gehringer_2

He signs a QO, he still has the year to see if they get lucky on the lottery pick and he gets a teammate he thinks he can win with, then it's his decision to stay or go. It supposed to be a poor draft, but there are always surprises.

right. My point just being that max physical effort is not the key in much sports competition. A basketball player doesn't generally hurl the ball at the basket, a successful QB doesn't make every throw at max velo. Baseball is supposed to be a skill game. Any hitter that swings as hard as he can on every pitch or makes every throw in the field at max effort is also going to find himself back in the minors - effort moderated by skill is a core of baseball performance. But somehow the game has allowed itself to evolve to where there is too much performance value in max effort all the time for pitchers as compared to command, sequencing, guile, and other less physically taxing aspects of the art. So it goes back to restructuring the game so that a pitcher that keeps hitters off balance and induces a lot of weak contact and picks his spots to throw gas, can still be just as successful as a pitcher that racks up a lot of K's.

I'd be surprised if he does anything else. Cade doesn't strike as any kind of romantic who's in the game to help rebuild some team that doesn't know what they are doing just because they happened to draft him.

And of course, widen the context and 'States Rights' still remains the clearest dog whistle ever for the white supremacy/nationalist types. So that's a twofer for Trump.

Accountability is something we can only hope becomes a wider trend in every aspect of this society. It's been been on the defensive for a couple of generations and the results have not been particularly good.

it's not *that* unusual. Every athlete in an endurance competition knows what it is to find a sustainable pace a step down from max effort that's going to enable them to win the most in the end. Not to mention if you define "best self" as the most winning overall, than you have to endure to be your 'best' self.

the joy of small sample sizes. I think Tork's range issues last year were more bad habits that lack of ability. He has decent hands and it's not like he has any physical deficits in his lateral movement. He'll be fine at 1b in the long run. He can't start every season as hitter in June though....

Didn't the NCAA deaden the bats a few years ago to cut down on the effective difference? In any case, Torks power is real enough, if fact if he'd trust himself he has plenty of power to the opposite field. He'd hit his HRs without selling out to pull the ball. I guess he got to the Tigers too late in Cabrera's career for that idea to rub off on him.

FLA was about 50-60%, that's less darkness than a cloud so play on!

A little more detail would have been helpful. Why would the NFL want to contact the USFL team? Would they sell a player to the NFL?

It's not sport if teams refuse to compete, it's simply exhibition - Globetrotters/Senators. It's trying to win even when it doesn't make a difference. to compete for the sake of the competition, that makes it sport in the first place. Take that away and all you have left is an ornate manufactured 'reality TV' series.

That's the thing, they can't get there, because the religious foundation of their abortion/IVF position starts from a point already at the limit. If 'Life beings at conception' is why you believe abortion should be regulated, you are immediately at: "Abortion needs to be totally banned." There is no logical method for how to get to a shaded view like R v W from that starting point.

Or anything else! Which puts me in mind of another question - which is that in 2016, Trump was making the argument that he was the guy who could stand up for the little guy against corporate America because he was from the inside and knew how to deal with them. At least to me at the time, that struck me as one of his more effective approaches, especially since the other 12 guys on the GOP primary podiums were all products of Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand philosophies. The 8 years since have certainly proven he is not and has never been interested in middle class economic development. So should that represent a slice of his 2020 electorate that he would have lost, or did that segment overlap too much with the MAGA culturalists for his failures on that score to matter?

All things being equal, I think that is a little too low a bar. You have a 26 man roster and players who stick will average maybe a 10 yr career, so the benchmark to keep turning over your roster is more like 2 - 2.5 players every year. If you want to be generous one of those could come from an international signing, and of course the Tigers have not done well there at all, which only exacerbated their lack of draft success in prior regimes. So I would say the benchmark should be a bench player, a starter, and an international on average per year. If you are below that you are probably losing ground. Now of course, all things are not equal, and if you are a team that would rather trade older high priced talent than keep it, then you can make a big dent in your draft needs.

ironically, they are not doing so great at their professed 'Job 1' of controlling the strike zone, sitting at 12th of 30 teams in walks allowed. TBF, they drop to above average at 18th if you drop out Lange's 5. 🤢

Against a LHP no less. Everything in Jung's stat line looks great except the 33% K rate.

also 13 goals in 24 game before Kane joined the team, 11 in the 52 games since. Maybe the coach should figure out that just because two guys played well together 5 yrs ago on a different team doesn't mean they are still the best pairing years later. Maybe in general not spending enough time with mixed and matched lines is part of why the loss of one guy and the line shifts it necessitated caused such a total breakdown?

The 1st Caps goal was such a cluster. Passing had gotten sloppy, Petry was gassed, couldn't get off because the Wings failed multiple times to clear - that goal was like a slow motion train wreck, you could see it and feel it coming. Then 99 yr old Ovechkin left Chariot with his hockey pants around his ankles to seal it.

I don't know why the Wings have switched away from their normal offensive style to start taking long shots. They look good in the SOG totals but that's not the Wings game, which all season has been to pass up on low percentage shots to keep moving the puck and get higher value chances.

A hockey team without Chiarot and Petry. I can only dream.

I just saw today's game off the DVR and Torkelson actually looked more in control, esp the 1st inning RBI he looked like he had decided up the middle all the way. Of course probably easier since Perez doesn't have a lot of velo, but a good sign none-the-less.

correct. The potential payoff for success is too great and every 20 yr old believes it will be the other guy.

Calipari walks away from Kentucky. It's amusing when the old kings of sleaze like Saban and Calipari find themselves at more disadvantage then they are willing to live with because the legal sleaze can now outpace what they used to do off the books.

And he gave up two GB hits. I can see why Hinch doesn't want to relay on him as a guy to call on with men on base, even if he might be the toughest guy in the BP to score on starting an inning clean. But if Hinch has any virtue as a manager, it certainly starts with his ability to fit the pieces of a bullpen together.

I tend to think there is a good hitter living inside Torkelson's skin but he has to get his head on straight with regard to his approach, and I really think the Tigers need to stop giving him too much to think about. Much like at the beginning of last season, Torkelson is in between too much, which is usually a symptom of thinking too much. Stop setting him up to be trying to outguess the pitcher, and just let him look for the ball. I have to say I am with Monroe on this. He says he hated pitcher scouting reports because it didn't matter if the guy did 'X' 90% of the time in 'Y' situation because he might just as easily know you know that and cross you up. IOW as long as pitch tendency data isn't absolute, it's value it pretty low in the real world. I would think any pitcher worth his salt, knowing that the tigers love to do deep tendency analytics, would absolutely come out and pitch against his tendencies, and I think we have seen a good number of games where that looked like it was happening.