gehringer_2

If Trump showed up at a Michigan game they'd have to embargo letting any students in or there'd be a riot. At the very least they would have to turn off all the field mics and do a sterile audio to keep the non-stop "F*** TRUMP!" chant from going national.

With a nearly 1% chance of death with every childbirth and a high # of lifetime pregnancies that's a lot of women dead in their 20's pulling down that number.

that's right - the deal bought him out of his 1st year - so you are probably right - the totals will about go up 60-100%. IDK, Mize show flashes, but every pitcher that gets to the majors can show the occasional flash (Daniel Norris comes to mind), that's not enough to prove he will ever be a consistent major leaguer. He has a power arm, he has shown evidence of throwing a usefully live FB this season, and those count for a lot, but the injury history......and this last one coming off the mound on a pop-fly is just too bizarre, unless he had done it before hand and just started to notice it then.

the club option is $3.1M, agree that sounds out of the question. Based on this year's $830K and being 1st year arb - let's assume he'd win arbitration at $1.2-1.5M. That's still pretty cheap. Next year would be another matter....

'15 '16 '17 O-Line letterman. https://mgoblue.com/sports/football/roster/patrick-kugler/16310

College football being in a state of total chaos, anything is possible. It's usually foolish to count on anything with a team with an untested QB, but it's possible a not very effective M offense will be enough against a bunch of other teams whose chaos has been even greater than M's

You don't need tests to know that Baez should be shut down'...though they might be helpful if you want a medical reason in addition.

It's the Matt Millen error. Teams are not as strong as their best part, they are as week as their worst. Balance is almost always better.

It's dumb system system. The Arbs seem to have established a seniority based scale with close to zero consideration of a player's actual worth. All it does is create more player movement without actually benefiting players. If the Tigers decline - the odds Casey can get on the open market anywhere near the amount an Arbitrator would award have to be about nil.

Someone noted no-one has started a game thread for M for this season. When you follow winning big with a season with a dim outlook, I guess interest falls fast.

I’d guess they’d be happy as not if no one read it.

think how much better it would have been if he hadn't extended Willis, Cabrera, Martinez and Fielder unnecessarily? Sure you want an owner with an emotional commitment, but most the things that Mike did that were counter productive all stemmed from being letting emotion trump cool reason: The tiff with Max, the way DD was fired, and the extensions noted above.

Yup. Absolutely nothing is more important in a GM/POBO than hard headedness. You can't get diverted from you plan for 'feel good' moves. We got enough of that from the owner's chair with M. Ilitch.

No the point just was that his performance had been steady. That is also a perfectly apt meaning of plateau so I'm going to stick with it. One of my pet peeves in life is when society takes a perfectly good word that applies in many places and demands it use be limited to one thing, so I will fight that battle daily for the King's English! (and of course 'plateau' is not even an 'English' word....) But seriously, I have always had some doubts about Malloy, so I would not be surprised if he were 'plateaued' in your sense. I won't write a guy off at 24, but I'd rate him under 50/50 at this point. Which I suppose isn't saying much because any AAA player if probably 50/50 at best.

If Tork is productive through the end of the season, they will be loath to give up their best RH bat. If he isn't, he won't net much on the market so if he is moved it would be as a throw in, he won't bring back enough to matter. If he is sort of so-so - 90-100 OPS+ then I think you have the highest prob they shop him.

There are two ways to look at it: To be promoted and not fall off the cliff a month in once you are thoroughly scouted is a good thing to see in a rookie, so 'plateau' isn't the worst thing. But we know Malloy is sort of an odd duck. His MiLB OPS was driven by a 20% walk rate, and his MLB walk rate is a good but more normal 10%. So knock 100 of his MiLB OPS for that and then assume a normal loss of 50-100 OPS points on reduced contact against better pitching and a 700 OPS player may just be what you have. But if he goes back to AAA now understanding he has to work on making better in-zone contact instead of waiting for MiLB pitchers to walk him, then the call-up will have profited him.

A tidbit in a recent Henning column I hadn't read ((Henning here) is that Workman has stopped switch hitting. Since he has given up trying to hit from both sides he has cut his K rate from 39% to 27%. That's still not great at AA but it's a lot closer to being in the ballpark of where he needs to get it. 24 in AA isn't young anymore but he may be the one SS in the upper system that actually has enough glove to stick as a useful backup/utility.

click the 3 dots on the tweet and choose 'embed post'. You will get dialog window with a URL in a box at the top that says "What would you like to embed?" then some choices lower on the page. I think the easiest thing is to ignore the stuff at the bottom, just copy the URL in the box under the question in the upper part of the dialog and paste it into your post. Do not choose "paste as plain text"

they won 78 last season, they need to get to >90 to be competing for the playoffs. So call it 92 wins and a 14 game improvement. To accomplish half of that this season would require them to get to 85wins - which is conceivable, but not all that likely - they would have to play 600 the rest of the way. OTOH, if they were on track for the playoffs, Flaherty would still be here, so that would add 2-5 wins. The the other view would be that if they do at least win any number greater than last year after losing Olsen, Mize, trading Flaherty and having Lange turn into a pumpkin, then the line-up has gotten stronger and they could be poised to make up a lot of ground in 25. The irony is that while you can point to all the unexpected pitching loses, it's still runs scored where they are lagging by 50+ runs of being in the same class as the playoff teams, while despite the pitching losses, their runs allowed would be competitive in most divisions.

No 'need' for Malloy in the OF either for that matter. Sweeney makes the most sense, but that all depends on how much they see Sweeney as actually auditioning to replace Javy vs just getting his feet wet.

Malloy has sort of plateaued at about 700 OPS. Not terrible, not great. But he has only hit one HR in his last 80 PA.

and he still lowered his ERA.

Going out in a blaze of glory.

Well at least the series didn't end up as 3 shutouts, which would have been pretty terrible.

Or if Dominguez doesn't double clutch. Guess he couldn't find the laces or something but it was probably the difference.