gehringer_2

250 is probably more than the overall team BA.

Montero will likely give up another one or two before we ever get to the BP

watching the Angels is like looking in the mirror

So Torkelson took the 2nd pitch for strike one - a little up but over the center of the plate - a ball that he can certainly get in the air for the sac fly, and instead struck on pitches that were all much harder to get to. Riley has had two pure 2025 Riley ABs where he was flailing away no where near the ball. I really hate watching these guys hit.

Well, at least Torkelson was watching the play.

terrible play by Vierling

Well that fizzled quickly. But one is better than none.

Keith and Torkelson both seem to be guys who spend time playing below their talent because their brains are in the way. For Colt, we can probably assume the HR drought is at a point it's messing seriously with his head.

fast healer.

i like defense as much as the next guy, but the league average plays for a SS in 9 innings is 4.5 and probably 90% of those are routine. That’s works out to about a play every two games where a better defender is likely to matter. OTOH, in those two games that player had 7-9 PA, every one of which mattered. That’s an extreme view, but the numbers are what they are.

could be. McK was a little rough at SS when he first arrived but seemed to play pretty well there last season, so that would make sense.

part of the family hails from ex-christian anatolia.

Sample sizes for relievers suck. That said, his walk rate is too high, but his WHIP is still in the ballpark of his career norm because he's giving up fewer hits along with the walks -- so that's a little contradictory. His velo isn't down measurably. The most optimistic reading is the HRs were just bad luck and skew his other numbers and the rest is just SSS noise. The less optimistic reading is the walks are the leading indicator of a degrading arm. Like Chasfh said - we are going to find out one way or the other.

true enough but what else have you got then besides old-school conventional wisdom, the thing from whose errors and prejudices we are trying to inoculate ourselves in the analytics era? If a guy holds his own for 120 PA against LHP and in particular has a reasonable K rate - a number which usually does stabilize pretty fast, where's the strength in the argument against letting that keep playing out? It comes down to someone saying "well I've been managing baseball for X decades and I believe most guys will crash back to earth" But any particular guy is not necessarily "most guys", so if all you have is a general prejudice, as the Dude would say: "Well, that's like..just your opinion man" this also an area where you would think tech should start making a difference. The reason given that LHH have worse platoon splits on average then RHH is that RHH have no choice but to see a lot of RHP. But with Trajekt (et al), a LHH who wants to work at it can practice against good LHP as much as he wants. We'll see if that has any effect across the league over time.

And McKinstry had a reverse platoon split last season. He's only had 8 AB against LHP and is hitless so far. IDK, somtimes it seems the management is slave to statistics until there's one that doesn't meet with their prejudices.

it was a very interesting place - they did a lot of things in ways they had never been done before and haven't been since.

I hope the slot him ahead of Vanasco or Hanifee

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.