gehringer_2

you can call it hindsight or you can say that the right choices are the difference between winners and losers. If there is no way to ever inform your choices better, then you might as well have kept Al Avila. It's Harris' job to figure out how to put resources where they produce the most return. No-one expects perfection - but you don't like seeing patterns in failure either.

for me the most valid criticism of Harris is the money spent on non-productive signings that would have been better spent on productive ones. I'm not sure where the disconnect lies between evaluation of draft and minor league prospects and current major league players, but there seems to be one. And it has mostly been on the pitching side (Paddock, Meada, Morton, Verlander is a sad list which I hope that Jansen doesn't add to). Torres earned his money last season. It's one thing to have misses, but a miss like Verlander is an expensive one - those dollars could have been spent on someone who is helping.

If you want to trade him wouldn't seeing him perform successfully in the NHL be the biggest boost to his value you could achieve? Especially if your internal eval was that he didn't have the stamina, bring him up early in the season when had the energy, send him back for whatever reason later.

I have a second thought take on this as well. I had to sit through a sales training course once with my fortune 100 (pretty close to living purgatory for an engineer!). So our sales system consultant trainer is trying to set us up for a role play exercise and he starts hammering on the idea that you always have to get one more thing on the deal - so he tells us an anecdote about going out to buy a car for his daughter and from his description he's got a great deal on the table and he decides now he wants a set of floor mats thrown in. The car guy finally balks at that and our guy walks out on the deal. That's supposed to be our model - walk out on a great deal because they have to give you more no matter what. So we get to the role play and the topic in the groups was 100% "this guy is an idiot!" but that's the way people the sales world often think (think "Glengary Glenross"!). That's the world Trump comes from. Shoot yourself in the foot for your ego.

correct. Not really implying that anyone is close to being fired, I was just arguing that I think under any hypothetical, the connection from Harris to Hinch is pretty strong.

Seems hard to understand why an athlete who's been competitive all his life would decide to take off at the objective point of his life's ambition - unless he was on the take (always has to be considered today!). I would think there has to be more to it. Pistons better figure it out though.

It's hard to ever really know about a manager other than in retrospect after someone takes over the same players and either does better or face plants. Hinch wasn't Harris' hire but I would still guess that Hinch is here as long as Harris. I think the only way Hinch loses his gig would be if Ilitch decided to broom Harris and start over..

to me the dilemma for Duren is how does he improve from here? He was much better this season than last, but mostly by doing better at things he already showed he could do. He's at the point now where the next increment in his game pretty much has to be his shooting, and that's asking to see a skill we really haven't seen at all yet - other than that he has a decent touch at the FT line. A Piston fan could be forgiven for being jaded about the likelihood of a big man's shooting improving.

You can bet the WH phone logs show a call from Bibi a few minutes before this tweet. I don't doubt this is Netanyahu's lastest gambit to keep the war going.

If Hinch asked for a player do we think Al would have refused? Whatever they should have seen, neither saw it. Roster decisions are co-operative.

Not that I don't think they are miles better, I doubt how many PA we will get before some number of them are back on the IL. EDIT: I really would have been OK if Gleyber hadn't felt the need to reinforce the point today. Jansen has blown 4 saves out of 13 save opportunities. His walk rate and HR rate are the highest of his career, his GB the lowest. He strikes me as showing signs of being on borrowed time. OTOH, his velo seems be holding - which is in his favor.

But that's the thing - Colt has potential to be better, Short and McK don't. You have have to take some lumps to bring your talent along - if you sacrifice the long term for the short term all the time, you are not going to have an environment where your young players have a chance unless they happen to just be 'plug and play' like McGonigle (assuming he doesn't eventually run into hard times also). But those guys are one in a million. The way he is being handled right now they have a better chance of recovering their investment in Keith if they sent him back to Toledo to play every inning. I have to wonder if Dingler would ever have gotten the consistent ABs he blossomed under if Jake had been left handed ( or hadn't gotten hurt). There is a ball player alive that won't tell you that the less you play, the harder the game is.

The positive part is that there is only one team in the division playing particularly well. The bad part is that it's not like Cleveland is playing so well they are bound to fall back and be easier to catch. I wouldn't count on a WC coming out of this division either.

I still have concerns I don't see the way out of. On the offensive side, my confidence level that Javy, Gleyber or Carpenter are going to add that much is low.. All three are fast joining the ranks of those those whose name has to be prefaced with 'the oft-injured.' Will any of them be able to stay on the field once back? Not to mention Javy isn't that big an offensive add under any circumstance. And Parker is already only about half a mis-step away from being a 'might have been' The pitching talent is going to be there, but you still have the problem of how you get Jansen and Flaherty off the field. It's not going to do any good to have better young arms able to pitch if the team keeps sending those two guys out there anyway. This management has been pretty bad about cutting bait on its mistakes in a timely fashion (Kenta?). How many games are they going to let those two lose?

so for the sake of argument, if the Piston's sit and wait and no-one else offers what happens?

KM should have clobbered that 1-1. Just couldn't barrel it. But hitting the 3-2 works too.

Vierling couldn't catch up to Rogers FB that AB

And they got Mookie Betts for Verdugo and have been laughing about it ever since.

You can't play every possible edge to win every game, and do player development at the same time. Hinch should be managing a rich team that buys fully finished product players. I love how he manages pitchers but I've come to question whether he is the manager you want on team that will have to always have a lot of young players coming up that need to play through their troubles and development. Hinch won't manage that way. He's too proud of his ability to push all the buttons.

Because the probabilities multiply with adjacent batters, offense gets bad by a higher order when you put really bad hitters in the lineup. If you send 3 guys to the plate in an inning with less than 300 OBP, you're chances of scoring are poor. If it's 3 guys with 250 OBPs it got worse by more than just 16.7%. You can't play good enough defense to make up for that. If it were one guy you were putting in a team what could score that would be on thing, but that 7-8-9-1 last game had no chance to do anything, they were just giving away half the innings in the game.

the platoon thing has gone off the deep end - it's like they aren't even thinking about what they are doing. You want to go by the numbers, fine: Lets say Colt's OPS split is 250 - (and I'd wager it would be less than that if he playing everyday), and he is 800 against RHP - he's still a better option against a LHP than Short by 200 OPS points! Any strategy is only as good as the players you have to implement it. The guy on the team that may have the best contact skill right now on a team literally dying for it, and he can't stay in the lineup.

I've got news, we are desperate. Besides, giving yourself more time is never a bad negotiation strategy. Thing is, at this point I don't know if I want Harris making the deals.

They are getting something out of Valdez, but Flaherty and Jansen have been mistakes. We can talk injuries all we want, but those two aren't getting their PT because other guys are injured. And Verlander? What can you say other than predictable outcome.

that's the conclusion I've come to. At this point everyday they wait value returned goes down, while the team just gets further behind anyway.

Tork gets his average back to 200!