gehringer_2

Anderson serves up a cookie and the Tigers lose. Weirdest thing in this game (not the loss, that's normal), there were 5 pinch hitters used for the 3rd spot in the batting order --.may never see that again.

all the Tigers starters have.

Oh boy, we get the 2 Zacs when a run is critical. EDIT: they got the run in. Sign of the Apocalypse?

You can't make it up.

and with two left on the board.

I don't know where he picked it up but it's a regular thing with Dan.

A bit of a pet peeve here or question for someone who pays more attention to this stuff. Dan just called the 2B catching the ball, stepping on 2nd and throwing to 1st an "unassisted double play." Doesn't the 1B get a put out? And if that's an unassisted DP, then what do you call it if the 2nd base catches a line-drive and then tags out a runner that wandered too far off 2nd and actually gets both put-outs?

Priceless ad copy in the Toyota radio ad that just ran: the car "is 100% hybrid!" So 100% a combination of things. ...meanwhile the defensive specialist doesn't get the out on the tough play anyway.

after 2 PH, the three spot in the line-up is..... 0 for 4.

I've lost track - what happened to Hurter?

The less people understand a technology, the easier and more likely it is to get oversold, and nobody actually understands AI, not even the people who created it.

Don't let the vinyard door hit you on the way out.

I suppose a player can put on a personna as an athlete much like an actor playing a role. It can be the way of giving yourself permission to do the stuff you wouldn't in your 'regular' life.

plus guys who aren't injured but whose 2025 was fool's gold -Jones, Perez and McKinstry, our back up catcher is giving us even less than he ever did and Colt's ISO is chasing zero. You have one add in McGonigle, one improvement in Riley, Dingler has been good but was good last season, the rest of the line-up is all negatives.

With so much of US space being run by aces like Musk and Bezos, I find the failures more amusing than worrying - at least as long as they aren't killing folks.

IDK - I would get that in hockey or football or basketball where you are going out and being physically and often painfully dominated by the other team and you cannot exercise any will on the field of play. But baseball isn't like that. You are not competing physically against the other team - the game doesn't hurt more to play based on the strengh of the other team (doesn't hurt to play in any serious way for non-pitchers) so like Hinch says, every day's game is a clean slate and a player who loves playing baseball can still experience playing the game he loves regardless of the score in a way that isn't true in other sports. I think there is more to the idea that hitters can get run down mentally when they are facing pitching that over matches them, but even with the injuries most of the hitters on this team are pros with enough big league experience that should not be an issue. So having said all that, why is this team in such a funk - I think it is just *directly* the effect of having too many poor hitters in the lineup -- you can't score runs when you have long stretches of low OBP hitters that in effect make whole innings pointless, coupled to the fact you aren't stressing the other team's pitchers. The guys at the top of the order have remained productive, but the lineup is too short, and there is no wrap-around synergy on either side of them. So I don't think you need any mental explanations - pure lack of hitting talent explains it to me. If the coaches or prep concepts changed would it make a difference? Who knows, maybe marginally, but you aren't going to do much with raw material like Workman, Jones, Short, Lee, Rogers, Perez etc - they aren't good enough ( all <600 OPS). And McKinstry has turned back into pumpkin -apparently last season was his career outlier, so add one more.

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.