gehringer_2

He laid the foundation for getting the team off the FA boom and bust cycle and into a sustainable development system. He upgraded the draft evaluation system to bring more promising players into the system. He got the Tigers off Dombrowski's 'old washed up expensive relief pitcher' merry-go-round and toward building better bullpens. He understood the team had to embrace the tech. He made a couple of critical hires. Those were the plusses. The minuses were that they didn't always understand what their tech was telling them (e.g. it's more important for a pitcher to have more life on his FB than more cut on their breaking ball. This misunderstanding led them to Mize, who this regime has had to rebuild into a pitcher with a more effective fastball because in the majors neither the split or the slider could make up for his flat fastball), most of his signings were busts and they spent too much time in denial about it, he was pretty much a zero in terms of being able to pull together complex deals like his predecessor, got way too little back for the assets he had when it came time to cash them in, and in general lacked sufficient urgency to move things faster, though in fairness we don't know how much of the go-slow may have been coming from Ilitch, and despite the tech they had, they had no apparent clue on how to use it to coach hitting and finally, pretty much failed at international signings. So on the whole, he did some things that were critical in terms of re-orienting the operation, but also failed at a lot of the portfolio. And he had his share of just plain bad luck with Zimmerman and Austin Meadows.

It's ironic to me that the one guy who has blamed the new money system for his walking away (at least in part) was Saban. Not the quarter I expected to hear that from.

It's not just the admit, you still have graduation rates and progress toward degree issues that will slam them if they just drop all pretense, and that's a different set of issues. I doubt that a tacit agreement to pass athletes through their classes is part of any hiring criteria for UM faculty and the athletic dept doesn't really have any leverage over the larger faculty. This is where the the historical academic culture in the larger institution does start to matter in terms of making things easier or harder. There are advisories that come down from the admin requiring that athletes be given accommodation on scheduling, but that's about as far as it can go. And of course there is an underground system which identifies instructors who are above average sympathetic, but I imagine that everything is just going to keep getting crazier Maybe a new system where as long as you do promise to leave in a year we'll let you roll over 30 credit hours of incompletes......

The metaphor might be that MAGA is a balloon that is more likely to be gradually deflated than be popped. And of course a good question is what happens when Trump eventually assumes room temperature. (a nod there to a another MAGA who has done the same and not really been replaced.). Is the discontent broad and deep enough that the movement will simply force another leader to the fore, or does Trump have rarer gifts that glue the movement together?

submariners in general do not reach the Velos that overhanders do, and stress correlates to arm speed.

Part of it is also statistical noise. For instance the number breakaways stopped is a small sample - there is always an element of guessing for the shooter and the goalie. A goalie might stop 8 or 10 breakaways out of 15 in two weeks and it was really nothing more coin flip luck because he made the right guess on where the shot would come and two weeks later he might let in 10 of 15 and he's the same goalie the whole time but his outcomes look a lot different. A sharp analyst will pick up if a guy is getting sloppy with his angles or maybe is just getting beat up and not moving as well. Or it;s just fatigue and loss of reaction time. IDK which if any of that kind of thing is an issue with Lyon. But even during the hot streak they were giving up too many wide open transitions and no goalie is going to keep up with that long term.

Don't disagree. I didn't mean to say it was expected, I was commenting on who I think Pence's constituency is, where I think he would have the most leverage should he ever use it. I've said before I'm a firm believer that the American Republican has so much of their identity construct tied up in the affiliation with that label that "refuse to endorse" is as far as they can ever get. Politically that means at best a non-voter, most likely only a non-presidential voter who still pulls the red level down the rest of the ticket. That would be enough to stop Trump, but means it's still a big lift for the Dems to get both houses and put an end to the current Congressional nihilism.

Actually the people Pence could reach are not the ones who care about democracy. Pence's cred is greatest with the religious right. If he repudiated Trump on religious grounds using an evangelical theological approach, attacked the 'Trump as Cyrus' trope as wrong/heretical, etc., tells his listeners that Jesus has told him the movement has made a bad turn, then some heads *might* be more likely to explode. Maybe.

IDK that he's exactly 'out' of Basketball. He has a title with the Pistons - unclear to me what it entails/how involved he stays.

It's a thought, but I'll be surprised if an old school guy like JB has much desire to step back into the the one and done merry-go-round system let alone one and done plus NIL. And even if he did it doesn't play to his strengths.

