gehringer_2

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.

Fulmer's stuff is marginal, he is what he is. Soto's stuff is good when he can control it, but he could not throw his slider reliably last season which is what was making every outing in the later part of the season an adventure. Looking at Fangraphs, his slider usage is back up to where it was in '21 and its pitch value is closer to career norm so it's looks like he has recovered it. If he doesn't lose the slider again he'll probably have a decent season by the time it's over.

Not happy with Turnbull maybe not telling them he has a physical issue? Or not happy they lost track of him while he was changing agents? Or maybe unhappiness internally because someone tried to play service time games with Spencer and he caught them out at it in public.

Manning 1.2 inning for the Hens. 5 outs, 0R 2H 2BB 1K. 45 pitches 23 strikes. Rusty.

Justice Bigbie and Chris Meyers from WM to Erie as per Henning. https://twitter.com/Lynn_Henning/status/1668022850916175872

things that happen when nobody likes you anymore.... https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/04/27/russian-bitcoin-wallets-allegedly-exposed-by-apparent-hacker/

We hope both that all this is true and that Harris is truly competent, but in truth how Harris talked to Ilitch - at least initially - is probably not that simple. Remember he had to get the job first. There is a calculus there right? If you come into the interview and are brutally honest about how bad it is and how long it will really take, you might not get the job because you know there is probably another guy out there who will come in and wax poetic about all the potential they see in the system and how painless progress will be with *him* at the helm. It's like bidding any contract - you'd like to put all the adds in there you know you are going to need, but if you do you know you won't get the job, so you hope you get the job and develop enough trust as you go that you can go back to the well for those adds you left under the table on the bidding.

I would say the 'starter' strategem worked exactly as designed today. Getting to the 6th inning with 4.1 IP from Wentz and only 2 runs on the board is absolutely a successful result for your pitching plan. That part worked fine. They lost this one because Foley and Lange both picked the same day to not be able to throw strikes. If you are managing by likelihoods, that's not the one you should spend your time planning for because you don't have any workaround for it anyway.

Funny thing, when Trout came up he had kind of a 'baby fat' look that I read as a risk he night run to fat as he got older. That part turned out to a completely unjustified concern, but he's ended up missing big chunks of his career prime seasons anyway.

the thing we don't see that will also play a part is what Harris represented to Ilitch as the target outcome for this season. WE can sit here and say there never should have been any expectation, but none of us know if that is the expection Harris presented to Ilitch, which is the standard by which he and his team are likely to be judged. Sure, I would be surprised if Harris doesn't more or less have a pass from Ilitch for this year, but I'd be a lot less surprised if the management team is going to be on a much shorter leash as early as next year. Once an owner gets impatient enough to make the 1st change, his patience to see movement is likley to grow progressively shorter, whether ours does or not. 😟 The third regime enjoying the accolades for success built on a foundation that the 2nd regime put into place but was not allowed to see through to completion is an all too common US business story.

dead now.

Not Castro

not dead......yet