gehringer_2

JV was almost as much a freak as Ryan, and he has said that things changed even between the beginning and end of his career. When JV first came up he could throw mostly a ~91-95 mph fastball for 2 or three innings, add more offspeed the 2nd time through then comeback with the 97-99 heater on the third pass, and even when he was dealing up to triple digits he'd be adding and substracting from the fb by several mph pitch by pitch. No one pitches like that today. Today Skubal comes out of the gate at 97 or more throwing all his pitches, and the FB hardly varies.But Verlander had enough spin at 91-93 he could get away with it early in the game. Nobody can get away with that anymore. Plus there have been changes in the K zone. My impression is that in the years prior to it finally being fixed in one place by QuesTec, FX etc., a lot of umps called a lower zone - more like bottom of knees to waist than knees to letters, and it was probably harder to hit those low pitches for much power. The higer K zone took hitters a while to adjust to, but I think there may be more power in higher plane swings.

and it's for good reason: Almost every pitcher today is out of gas and does lose effectiveness somewhere around 100 pitches, which is probably more evidence that the old timers didn't throw max effort all the time, because there is no reason at all to think that today's pitchers should have less stamina.

circling back to the discussion about 'max effort all the time' pitching, Lolich is one of the guys who at least claims that it was very different when he pitched, that he did not pitch hard to a good part of the line-ups he faced.Now it's true that sometimes guys re-image their own histories a bit, but that is what Mickey has said on record.

and there must have been a big Yankees fan on the draft board because he got called back for Korea and once had to make an emergency landing after his plane got shot up!

from Axios today: also this from the wire services: "The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge surged to a three-year high in April, adding to growing concern at the central bank and on Wall Street over broadening price pressures. The Personal Consumption Expenditures Index rose 3.8% in April as the conflict in the Middle East pushed oil prices higher. That was in line with expectations and up from 3.5% in March. Excluding volatile food and energy prices on a so-called “core” basis, PCE was up 3.3%, also in line with expectations, and up a tenth from 3.2% in March. Still, that’s the highest core reading in two and a half years."

yeah - MI is definitely a race the Dems could screw up. I can't figure why Buttigieg didn't jump on this one.

back of the envelope, 0-60 in 1 sec is pulling 2.75g's. Do you have to bleach burn the tires to get enough stick to do that?

I think every manager ends up suffering from some level of decision paralysis trying to manage a bad BP. . We had the same discussions when Leyland was trying to manage with a bad BP. I think it's human nature to be more reluctant to take an action that goes bad as opposed to hoping a previous decision doesn't need to be second guessed. And that's pretty much true in all aspects of decision making in life. Some managers - Hinch included, put a lot of emphasis on not 'wasting' guys warming up, which is also part of it. Hard to know over the course of a season how that bias toward not 'wasting' warm-ups plays out in total wins and losses or total injury rates (since no-one seems to understand pitching injures anyway) - like a lot of things it probably depends on the particular pitchers in the mix.

or maybe it's like politics - a good leader in one place is a disaster in a different place. Winston Churchill was one of the World's great wartime leaders, he was a disaster as a peacetime politician. Or you get a management synergy: Sparky Anderson with Roger Craig was a better combination than Sparky without him. I remember when the Tiger brought in Ralph Houk expressly to manage a turn around - then he retired before they started getting good.

I vaguely remember this episode. The Russians should have given him a medal.

I thought it was reported Gleyber had a setback? Little one I guess....🤷‍♂️

Baseball is a pretty basic sport, very little equipment used by the players where tech can be applied and even the games played with the liveliness of the ball don't affect throwing it much, so I would guess there is less change in what the players at the limit are doing - if Nolan was throwing 100 as a starter that's about what the fastest guys are doing now, but there are probably a lot more guys optimizing their biomechanics to get near that maximum. So the average is probably up a lot more than the max and what was a big outlier in '74 is probably a lot closer to run of the mill today.

yes. But anything over 25 is getting deep for a max effort reliever. It's the classic argument over the better pitcher tired vs the worse pitcher fresh. As Chasfh says, we'll never know but it's certainly a fair game arguable point.

