gehringer_2

bingo there.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. - Arthur Clarke I think this is a key to understanding where we are in society now. We are living in the confluence of a highly technology society where the educational system does not prepare people to understand technology and even when it does, often trains them so narrowly that they can comprehend only a small sliver. The result is that while Americans 'know' in an abstract sense that techonology isn't magic, at any practical level they are so ignorant of underlying conceptual frameworks to understand it that that one bit of abstract knowledge doesn't help them. They are still just as subject to the voices of self appointed Shamans as any paleolithic hunter. And so we have seen debates on scientific/techical questions where facts actually do exist devolve to the level of religious argument in our politics I count myself as tremendously lucky that I happened into an extremely broad techinical education (and put in 50yr since trying to keep up) that allows me to look at primary data from most any field and at least make some sense of it. I don't say that to brag at all but only to say that I personaly can't conceive of how poeple without that kind of background manage to navigate the modern world. To constantly have so much uncertainty, to hear so many conflicting voices and not having tools to sort it all out? I can see how it would leave people in a constant state of subconscious level anxiety and in turn prone to charlatans that promise easy resolution of complexity into simplicity. Heck, if you do understand technology it's frightening enough! So to bring it back to your point, people end up anti-expertise because they find themselves unable to make determinations about expertise, with the result often being "I don't understand any of you and your conflicting claims! A pox on all your houses" as the response. And then in addition to that, since the rise of cable TV and especially the internet, the function that elites used to play as gatekeepers for expertise in mass media has broken down. Even if I didn't know immunology, I trusted that a wack job doctor would never get to appear with Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news.

To be brutally mercenary about it, that maybe be good for Maton, but the team doesn't exist for Maton - the equation is supposed to go the other way. For the current Tigers, 3B is the position of need, but as you note, he sure doesn't play 3rd well enough for much investment in him to be worth it on that basis, and at 2nd there are other options that appear at least equally useful so what justifies the level of commitment to Maton's 'develpment' over other objectives -- like winning a game here or there? One the other side of the ledger he did flash some power, hitting 4hr in April, but he's only hit 2 since.

As long as he is the 1st or 2nd best hitting OF on the roster, I'll live with his left field play. If the time comes we have some OF's that can provide more total wins, then we can worry about it. My team building philosophy would always be to first concentrate on replacing the bad players with decent ones, then worry about trying to upgrade the decent ones to top tier.

Holden is a curious case. The results seem to out pace his peripherals. If there some special sauce in the way he hides or spins the ball? Or is he destined to have his results regress?

He probably wanted him to be able to get himself back together after plunking Taylor on the theory of avoiding having him taking it in to his next outing, but he guessed wrong that Lange could do it! Lange hit both batters with curve balls but it seems the more over arching problem for him recently is he can't throw his FB for a strike, and once guys start waiting for the curve they can hit it with some regularity. And it's not even inside/outside command on the FB, it mostly just that he can't bring it up a little - he keeps putting it at guys' ankles,

Tork with the powder blue shoes. I don't know if I've watched a local athlete wearing that color since Ron Johnson wore blue suede in UM's backfield.

No question he is as quick on his feet as anyone you'll meet. It's also generally unfortunate that our campaign culture rewards that so highly since it's not particularly high on the list of necessary executive skills.

IDK, there does seem to be evolution going on at levels we don't see and understand. Maybe the very existence of TJ surgery has changed the mindset of pitchers to where they are more willing to push themselves harder than they might have when they knew that to overstrain your forearm was to end your career. Back in the day, you hurt your arm, you were done, and that probably happened to a lot of guys before they ever got to majors or at least were well known enough that anyone remembered what happened to them. So the guys that were left either had the lucky genes or had found some compromise between performance and health that is different than today's.

So if we end up trading Lorenzen and Rodriguez, or even if not and Rodriguez just opts out, we could easily end up with the 'ALL TJ" starting rotation with Mize, Skubal, Turnbull, Faedo, and Wentz.

This is what should happen. It's just too bad they never went after Shrub's legal team that wrote the torture memos. If some them had been disbarred maybe the precedent would have had a few of these folks thinking twice.

Probably an easy money bet that Tiger pitchers are going to get traded, the only question is who. So I think odds are pretty good a Wentz, Faedo, Olson or all of the above might end up being needed. Would like to see Olson sustain what he has done in the last couple of games for a longer period though.

Maybe the simplest answer is they want him to keep working at 3B and there are already too many 3Bs at Toledo. Nevin and Malloy are also Harris' guys.

busy day!

Three box scores from FCL today for the Tigers. Are they reporting latin scores with the florida scores?

So, speaking of the FCL, the Tigers are currently running *3* teams there. We should have guessed the teams really didn't want to contract the number of players in the low minors, just the cost of having them spread out all over.

Justice Bigbie has 1.200 OPS 🔥. They won't even miss him.....

still not sure why he isn't at least at Toledo. Is the org saying they don't have an IF coach at Toledo they trust to work with him?

Works for me.

Aug 1.

Numerically? No.A few yr ago I ran a data set of the simple 1st order unweighted batting measures against team scoring: BB, K, Avg, Slug/ISO, OBP, OPS etc. But TBH it has been a few years now. If I could find the my old run I should run it again against more recent data just for grins to see if there are any shifts the relative correlations. OPS was clearly the best correlate but I don't remember the order after that Is there any disagreement today that OPS is the most predictive 'simple' stat for hitters? The more sophisticated linearly weighted measures may be even better, but the average fan usually doesn't have the data to generate those, not to mention it being difficult to understand the moving parts as easily as with OPS.

the Cabrera extension didn't bother me that much because I figured for Cabrera, the skill level was so high he probably would still have a chance to be decent hitter to his late 30s. Many of the HOF level hitters retained their hitting skill to near 40. But the injury risk is always there for all players and it ravaged Cabrera. And yet still - you look at the last few weeks, when he feels good, the swing and eye actually are still not bad even at 40. There is still a hitter trapped in that beat up body.

Sadly, Cisnero's FB has never come all the way back since the DL trip in the fist half last year. Maybe the injury, maybe just would have lost it at 34 anyway, but 4 BB/9 is more interesting with a 98-99 mph heater than with 96.

Someone put up the clip of Skubal's first inning yesterday - Sands behind the plate. Don't know if I've seen a guy any sloppier throwing the ball back to pitcher in one inning. Skubal was having to bounce up, down, in, out just getting the ball back. Hope that was just a SSS aberration, otherwise that would have to get irritating.

agree - though not as bad as the couple of previous years. But I saw it a little differently - to me the deficit was as much in the forward's lack of size, strength, tenacity in their own zone. I though blue line upgrades have been real and last year's D men played better down near the net and red line when the play was down there than previous versions, but they usually got less than zero usefull support from their fowards out near the blue line. You can put Lidstom and Konstantinov on D together and if you have 3 useless forwards out there with them your team still can't play much D 5 on 2.