gehringer_2

forgetting Platner for a minute - being working class doesn't really mean much either way. FDR didn't have a working class cell in his body - was the best president the American working class ever had.

Torres and Carpenter both played for the Hens tonight - Carpenter a walk in 2 PA, Torres 0-4. Sounds like we can't count on Javy for a long time yet. But with the BP a mess and Mize questionable Torres and Carpenter are not enough. If Mize doesn't come off the 15 on time and stay off it the rest of the way (neither seems likely) I don't see them having any chance to catch up.

OKC had the size, didn't make it work for them.

- so to circle back the original jumping off point of this digression, I'm not excited over the prospects of the Pistons' future having to depend on either Thompson or Duren turning into bigger offensive assets. Don't like the odds on either.

he tougher to play against then kareem because he's more athletic - he's more like a young Wilt but with a long range shot.

One team plays dirty and the other dives, are you guys sure you're not watching the NHL?

but this assumes a clean sheet of paper on every play. You're never going to plan an offense around it, but what any increase in shooting ability does for him is to be able to do something when the all the other doors are closed and it's an it about to be an .8pt chance vs zero. It's always better to have an additional skill than not. I'll grant you any day that it would be better if he could trail on a break. pull up and gun a three, but I can't help but doubt that will ever be the case after 4 full years in the league and 0 for 6 total on 3 pt attempts. But I'm all for a miracle if you think it can happen.

That's the thing about inflation. You can persuade people to believe all kind of lies about the state of the world, the nature of the opposition, your own virtue as a savoir, and about the threat of their brown neighbors, but you absolutely cannot persuade them they just paid less for the week's groceries than they did.

Of course a trey is the better percentage strategy, but if hitting treys is completely out of the realm of possibility for him, then it becomes the perfect being the enemy of the good. If they are going to sign him and be stuck with him, then any increase in his offensive game adds options for him and requires a defense to respond. Obviously you hope the coaching staff has some idea whether him working on treys is pointless or not and pushes in a productive direction.

I've listened to a couple of long form interviews with him out of curiosity - anyone expecting Seb Gorka or even Stephen Miller level nods and winks to facism would be disappointed. I don't have to decide whether to believe him or not as I don't have to decide whether to vote for him. then again - on one hand, you have guy who admits his past and puts it out there, on the other hand there's a guy that was probably just as bad but spent a herculean level of energy lying to deny it like Brett Kavanaugh? Which is worse?

IDK if it's been all down hill over all, but I would say that the day before Scherzer turned down a contract from the Tigers was day the team had the most *potential* to be great of any day since then.

Platner has an interesting lift. He has to persuade the voters the person he use to be was a stupid, provocateuring grunt and is now a grown ass adult. The first question is whether it's actually true and the second is whether he can persuade voters even if it is.

without any real basis I tend to think Duren will have a mid-range game before Ausar has any offensive game.

Horsehoes and Hand grenades as they used to say. 😥

If it has to be the incompetence that stems from the base, craven character of the current GOP rather than that character itself that leads to their losses, I'll take it -- even if I am depressed by it.

Fair question. In baseball there are trade-offs to be made between the short term and the long term across a season. across a series and even across a game. It's hard to excuse letting Short bat unless Hinch has some other plan for how he wanted substitutions to play out. Maybe it was a good plan, but maybe it was a case where an emphasis on the short view may have been more appropriate - or maybe his match-up data said he didn't have a hitter likely to do anything anyway. That would certainly be a depressing reason.

no question they need a couple of power arms, and I don't see any on the near horizon.

this has stood out in this stretch. Running a strategy you don't have the players to execute doesn't matter all that much when you are just PHing one terrible hitter for another (i.e. Short vs Workman), but it makes platooning Keith - who has more potential to at least offer some OBP - even if he can't find ISO, justifiably questionable.

And lets not forget that a blown save is a blown save whether it's one run or 3 that's given up. If Tigers relievers came into more games with a 3 run lead than a one run lead, or if the team scored more late runs, some of those saves wouldn't have been blown - or long story short, the BP has been bad but poor offense also contributes to it looking even worse.

LOL - in his dreams - or maybe that's pounds measured by Troy ounces...

Ilitch has shown that while he likes to be 'around' his teams, he has no taste for being an activist owner. Avila and Yzerman prove he is willing to have far more patience with his management than many pro sports owners. You might think that seeing both of his teams repeatedly collapsing just when they were supposed to be turning the corner might drive him to a drastic move, but I still doubt it. Maybe more concerning is that all of the 2024 euphoria about McGonigle, Clark, Briceno and Liranzo as the next wave of hitters has turned into "Well, McGonigle is certainly great and who are those other guys?" Nothing unusual about a high miss rate on prospects, unless you are specifically selling your ability to find and hit on prospects at a higher rate as why you should have the job. You need to average one or two players a year to keep up. If this year we count Melton and McGonigle, that's fine, but two players is not a development bonanza - it's your average target.

I'd like to believe voter are this intellectually interested in government as government, but I just don't believe it anymore. I think if the GOP gets swamped it will be over a much more mundane concern - inflation.

But we'd need to have a different cast of bad players having their one good year - it's too much to ask for multiple bad players to have multiple good years, if they could they wouldn't be bad players.

the sane runs are running on health-care and increasing economic equity - the latter one plays well conceptually but there is nothing like any wide consensus of what policy to do that looks like. I would guess that if the Dems as a party actually generated a wide ranging platform of popular economic reforms they'd instantly lose all their big donors.

well, Brieske throws hard, if he can hold together for any period of time.