gehringer_2

The way the Tigers jerked Castellanos around in the minors was a classic case of being stupid in this regard. If you have a good fielder, I think it makes a lot of sense to build his flexibility by learning new positions, but if you have a guy that starts out with a distant relationship to his glove to begin with - put him somewhere and leave him there to concentrate at getting as good as he is able.

That might well be a missing piece. A lot of the discussion has been about the league not communicating the policies, but If the league put out the policies to the teams and told the teams to communicate them, then it's easy to see why the league might have no guilt over enforcing the sanctions on a team that didn't do the job.

This part is also true. The complete contrast is to Basketball - where you expect your top pick to play immediately and fit into a team with an already fixed cast of players.

or is it the opposite?: Maybe it's that in baseball, BPA 2-5 yrs out is so impossible to determine with any degree of probability that it's pointless to go down the rabbit hole of trying to make razor fine distinctions to rank many similar players in the absence of anything like MLB relevant competition? Sure there are mere handful of guys that break away from the pack in a given year - but always far less than the number 1st round picks and thus only relevant to a small minority of the 30 teams. IIRC, when people have broken down the MLB draft by total WAR by draft position things get pretty flat after only about the 10th pick or so. It would be interesting to see that same WAR vs draft position data reparameterized by team. It's often argued here that it's the teams doing drafting that is the better predictor of performance than draft position. Of course there are two possible explanations for that, which are not mutually exclusive: Some teams may do a better job with their internal BPA rankings than the conventional published wisdom (i.e. they are getting better players in lower rounds) or they simple do a better job at skill development - i.e they create their good players - at least to some degree. And then the third thing that all the concentration on the US draft misses is that nearly half of the players are coming from the international system, and being good at working that system is a whole different set of competencies for ML teams.

yeah - wouldn't have gotten my vote.

He's is a great sniper from anywhere in close but I'd rate him primarily as a facilitator, and he's pretty much never had more than one 1st class line-mate to play with. He was with Bert through one good season of his but Larkin's own health was up and down that year.

Verlander spent one full season in the minors, was in the majors at 23. That's probably the practical benchmark even for a 'generational' player. The Dodgers brought Urias to the majors at 19 but that decision was pretty much a disaster.

Schoop is sort of the marker for me. To be carrying a 30yr old player who is a full season and a half and 600PA away from the last time he did anything with a baseball bat is the measure of a team deep in roster hell.

I saw one of the beat guys report that the plan was to put Brieske in the BP - but you can't send Englert out and Holton has been pretty good so who does that leave? Maybe the BP in Toledo I guess. Faedo will also be back in couple of weeks. And if ERod is already throwing a BP, he is probably less than a month away also. I guess it would be back to the opening day rotation with Wentz and Faedo in Toledo ----- and Boyd, ERod, Lorenzen all on the clock to be dealt

Keith, Perez, Navigato, Bigbie in the 2-5 spots combined to go 8/15 2B, HR (Navigato) tonight for Erie and still 3 innings left.

Brieske with 1.2 and Wingentner with 1.0 IP for the Hens. No Runs.

meadows with another 2/4 tonight. 880 OPS for June, but still too many K's to likely survive being thrown against MLB pitching

Eric Haase with a 202 OBP for his last 99 PA. That's a lot of outs. Jake's been better for a couple of weeks but not much better overall for the season. It would be good to get a little something out of the catcher position.

How many shutouts?

Torkelson suddenly in a full on funk the last two days. Missing everything.

Tigers still haven't hit a ball.

Torkelson may need to walk this run in.

well, maybe Aroldis will do one of his rare self-destructs tonight.

That last play by Tork on the throw from Schoop was boss. He had to take the ball right as it was hitting the dirt - no bounce. That's a MLB play with a 1B mitt.

meh - more indictments are just insurance runs. He's already charged with plenty to put him away. If the system can't manage to convict him on the straightforward charge, another likely more complex case probably isn't going to be the difference.

this is the 'another shutout on tap' version of the Tigers. They just keep coming back like a bad penny.

If ERod is throwing a BP that was a pretty minor version of pulley rupture. But good for us.

Eye dunt undirstend the poynt in this poste.

You'd think if there were to be any hope for him at all he's got to move fast - -get back at least to AA this year.

I think a conviction on insurrection would be hard to get. The fact that he personally never went to the Capitol leaves you with too indirect a line of action. Of course if the SS had been willing to take him to Capitol the case is probably a slam dunk - but then again if they had we might be in the middle of a civil war. But the case on a charge of conspiracy to interfere with government operations might be hard to defend if there is testimony from insiders like Meadows.