The Navy has spent a lot of effort on laser tech, which could be a big neutrallizer against drones, in fact against all airborne threats, if they can make it work. To stick with the paradigm of the article, the kill cost with a directed energy weapon is measured in pennies and a single unit can take down a whole swarm in seconds seriatum (again - this is the theory.) There was a lot press on this a few years ago, but things have largely gone silent, which means they've either hit a technical issue they can't solve, or they are quietly starting to role it out. Seeing as the Gulf would have been the perfect place to apply it, the latter seems doubtful.

one commentator made the point that if Trump hadn't dissed Zelenski so badly, he might have called Trump up and told him what was coming and how to deal with it.

Absolutely. If the dems weren't also so unpopular as party the risk wouldn't be so clear - but this election could be anything from a record turnout to everybody on both sides is jaded and stays home - who the heII knows?

OTOH - there were other reasons to defend making a move sooner - he was at 54 pitches and 30 in the inning so he was over exteneded, his FB was down off his better level, and his strike throwing was faltering as he got deeper in the inning.

baseball pitching has made a terrible devil's bargain in the modern era though. Pitchers are brought to a performance level where their wastage rate is now so high that team's success in a season has as much to do with injury rates as the talent level at the starting gun. We've come to take it for granted because it's now mundane, but if you stop and think about it, if TJ surgery had never been invented, half the pitchers in the majors would be out of the game. That's a completely absurd situation. So here's a different take - the increase in strike out rates is partly because of the ability to fix pitchers' arms who do things that pitchers didn't use to be able to do and stay in the game.

this is exactly it. Every strategy is based on a set of premises. When the premises in your situation have failed, it doesn't matter what the global data set says is optimal strategy. And you still have the larger question of whether the Tigers care if they produce a platoon player instead of an everyday one. There can be a divergence between what is in the player's best interests vs the team's. There is certainly a short team downside to letting a LHH work through hitting against both sides.If for whatever reasons the team doesn't regard the long term payoff as significant, why should they do it?

yeah. anyway you look at it I feel bad for him, he took the initiative and did the work to try to get better and it's not working the way he had it scripted. He's not in a good place now and a manager under the kind of pressure to straighten out his team that Hinch has been under since last Sept would not be at the top of his list for team situations to be in having to work through his individual issues. I actually hope they send him back to Toledo to play one position every inning of everyday, then bring him back and park him there. But I see little likelihood they will.

yup. And you can get a 4.1 sec 0-60 for less than half of the Tesla. That about 2 seconds faster than your best glory years muscle cars. You can buy 370 HP in a very mid market EV that with the perfectly flat torque translates to about the same performance level of at least 500 ICE HP. It's a completely different world on the performance end.

Truly Keith has shown no aptitude for stealing bases, but TBF, he is otherwise fine on the bases and is positive runs as a base runner. The power thing is what I think has him in the dog house this season. I can imagine the change in stance probably either came from a private coaching shop or in some way without team input so he's probably getting no slack from the staff over his disappeared launch angle. For my money, if you have a guy that has shown the kind of contact skill Keith has flashed you work with him because everything else can follow if the skill to get the bat on the ball is there. Riley is the cautionary tale here. He made an adjustment last season that had a lot of people ready to write him off, but he's been able to back of the extreme place where he was and he's being very productive so far this year. Like Riley, Keith has to come back some distance from the extreme of this short/flat approach but at this point it may not happen this season.

and there is more to it. An MLB batter makes choices with their set up and approach that can change their susceptibility to the slider away (the big driver of platoon splits). Tell a LHH that LHP is off the table for him and he's going to maximize his approach to hit RHP, at that point he will be less prepared against any LHP he has to face. That's the self-fulfilling part. Now it's possible teams have decided that that by having their LLHs optimize to hit RHP combined with RH platoon players further combined with the 3 hitter rule for relievers, they just don't care about having everyday players; they are prepared to just keep switching all the time. But then you get into a talent constrained situation like the Tigers are in and it's easy to believe that if he had a chance to work at it, a player like Keith would be better hitter against LHP than the pinch hitters the team actually has available to take the other half of his platoon ABs. That's where the potential loss is.

I think the Tigers need a resiliency trainer on the staff. The number of injuries this team is suffering in the course of fairly ordinary game activities seems out of any reasonable proportion.

or they'd all be dead the first year after being sent out every 4th day