gehringer_2

yeah - I'll grant the 1st line went into the tank late, but I'm going to put that as much on Larkin as who he was playing with. He's played with a lot of schmuks on one side an still been productive and/or pulled them into some level of productivity with him. He wasn't the same player from some point after the worlds - whether it was mental, a lingering physical thing they didn't advertise, or he's just getting old.

IDK. I think it's possible there could be some kind of spit between the big AAU schools - which the Big10 mostly is, and the rest - in effect mostly the SEC - where you have two different competing 'super conferences'. I say possible, I'm not going to say it's likely , but still possible just because of the long standing habit of the B10 centered schools wanting to do things differently.

Wasnt splitting Seider/Edvinsson part of the team's upswing when McLellan came in? Of course even if it was the team went back to being crappy later anyway. That seems like the kind of thing that could be more of a mix and match. If you are playing a team with a powerful 1st line, pair them up. But against most teams I think you want one of them out there 50 out of 60 min.

Language outrage seems selelctive. Wagner is supposed to be the national music of fascism, it's all sung in German, and all the Pope Francis haters want the Mass done in Latin.

You had the mods by the short hairs - they were tired of going game threads -

Great time for UM to be operating with an interim Prez, and one from the Dearborn campus no less. Warde better know what he's doing because he probably has no effective informed oversight right now.

Dan was talking about him being an ex-shortstop and by far the Tigers' best fielding pitcher. The catch and throw to 1st on the high chopper was a 1st rate play for a regular middle IF.

Same here, but clearly he's a 5 alarm fire for the culture warriors.

second time in a month Holton didn't know where his infield was.

get Perez and Riley going again and it would be a lot better line-up in the next round.

This. But we'll take it.

Managers always look like geniuses when guys perform, always look like dunces when they don't.

Yikes. Flaherty gets the K after almost giving up the long ball. Game of milliseconds.

Torkelson took two tough breaking balls for strikes looking for a better pitch and never got one. The Tigers approach problem in a nutshell. They refuse to put strikes in play and end up in a hole where they can't cover everything.

do not understand why Perez was put on the roster. He is totally lost at the plate recently.

I think he will be a guy who it benefits more than most.

An old boss of mine had sign over his desk with something pretty close: "Why is there never time to do it right the first time but always time to do it over?"

Fixing that is Scott Harris' job. That's why you hire the smartest guy in the room, right? He knew coming in he was in a market that was not going to give out that kind of contract, he better have planned for it.

The "Christian Church" as a whole in the US is lost. The remnants that reject its current state are even seeking to abandon the term "Christian" as their identifier altogether as hopelessly polluted and are looking for a reformulation of what to call themselves.

To me it comes down to "can you find a way to battle against a good pitcher?" To me that means being able to battle against well located pitches and not just waiting for mistakes - though obviously hitting the mistakes is hugely important - if they have done even that today they win easily. Every guy in majors can do it occasionally - for instance, we've seen McKinstry have some fantastic AB's this season. The trick is can you be at least somewhat consistent in bringing that level of compete.

I don't know if there is any easy metric for it, but just my casual sense watching Carpenter is that he has huge games with mulitple HRs/RBI, then disappears for a week. Looks pretty good on average but not very dependable day to day. Obviously with a >70% failure rate for hitters across the board, there always a lot of that with every hitter, but it's just my impression that it's moreso with Kerry. Or maybe his hitting is just more match-up dependent than some guys?

It's not how many HRs he hits, it's his net production by any better standard - RunsCreated, OPS, oWAR, RE24 etc. In a year when he should have still been improving, he is overall down by all those measures despite the increase in his HR total.

Fair point

Elmer has the luxury of not having to skate a lot to still take up a lot of space.

I always wonder where Hinch is in all this in terms of what he is encouraging guys to do in a given AB - whether explicitly or implicitly. Torkelson is a good opposite field hitter and can reach the seat oppo in almost any ballpark, but he doesn't go that way as much as I would like to see him. So the question is do the Tigers get a lot of all-or-nothing hitting because that is what they encourage? IDK but it's a fair question.