Once they abandon their own political ambitions, people get a lot saner.

That's always the bottom line - who's going to take his place? If Kreider can go down to Toledo and OPS 800 for a month, then you start looking for Javy to get benched. Otherwise what's the point?

I get that Willis should face any proper consequences of unprofessional conduct, but not that there is any reason any of that should accrue to the benefit Trump's case- because they are in the final analysis separate issues.

the judge and the jury need to be unbiased, you can't claim 'bias' for the prosecutor - it's his role to be biased, that's whose bringing the case. Its an advocacy system. The prosecutor tries to win case, the defense to stop them. Neither is 'unbiased' in the trial. If you are hired to prosecute the case how does your professional interest in winning get any higher than it already is just because you get it on with another member of the office? There is no bias here that is inherent to the defendant, which is what would matter. Again, it I agree it sounds bad superficially, and it's certainly unprofessional, but justice wise there is really no there there.

but on what grounds actually relevant to the administration of justice? Propriety may be violated here, and as I said, there may be policy issues inside the office, but where is the line of logic that gets you to an impingement on any defendent's rights?

It's just noise generated by politics. It's a sloppy kind of logical attribution: "Prosecutorial misconduct must be prejudicial to the defense." - well, not really. The prosecutor can have 10 yrs of unpaid tickets for not feeding the parking meters at the courthouse parking lot. Unacceptable conduct - still has nothing to do with any cases. If there are relationship rules in the office, then fine - they should be followed.

I don't think Trump is going to get any changes of venue when he works the media to a higher volume than any direct news reporting about his cases, and it hard to see how a relationship between two members of the prosecution team has anything to do with the procedural soundness of a trial, but the state of American jurisprudence is such that logic is pretty immaterial anymore.

Warde getting a little testy? "*I* have decided....." No institutional passive voice or corporate "we have decided"

among whom unemployment is at the lowest level since the '70s. We know economic data no longer trumps cultural issues to the degree it once did, but it ain't hurting either.

movement at light speed relative to normal!

I can understand that the system has to sanction poor behavior in a prosecutor and the way to do that is to hammer their cases, but this a case where any line to fairness for the defendant is purely incidental. If anything, the DA making a sub optimal hire out of personnel preference is an advantage to the defense because a non-deserving hire by definition is likely be less competent. There is nothing in that for the defense to argue makes their defense more difficult.

I think in the wake of the civil unrest following Floyd's murder, and all the 'defund the police' talk, plus the general minority skepticism about the medical establishment re-juiced by the pandemic, you had a bit of a perfect storm for driving more socially conservative AA voters away from 'the party of AOC.' But consider the last 4 yrs. Society has calmed down, crime is down (and no segment of the society feels that more immediately than the black community), *nobody* in the Biden admin gets anywhere near anything but law and order rhetoric, the Press has put himself front and center into the Union movement, and the VP is an ex-prosecutor at whom progressives have aimed a lot of criticism in the past. IOW, this admin has pretty well inoculated itself against most of the trends that were alienating socially conservative blacks.

/s !!!!

Yeah - I think this is probably spot on. They need "process" as justification for doing the obvious because the fiction must be maintained that winning is not the only value in big time sports. So I imagine if you put any group of twenty 18-20 old kids' lives under a microscope you can dig up enough going on to come to any conclusion you want so they will get what they want. The truth is probably closer to this: Juwan may have arrested development juvenile anger issues that make him an untenable presence in the modern world, but that is not why his team lost (anyone remember Bobby Knight?) They lost because of talent: Dickerson walked and then they lost more talent to injury and academics. His recruiting probably fell off because you don't exactly overflow with energy when you have coronary disease, and energy is sine qua non for a recruiter. I'd also note Dickerson didn't leave mad, he just left for money, and that goes to more doorsteps than just Juwan's. For Juwan, bringing his kids to his own program was a mistake, but he's only the zillionth coach to have done that. In the end, it's NBD. Coaches come and go. Not everyone is cut out to succeed. It's just that I think it's not going to be as easy as folks think to find the guy who fits into all the pieces of the puzzle it takes to win at basketball in Ann Arbor.

And not to state the obvious - Danielson might eventually be an all-star but right now the Hronek trade is killing us.