gehringer_2

maybe sometimes you just like a guy because he's not going to hurt you if you have to play him. Too many of the guys that have come through our roster recently haven't just been not good, they've been constant disasters waiting to happen.

you know, when I was a young anti-Vietnam and thus also anti-military-industrial complex guy, I though it was sort of quaint that organizations like the USMC spent so much time in their recruiting talking about honor, loyalty, and other virtues when the core reality of their purpose was to break things and kill people. What was the point? But in today's Russia we see all too clearly what an Army unmoored from honor and fidelity brings to the world -- and though all War may be Hell, this Russian Army's brand is something else altogether.

If a Vatnik decides he can't face the oncoming Ukrainians, he better either surrender or take a loaded rifle with him as he retreats. AFU drone footage showing up of Russian rear guard troops gunning down their own retreating men. You have to hand it to an Army that knows how to build morale. Between this kind of outrage and the daily threats of execution flying back and forth between the Russian MOD and Prigozhin, no-one can have seen anything like this before.

Tigers waste a lead off double. Torkelson has twice tried to sit on and golf a Morton curve but popped it up both times.

two in, man on 2nd, still no one out in the 5th. Braves looking to put this one away. EDIT: Hill gets out of the inning without more damage. Game is still in reach at 3-0. At least for the average team on the average night.

Morton's back door breaking ball to the LH hitters looks like it's going way wide then zips right back over the plate

I don't know if this coverage is exactly what you would call good, but it's not missing Shep.

TTBDNS

So we missed a chance to see the 1st Vulcan player make the majors? A blow for intergalactic relations....

This is probably most likely. Hard to imagine the states would accept a system using only the user's representation about where they are. Then again, when it comes to law interfacing with technology, I would never underestimate any legislature's total incompetence. Then again, he could have avoided the whole thing if he had just gone out for a walk. 🚶‍♂️

He's been building his trade value in the last ....week....or so.

This is a case than any reputable lawyer would have to advise his client to plead out for the best deal he can get, but of course there is zero chance of Trump doing that, and who wants to take a case when your client isn't going to listen to your advice?

Hear that Jamison? - Next time you get a hot tip, turn off your phone's cellular service and location services, use the hotel WiFI through a VPN. Got it?

LOL - to *some* degree. There are certain bottom lines. In the majors every hitter is close to or pretty much up against the wall of the their maximum neuro-muscular-visual limit and much of the variation between players is down to pure genetic limits. If you were to get everybody to optimized approach and mechanics, you will still see a distribution in the physiological phenotypes. Or another way to put it would be that poor coaching may prevent a guy from ever reaching his max potential, but no coaching is going to get a guy past it. I don't know whether I actually read or heard him say this once, or if I just surmised it from his MO, but I think Dombrowski loved to take guys with big arms because that is the one absolutely hard certainty you can measure in a baseball draft pick, and I think that continued under Avila and maybe even moreso since now you can measure all his spin and break so you can get more 'comfortable' with a decision about a pitcher because you have all this data. By comparison projecting what a hitter can do against levels of pitching he has never faced and you don't have machines to easily measure is scary and uncertain. Of course the thing is a good team must find a way to do it and do it well, or you end up like the Tigers.

People have posted the chart for average career WAR vs draft position. The corelation is real enough near the top, but still pretty noisy even there. The baseball draft is the most problematic for the major sports because of the high level of noise in the player evaluation signals you get from intrntnl, prep and college baseball, If you look at the difference in the quality of play differential between the top of college football and the NFL, or the top level of NCAA or Euro basketball and the NBA, the comparative difference in baseball is a chasm, so draft uncertainty follows. I would not disagree at all with the premise that some teams coach well and some badly and it certainly seems inarguable that for non-pitchers at least, the Tigers system has done poorly. And in fact the Tigers success with lower draft round pitchers tends to prove the point. But their pitching development and hitting development might as well be from different planets. Plus another problem with the Tigers has just been bad internal evaluation. Adames, Martinez, Castillanos, Paredes, Suare --- In too many cases we have failed to properly value what we did have and sold too low - gutting our system depth over many years.

