gehringer_2

Please no more headshots featuring Natalie's chewing gum.

forecast has it gone by 6;45. 7:20 to get the tarp off. Would they wait that long to finish it?

teams do get into cap hell, those are about the only waters to fish.

LOL! As he hit the ground ball I was typing "stranded a leadoff triple yesterday and leadoff double today... but they threw it away before I finished!

Just to yank your chain a little, I will argue that my whole approach is that it's statistics that argues that a team that consistently finishes years hitting better than they start them has some forcing function at work early in the season (a roster full of Tony Clarks would truly be an anomaly!). It's easy to just say these hitters are all bad, but they were not bad for significant segments of last year, it's not valid to wish away their previous success in defense of the status quo either. But again, that is why the strength of the evidence turns to a degree on what happens over the next month or so. The possible whys are speculative. Finding causation is usually harder than finding correlation.

Tiger making some loud outs but so far just one run.

exactly - Yzerman talks about the guys you'd like to get never being available. But that still argues that maybe you don't spend the cap just to spend it unless you can keep things to one year so that if somebody you want does become available next year you have the option to move. Rienhart would be interesting - He not playing center but he is listed as one. Better wing than center or Panthers just short of RH sticks?

Save the replay of Canha making a nice running catch in LF for Lee.

busting Parker inside but he almost gets a hold of one anyway.

that's why I'm not focusing on the analytic aspect because there is no particular reason to suppose it's that per se, it may be more the idea of what the 'control the zone' mantra ends up meaning to hitters - do they take it to the point of paralysis instead of a point of practical value? There are any number of things beside scouting that go into how the players do prep/film/work, batting practice, approach their AB. My issue is does the org recognize they may have a problem or are they in denial? You can't fix something if you won't recognize something isn't working. After three years of poor hitting starts out of the box, I think there is a growing rebuttable presumption they need to look at their prep work - again, depending on how this group actually plays out.

well, he did swing at a hittable 1st pitch strike, just didn't do anything with it.

well, that is why I'm interested in where the O ends up. If they come around and start getting better, then what I want is for Hinch to go back and think about the whole process from Feb and the transition into the regular season and use his best brain to try and figure out how to avoid putting his hitters at an early season deficit in the future - i.e to recognize that maybe there is an induced problem and not just double down on more of the same next season - and that may well have nothing to do with analytics, it may be more a matter psychological prep. But I will want him to be considering change.

But maybe this doesn't give the pitchers enough credit? You can't give away every AB where the pitcher doesn't make a bad mistake, you have to be prepared to compete at the bar the pitcher sets or you might as well go home that day. (this BTW is sort of the description of the Tigers making too many pitchers look like Cy Young) If you could only *know* what is coming, but all you have are tendencies*, and pitchers smart enough to deliberately pitch against them at will. The data will never go away, but as long as it actually remains 'sport' neither does having to deal with the human element in the competition. 😉 *unless you played for Hinch's Astros......🤣

I sort of go back to Buddha's point about not wasting money on mid level guys. Swing for the fences with one signing of a guy young enough to be here for a while and good enough to make a difference and promote guys to fill in the rest. If you lose a little more for one season so be it.

How much good does that bit of information actually do a hitter? He has to recognize the pitch. If he does, his expectation about it is immaterial, because he sees it for what it is. If he doesn't recognize it, he's still swinging or not based on a guess. OK, I'll stipulate that early in the game, if you are ahead in the count and decide to sit on a pitch, then you should sit based on tendency. But once a game has played out for while, what is and isn't working for that pitcher in that particular outing will in most cases become more important data for the hitter than the pitcher's overall tendencies. But I don't even think that is what the Tiger hitters suffer from. They are taking too many hittable pitches and getting behind early too often and then uncertain about what they are swinging at too often when they do swing (the dreaded "in between" swing). That really has nothing to do with advance scouting reports, it has to do with basic approach, confidence levels, and how coaching and management expectations and feedback relate to that is probably a lot more subtle than anything to do with the hard data or preparation of advance scouting. Now, if none of them do anything other than what they are doing now, or in a career after leaving the Tigers, then we will know they were all simply poor hitters. But if in a few weeks or two months this team is starting to hit league average scoring levels like they did after June last season, then I will argue the coaching staff is responsible for some kind of poor psychological season prep!

it looks like a fast moving narrow front. Even if it gets there it should pass quickly.

Yeah - it's probably easier to decide not to spend the money than to figure out how to spend it better.

At the beginning of last season I thought Lalonde had them pursuing the puck better and generally being harder to play against than Blashill ever did, but his inability to snap them out of their March funk was disappointing, and I think they have gradually reverted to playing soft again. Part of that maybe because as has been noted, they are not a young team and it's been a grueling season and some of them were running on fumes.

So it seems to have been assumed that Gio was only going to see LHP, but so far this season he is having no trouble against RHP. If you look at last season, he did have a pretty large platoon split, but interestingly, two years ago he didn't and for his career he doesn't, so maybe he could provide a little more against RHP if Hinch gives him the chance because the glove is all it was advertised to be.

Thursdays lineup? Have we called today's game? It is raining on my driveway in Ann Arbor already.

I have still have hard a time seeing Yzerman committing many dollars to a 36 yr old unless he thought they would be winning a cup next year, which I also don't see. It would be a major departure from his professed strategy. Nothing is impossible, but unless we get a big discount, I'll be surprised to see Kane back. Or neither Kane nor Gost is back, and Yzerman goes in another direction, which also wouldn't surprise me.

Another aspect Carlos hit is that pitchers know the paradigm is to try and run pitch counts to chase pitchers, so since they know hitters have a predisposition to take the first pitch, they take more chances throwing hittable strikes- ergo pitch one is now often the best pitch of an AB. Hitters can’t just let pitchers have that free ride, they have to make them work finer on pitch one, which means they will miss more and the hitter can get ahead more. The bottom line is you can’t be so committed to any approach that you become predictable, even if the approach has a sound basis because to be predictable is to be dead. this all reminds me a game early in JVs career when he was really cruising through his starts, always ahead in the count, and then in Baltimore one day they swung at every 1st pitch strike and beat him up pretty good because he had gotten habituated to guys taking 1st pitches and stopped throwing them with enough conviction

not unexpected but still a big deal as the Dems can move legislation in the House again.

So in the end they scored 38 more and gave up only 5 fewer - so in the end virtually no improvement in the D + goal tending at all. OTOH, if they can improve as much from this year to next as from last yr to this, they are a solid playoff team.

Sites I've seen say the Wings have $28M going into next season. By your figures, If Seider an Raymond take $14.5 (they are already taking ~$2M so the raise would be $14.5), they have ~$13.5M to work with. I wouldn't spend the money on Kane if I could get a center, but I don't know if we can - and Stamkos is old - don't see Yzerman going that way. Anyway - it's still a pretty good chunk of change - they should be able to do something helpful.