gehringer_2

Lee makes two good pitches then completely loses the plate. 🤷‍♂️

As Peaches notes, great to see Torkelson going middle/RF twice after an 0/4 day. Call it a sign of a maturing hitter.

Won't be surprised if Scott leaves the game before it's over. That's bad place to get hit.

The whole episode only cost one pitch.

One of Javy's worst AB in a while there.

I remember a few years ago the Tigers came out of ST with a bunch of steals, them proceeded to get thrown out a bunch of times once the season started and pretty much stopped running altogether. The were doing a nice job on the bases last season but definitely seem to be pushing a notch too hard this season. The trick will be to cut back without shutting it down.

We didn't quite get Scherzer just for Jackson. Scherzer's cost was Jackson and Ian Kennedy, and the payoff for Kennedy was Curtis Granderson less the return of Austin Jackson. Scherzer was still the prize of the deal, though Granderson was understood to be the biggest piece at the time. EDIT: LOL, slow on the draw here!

The team that gets him won't have to take it all on though. Canucks are just stuck. Maybe the coaching change can work but otherwise he's useless on that team unless they bring in 19 other new players and any potential trade partner knows they are over a barrel and will drive a hard bargain on how much salary they will risk taking on. Someone will take a flier and either end up very happy or just as screwed as Vancouver. Wings, with 6 Swedes on the roster, would probably his best landing place, with the big cap jump they'll have room to be interested, but I doubt they will be.

well, at least better that they thought they hadn't delivered them when they had than vice versa!

They'll learn not to use him to close soon enough...🙄 In April, he had a bunch of holds, a zero ERA and a 287 OPS against. In May, being used to close, he has 5.83 ERA and 929 OPS against.

I'm sure he's probably not the only guy to have ever done it, but my all time favorite checked swing was when Willie Horton broke his bat.

I'm getting the impression that Skubal is pushing himself too hard early in a couple of these games where he was chasing a no-no. He's got to realize that going that hard there is no way he can finish 9 innings anyway. I'm almost hoping to see him give up a hit in the 1st so he dials back a little.

LOL - I was just going to post to ask if this was a single Post to both cities. How bush league can you get?

Jake and Dingler could be a nice tandem for a few years - not perfectly ideal as neither hits left, but in team building never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Don't even need metrics to know he has one of the strongest arms in the league, that's measureable independently - and he appears to be pretty accurate, so I'll believe he is Jake's equal in terms of the run game. It would take a little more convincing that he's already as good at Jake at blocking pitches. Jake is really quick. Framing can be a little tougher for bigger catchers because umps will tend to favor what they can see more easily. Bigger guys have to work harder at staying out of the way.

I was amused to notice that there a disclaimer under Google's AI Overviews. I don't know if it's new or if I just never noticed it, but right at the very bottom now you now get: "AI responses may include mistakes."

I haven't paid as much attention recently, but in games after Jake first went down they were signaling pitch calls in to Dillon from the dugout. This is something that pitchCom actually makes easier.

I've lost track since it's been a couple of years, but the FDA would have standing if the vaccine suppliers have never converted their emergency approvals to "full" approvals. Short of that, no - I don't see what could could prevent Pfizer or Moderna supplying all the vaccine they wanted as long as someome paid for it - private insurance, OOP or whatever. We followed the pandemic very closely in real time (my SO is a MPH) - watched all the demographic numbers from WashCo Public Health and it's true, in the absence of identifiable co-morbidity, the danger to the young was vanishingly small, and now that kids are growing up in the presence of circulating virus, probably even less so. At the time the issue around children was mostly that they were a spread vector to those around them higher at risk.

true - Jake's bat has always made him a stretch to be a #1.

I suppose if there is such a thing as herd immunity for Covid the US has reached it by now. Hell of a way to find out though.

I actually have a different view - I think the conventional liberal idea of 'making the corporations pay their fair share' is just virtue signalling rhetoric. I'd would just as soon see corporate income taxes stay low for the sake of US competitiveness, and because the corporate income tax is fundamentally regressive - lower income consumers spend more of their income on corporate products. But the balance is I want to see dividends taxable as ordinary income on the graduated scale. The historical precedent for low capital gains taxes was that it was a double tax because the corporation was already taxed - low corp income taxes kill that argument. Then the adjunct to that is that the 100% reset on capital gains on inheritance has to be modified. Too much capital gain escapes taxation completely under those rules. Those are my perfect world tax system dreams....😉

I guess the assumption is that Pettersson is the issue and not that the Canucks have a toxic locker room. I don't follow it enough to judge but if there are people in the game who believe that and turn out to be right, another team will get a good deal because I don't see how the Canucks can keep him or get much for him at this point.

But it doesn't really work that way. Corporations fundamentally don't pay taxes of any kind and they don't "decide" whether to pay taxes or not. The consumer pays them all no matter what the form of the tax. The tariff is no different from the corporate income tax in that regard. All corporate taxes or any kind are simply cost of sales that get added to however a company sets their prices, and in the end any retailer's margin is not a matter of their willingness to pay taxes but the willingness of their competitors to take a smaller or margin, or not. As long as Walmart's competitors raise their prices to protect their margins, so will Walmart. And as long as they all need a given margin to return enough on capital to their investors to stay afloat, they will all raise prices to protect their margins. The only tradeoff is that there is a point where price increases will shrink the market and total sales fall, which again pressures corporate ROI. There will be an optimum point where there is a trade off between margin and volume, but that won't be decided on by the store's politics. And of course, total market sales contractions have another name - recession.

I think the biggest problem with a transition to ABS is that 90% of MLB umps currently call a zone which is wider than the plate, and worse, it's not symmetric to both sides, the pitcher generally gets a couple inches to the outside relative to which ever side the batter is on. So the only way for ABS not to cause a big dislocation in the major league game is if the zone is set wider and shifts left and right at each batter - otherwise there is going to be a big jump in offense when hitters start spitting on all the outside pitches they can't reach that they they swing at now because they know will be called strikes anyway.

I'm not going to go look it up, but my recollection is that the rule book says the umpires is supposed to judge whether the batter committed to swing - or maybe 'offer' is the word. I don't think any particular physical geography of what that means is in the rule book. I don't know that I've heard a working umpire admit to what his standard is. Practically speaking, the home plate ump might be able to see the bat "cross the plate" but I wonder if the research showed that the base umpire (who makes the vast majority of the calls) is actually going by whether he sees the bat line up with his line of vision, whether he even recognizes that as his judgement point or not - simply because visually that is the only point where the base ump's eyes can detect a transition of some kind, and that isn't too far from what this system does - the strike line is parallel with the baseline - which is the point where the bat is pretty much pointing directly at the base umpire.