For us true, for the Ukrainians, who don't actually exist anyway, not so much. Amirite? and of course there was a time we might have said the same things about red lines and Russia trying to manipulate US elections.

I'd link it if I remembered where I saw it but apparently Putin is in the process of removing the last vestiges of autononous local management out in the counrty side, moving to make all rmaining local governing offices Moscow appointments. I'm sure that will improve the nation's long term outlook. I wonder if with the LSR the Ukrainians are on to something no-one in the West has had the imagination to conceive might succeed, which is to actually foment indigenous armed rebellion in Russia.

Of course the problem isn't really the Nuke plant - it's the Russians occupying it. You don't need the whole Kakhovka reservoir to keep a reactor in cold shutdown safe, but you do need to do something in the several months available before the current water supply runs down - run a temporary water main or maybe sink a well or two etc. But given the malignancy that everything Russian currently is, any of that could turn into a problem it doesn't need to be.

Not sure it matters. What matters is whether it leaves any permanent deficit that pitching then keeps aggravating. Not trying say there is anything here that may not be, just noting that neck is a more nerve-racking place for a fan to see a pitcher have an injury.

I guess I'm going to dissent here. The impact is ecological, long term and widespread - i.e. similar to Chernobyl. I don't see any necessary reason to draw a culpability implication from that headline syntax. Sure you can if you are looking for them and absolutely I agree headline writers often do readers serious disservice, but I'm not sure I see it here. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But I think there is one other logical error being made in the coverage of Kakhovka. Not to be PollyAnn'ish here, but the implicit assumption in the reporting is that dam loss puts everything at square one. Not quite true. When the war is over and the dam is rebuilt, all the ancillary infrastruture - of which there is a lot, power distribtion, irrigation and potable water distribution systems etc, will still be there waiting for the water level to come back to them. Still a massive undertaking but not the whole original undertaking.

there are states with graduated income taxes where that's going to ding you signficantly, e.g.,NY, Balt, MN are near 10%. No doubt, MI's 4.25% isn't chump change on $100M, but OTOH, I can't say I've ever heard a MI pro athlete complain about his state income tax. Also - state/local taxes are complicated for pro athletes - an athlete has to pay local taxes in the juridictions where their away games are played, so you only get the lower rate on the part of your salary you can apportion to your home games.

The Tigers best hope is that enough pitching gets healthy that they can move an effective starter or two or one or two effective position players. I'm still optimistic Torkelsen can be a good hitter, Greene looks solid. Add two FA and that's a 6 man line-up. Six solid players plus a Jake Rogers and a McKinstrey and you can fill in enough to compete. The problem is they are running out of time this season for any of that to happen - guys need to be on the roster pitching to establish trade value - and of course we are not likely to see Mize at all this season. But the lack of a single high trajectory player on either side of the ball at AAA is just catastrophic - it means there is no room for error, injury etc. They are going to need a marked reversal of their recent injury rates and what reason do we have to suppose that is going to happen?

Turnbull has nowhere to go and the Tigers need pitching. I can't see whatever tiff they may have had trumping those realities. He'll be back as soon as he's fit. Edman points out the bigger risk, which is that you never want to hear a pitcher has a problem in his neck....

Parker has been hitting at a very steady 720 OPS. The oonsistency is good but he will need to take another step up if he's going to make it.

Gee, I *hate* to disagree with Lynn, but while familiarity with a hitter is an advantage to the opposing team in general in formulating pitching approaches, on the individual level, the advantage goes the hitter with increasing familiiarity with any particular pitcher. There are of course many factors in total, but I think one contributor to the increase in 'true outcome' hitting approaches is that a hitter in today's game with 30 teams each with a 13 man staff, never gets the opportunity to get as familiar with each pitcher's stuff the way they did when they played all their games against only 7 or 8 other teams with 10 man staffs.