gehringer_2

I would guess temperature - and for sure low wind load. These huge structures have to be designed to expand and contract around some neutral temperature - again a guess, but I think they would want to lock the ends in place on a day when the whole structure was as near as possible to the neutral point design temp.

The Wings are already too small/lack physicality up front for Berggren to be a good fit on the current roster, and when he was up he did not defend, which wouldn't have endeared him to SY.

the connection they made the other day is interesting construction tech. From what I could gather, they couldn't predict the exact distance for closure working the two ends from so far away(the main beams bolt together, the holes have to line up exactly), so they installed temporary adjustable beams to lock the ends in place while they customize the last primary beams to fit exactly.

I think there is some truth to this generally but you can't say it categorically since you have the recent examples of Stafford and Brady winning Championships in their first year on a new team as counter cases.

Flying Tigers sweep a DH. Clark 3/4 and McGonigle with a HR in the 1st. Clark with the HR and McGonigle 2/4 in the second.

Best case scenario Carpenter and Torkelson come back after the ASB as effective players and they manage to play >500 ball in the 2nd half. The $64 dollar question is will they fall too far out of it before then, and the answer to that is looking like yes. They don't hit and they are down to 2 effective starters. Manning isn't doing anything much at Toledo. Oslen maybe finds his grove again, maybe Mize's command keeps improving with more IP. A lot of things will have to go right, and when have they ever for this team? You'd have to go back to 2006. I guess they must have burned a couple of generations worth of good Karma that year.

Well, it would be cooler if I knew the pitcher was doing something extraordinary, but if you no-hit this team the way its playing now it should go in the books with an asterisk.

Maybe, hopefully -- it's because they have told him to swing at more pitches in the zone and learn to reach more of them and this is the beginning of an adjustment period. The last couple games he does seem to be taking a lot fewer pitches in the zone.

A waste to have used Holton and Foley today.

And the Michigan GOP (other than Snyder) fought it tooth and nail right along with Matty Maroun. Too bad they aren't yet as dead as he is (at least metaphorically speaking.....)

But if you want to off yourself, do you really have to take a bunch of bystanders with you?

Yes, there is that....🙄

True - Baez is having a weird season.

Here's another theory - they are above average at hitting below average pitching. Thus you get feast or famine. Beat up on guys who throw too many cookies, struggle to hit against even moderately good command when they have to adjust to hitting pitches where they are thrown. Since run scoring is an asymmetric distribution, you get more boost to your average on the high end than you can lose on the low end (since you can't score less than zero).

No doubt they depended too much on the power play - which is partly because it's such a thin roster that getting the few good players out there together at the same time makes a huge difference. 🙄 Shooting percentage is partly just the style they play. The Wings don't take nearly as many low percentage shots as most teams, and I'm fine with a style that works for fewer but higher quality chances. So they should have/maintain a higher shooting percentage than average. But yeah - they really can't afford to 'give up' anything.

I suppose, but from the construction side It's not really a 'moment'. Setting each section is a long, slow, drawn out process - with many steps. Sort of like watching grass grow and picking a point at which to say "it's long".

Wings had the 5th highest GF in the conference and the 5th worst GA. They still need more defense more than more offense.

BTW, on the topic of Torkelson hitting fastballs, he did hit a couple of 95mph pitches decently tonight - a 106mph GB to 3rd for an out, and 320 ft 95mph fly ball he got under too much (32 deg LA). Nothing to show but at least he was getting around on some velo.

Yes - I think what gets lost in discussion is that to actually 'control' the zone it has to go both ways - it must not only mean not swinging at balls, it has to also mean not giving pitchers too many free strikes -- or else it's a policy for failure. It's no different than the fact that controlling the zone for a pitcher means more than just throwing every pitch down the middle. A pitcher tries to throw as many hard to hit pitches in the zone as he can, in turn a hitter has to try to convert as many of those pitches into hittable as he can. That's where the whole game lies. Teams with batters waiting for cookies will never do more than win on days they are lucky enough to face sub-replacement pitching. Now on the plus side, they have talked about trying to make Torkelson "more athletic' in the box - and I have to assume this means to enable him to reach more pitches, but the roster in Detroit is deep enough into being passive hitters it's going to take a broader effort to dig out, even if the coaching will is there.

Ah yes, remembering more bad old days when a marginal knuckleballer was the ace of the staff.

Petry and Dan hitting the connection again that the Tigers take the most 1st pitches of any team by far in a context clearly implying the connection to the inept offense, a point also having been made by Monroe and Gibson, none of that, let alone multiple years of terrible results, appears to be motivating this coaching staff to reconsider its assumptions.

Point taken.

Yup, this too. But do you think anyone in the US media will actually provide a serious challenge to the stupidity of any of this?

without running any numbers I'm going to make a 1st pass assumption that the number won't match up. Tariffs were the primary income for the Federal government prior to the income tax and simply were not yielding enough money, which is why the income tax was established in the 1st place. I pretty seriously doubt you could come close to replacing the income tax with tariffs. Not to mention the elasticity effect. If you push tariffs up to get more revenue, imports will just fall in response. That might be a nice outcome for US manufacturer's but it would still leave the Treasury empty. You also have a stability problem. The income tax is a popular tax with governments because after property taxes, it is the most stable. The business cycle plays havoc with consumption taxes and would even more-so on tariffs, leaving the gov with a huge headache over year to year variability.

and that raises the question of whether pitchers are really inconsistent or just their measurements. Undoubtedly both to more or less degree depending on the case. With relievers you have the added issue that the sample sizes can be too small in a given season to get reasonable stability. Numbers from a guy that puts up 200 IP are going to be more reliable, assuming you don't have changes in health, and of course we don't necessarily ever know about those - a la the year Verlander was pitching over the abdominal tear (aka sports hernia). In the case of WHIP, I'm not going to argue it's accurate enough to compare guys on different teams to a 0.1, but taken inside a staff, where the guys are pitching more or less to the same opposition in the same ballparks, it's going to be a pretty good relative number once the sample size is reasonable. FIP is valuable, but I think the assumption a pitcher has no control over batted balls is too extreme to be completely valid either. Swing and miss is certainly going to be inversely correlated with barrel rate but not perfectly. But there is still a different between missing because of movement and missing because of misreading the pitch type and also what areas of the zone a pitchers prefers pitching to. Pitchers who 'fool' batters on pitch type are likely to give up harder contact when the batter guesses right than a guy that gets by more on pitch movement, so there are still additional complexities to OPS against beyond just K's and walks.