gehringer_2

Ha - I heard Jansen talking this morning about an OT that was in play for the Lions and he said after watching him that even though he was big, he didn't believe he would ever be able to keep his pad level low enough to be successful in the NFL -- and gave some detail as to why, but of course I never heard who he was talking about before I got to where I was going!

the story writes itself.

he won't get that kind of suspension when it was Soler that charged him. EDIt: He got seven and it was reduced to 5. Which for a pitcher might not even be one start. And TBH, the way Soler hangs over the plate, the pitch that hit him in the hands wasn't even that far inside.

when they were part of the Washington Post they were doing better work than either of those two, but that didn't sell enough magazines. The US is no place to get rich doing quality journalism.

well, he was bleeding from the mouth, couldn't move his left arm, and appeared to be concussed - any one of those could rate a night of observation I suppose. He was not in a good way when he finally got up.

Yes run prevention is the bigger issue, but while the offensive numbers are true in aggregate it's largely because of 2 lopsided wins, also true they've scored 3 or less in 6 of 13 games.

i've said before that at some level there seems to be disconnect between Hinch and whole 'control the zone' concept. Hinch constantly re-iterates that he is always telling his hitters to "get a good pitch to hit". Well what if you don't? A major league pitcher can easily throw you 3 pitches in the zone and none of them are going to be 'good to hit'. So you just give up any AB when you don't get a cookie? How is that controlling the zone? You can win a lot of games waiting for mistakes when you are facing bad pitchers, but what about when you aren't? If you make it 'defend the K zone until the pitcher makes a mistake' that means you have to have a real defensive two strike approach with a short stroke to keep fouling pitches off. Do we see a lot of Tigers with that? Riley does say he's trying it.

the problem with Riley is that he seems to go overboard with everything. He was hitting too many ground balls in the 1st couple of years to he revised his approach - to the 2nd the most extreme upper cut in all of baseball. Last yr he struck out too much, so far this year his K rate is down a lot, his walk rate is up, but he's not getting any hits either.

I've beaten this point like a drum. They cannot pressure the puck in their own end. They lack the quickness to challenge and the strength to get a take away if they do get there. That is a skillset, and it's basically the same skillset needed to forecheck effectively, and Wings simply do not pay any attention to it in their roster construction for forwards and have not going back to before SY took over.

There was always the chance that the real Tiger team was the team we saw in the September and the team we saw in the 1st half was the one not playing to its mean level. Keith seems to be the only guy that has started the season hot and he doesn't hit for the kind of power that can help carry a team past other guys' underperformance.

He was holding his Left arm in completely immobile also.

Or just take them. I find it an odd combination. As a team, they K a lot, but they are fundamentally not aggressive hitters, it seems more because they get behind. Tork esp takes a lot of good strike ones.

Holton wanted no part of Buxton there.

yeah - it always looks bad when a team doesn't score, but sometimes you are going to face good pitching in the majors. Run prevention has been the bigger problem, both pitching and some of their defense.

aRtiC SqUiRrEL!

this is too true, but I don't know that the decision on how much time is spent away from the PBP is Benetti's call,

Too many 100mph EV outs in this series.

i’ve thought they needed to let the skilled Dmen do more also, but if the forwards can’t or won’t rotate back that can’t work either.

beyond 3 players they don't have the skill or the speed the play the skill game either.

Team is just one run below average run production and a bit above average in Ks. On the other side the pitching has been slightly below league average in almost all categories, including K's. But their numbers are not as bad as their results. Pythag puts them at 500.

I'm of the view that people get conditioned to "retconning" in all the video entertainment they consume, and the normalization of inconsistency in the video worlds they consume becomes operant conditioning to the way they process reality. Not to mention consuming too much passive video entertainment appears to correlate with brain rot in general. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/mentally-active-vs-passive-sitting-may-lower-dementia-risk-2026a1000a2w?_gl=1*d9w8ox*_gcl_au*NTU1MzMyNDcuMTc3NTczOTYxOS40NTY5MzUxMDYuMTc3NTczOTczMi4xNzc1NzM5NzMy

I had a Subaru that did a similar thing maybe twice in 10 yrs - all the electronics crashed. Just had to restart the car. Of course today, if your car is sitting at your house connected to your wifi, or if it has its own cellular modem, it might be updating SW and either introducing new bugs or squashing old ones on any given day and you might never know.

LOL - I could place what it reminded me of, but you nailed it!

We can be frustrated with the hitting in general but the pitching lost this one.

yup. The year before COVID I looked at this team with Betuzzi and Larkin and thought - 'They are only a couple of Dmen away from being competitive", and every year since then, there has been this illusion that they are not that far away. So initially the D was terrible and it's improved a lot, then they got an at least decent goalie, but here we are several years later and we find ourselves down to a mere 3 bona fide offensive players. The illusion is gone, they are not close. The front lines have decayed as fast or faster than Seider, Edvinsson and Faulk have built up the D.