find like Foley. Doesn't seem like so high a bar, but the Tiger's hadn't been able to get over it often until recently with the Tigers finding Mize, Skubal, Turnbull, Manning, Tork, Greene, Carpenter, Foley in the last few years. Of course if they improve they have to keep that up with lower picks.

and we're not even talking about the goaltending, which ran hot and cold last season. That also has to be better.

you also want one strong checking line that can hold up against the other team's top lines so you don't always have to waste Larkin and his line out there playing defense or killing penalties incurred by overmatched defenders. The thing is, I thought they would take a big step last year and it turned out to be baby steps at best. Plus it was disappointing to see how badly they collapsed after the deadline deals. They went into the off season with a much worse performing team than they started the season with, so they are having to build from a point worse than even last season's starting team. So I'm a little gun shy about predicting progress.

Truly. Between agents with their agendas and scribes that need new takes to capture eyeballs, a lot of silly stuff goes out. Especially once the season ends for all the prospects and there is nothing real to add to anyone's data base. At least in football there is speculation about combine performance after the season ends and then the actual combine etc. With baseball in the weeks once regular seasons and finally the college WS is over there is just nothing more to add. I think the speculations about whether teams might have internal reasons for not picking in strict player ranking order are more reasonable. Some FO information does leak. But that's a separate issue from the player rankings. But this year even the very reasonable speculation that Pittsburgh would make an underslot play turned out to be wrong.

When it comes to scouting individual players - of course. OTOH I think sometimes there are things that even releatively casual fans can see if they have been following the game for a long time. It's not that hard to see when a front office is just doing something wrong, like the Tigers late discovery of player metrics or their disregard for fielding in the system for so many years. For me right now one might be the way teams fall in love (overvalue) with college pitchers that are breaking ball specialists. I don't know if the ability to measure spin rates has gotten a lot of professional people head over their heels, but a 'devastating' college breaking ball is too often a pitch abandoned a year or two into a pro experience - Casey Mize's split being exhibit #1. I just hope jackson Jobe doesn't turn out to be exhibit #2.

yeah - there had to be a seriously unhappy agent hearing him say that out loud.

reports emerging that Prigozhin met with Putin 5 days after Wagner march and walked out under his own power and he certainly seems to have retained complete freedom of movement in Russia. It appears Prigozhin has some kind of leverage that we do not exactly understand yet.

I think a team does have to reach a certain critical mass before a guy like Debrincat is going to be able to do his thing. Does Yzerman have the Wings to that point yet? That's a big maybe.

If this is substatiated, and it appears to be, he gone.

Meadows has played a LOT of professional baseball, I would have no problem calling him up. The question is would he help? You're not going to give him Riley's or Carpenter's ABs. Maybe if Baddoo can't find it, but you have to give Akil some PA before you cut bait there. It's on the IF they need the help. But Keith has 33 PA at AAA. If he can get to at least 100 without crashing then maybe I'll be on board for taking a look.

Right. Like the outcome any individual baseball game, the outcome of any single pick is strongly random, only weakly predictable Harris said it best when he said that a lot of the very best bats never get to college - our own Riley being an example. Of course everyone matures physically at a different rate and sure even some all stars will not have shown (or just didn't have the chance to show) their batting ability at 18, but OTOH, in the history of baseball the fact stands out when you look at HOF hitters is how many of them were already showing their ability younger than other players and were able to get to the majors at young ages. If you take a bias against HS hitters you're playing with one hand tied behind your back. And again, it all goes back the the eyeballs and evaluation skills you are putting on these players. If you need that year or two of film and counting stats to be confident in your scouting, then absolutely stick with college players. Better that than misses. But if you assemble the skill in your org and are making the huge time and money investment needed to scout prep players deeply, there is enough reward there to make it profitable despite the increased risks. The same being true on the international side where you have to look at even younger players. And we don't even know yet if Harris has that kind of team in place or is just whistling in the dark!

So they would have taken Crews or maybe Skenes but not Langford.

I actually like it if they aren't falling into the trap of looking at every SS prospect in the reflection of Alex Rodriguez. Teams keep spending their time looking for the next ARod and instead just keep getting guys they have to move off SS, sometimes even before they ever make the majors. It's OK if your SS doesn't hit 30 bombs/yr - really.

Yes. Vierling, Torkelson, Baez, and Rogers and maybe Malloy are your RH core and Greene is going to play every day so short term (as in the next year or two) and that is only 5/6 of 9 posittions in the order so at least one RH upgrade in both the IF and OF should be on the offseason shopping list for sure.

as you listed, they don't lack for candidates eligible to step up on the offensive side. The door is open if some of these guys can skate through it.

there is a certain logic to taking HS bats and college pitchers - but only if you can put eyes on those prep hitters who have some serious skill at analyzing what they are seeing. If Harris has those people in place now then the strategy will pay off with more upside on the results. If he doesn't - it's gonna be more long summers. But we might as well be optimistic now and enjoy that the sky is still the limit as long as the new FO honeymoon lasts. One a related note, I saw some comments from Gabe Alvarez (Erie manager) about Bigbie. The interesting thing is that Gabe said that Bigbie is only challenging to be a more serious prospect now because he's a completely different hitter than he was when he was drafted, that the org has worked him through a total revamp. So maybe it's just coach speak, but OTOH, how many years has this very issue i.e. whether the Tiger org had any clue about how to make hitters better or just sent them out there to play everyday and sink or swim on their own, been a hot topic wrt both the Dombrowski and Avila regimes?

Pitchers? Pitchers?? We don't need no steeinking Pitchers!

I like this. The counter point might be that since Perron and Larkin are probably their best O-Zone puck possession guysyou might want to split them up so the two top lines both have some of that. I'd guess is will turn on whether Perron-Larkin-Bebrincat leave the second line too inept..

Out of those 4, Hronek was the only Czech that could check. Last time I checked, 1 out of 4 is not enough checking to get from your Czechs.