gehringer_2

and again, what we don't know may be the difference in what the team does. We can see that last season Soto couldn't throw his slider for a strike. This is why he gave up so many walks but still managed a reasonable save success rate - he'd keep trying the slider, get behind, maybe walk a guy or two, then have to resort to all FBs and still get away with it because the FB is good. To me one interesting question is, was his problem mental or physical? For instance we don't know if he could spin that slider right on the corners in a bullpen but then froze up on it in games because of some confidence/psychological issue. If I'm a coach or GM, the difference between a guy needing the coaching to get his confidence up versus a guy being physically unable to so something and what his coaches thought they could do about either could make a difference in how I valued him. Now this is all 100% hypothetical, I don't have a clue why Soto couldn't throw his slider last year - just noting how much information we may be missing compared to what the team sees. So as a fan you tend to give your team management the benefit of the doubt because of this kind of thing, until eventually too many decisions are proved to be wrong and your base assumption flips around to that they don't know WTF they are doing.....

Last year Joe was throwing a high quality, high spin fastball. I think his stuff was on a level with Soto's if not quite as dramatic to watch. Both guys have a track record of being erratic, Soto is under control for longer. Depending on which factors you like or believe in you could pick either of them as the better fpr success this year, but that only goes back to the question of whether dealing Jimenez was our choice or Atlanta's?

personally, I'd guess it's been as much as that Al didn't go in for old high cost broken down end of life relievers like DD constantly did. Just because Al was incompetent at building a hitting line-up doesn't mean he didn't have a better handle on acquiring pitching than DD ever did. The depth that got them through last year testifies to that, as much as we'd love to not give Al A credit for anything at all. I'll Fetter all the credit in the world as a great PC, but in professional sports, talent >> coaching.

I hope you are right, it would be nice to turn a couple trades and get useful returns, but I'll worry until I see 3 or 4 guys actually sitting out in LF at COPA who have proven they can get guys out.....

I imagine one of Soto's virtues is that he has been durable, which seems to be a huge exception for being on the Tigers staff. Then again, maybe that just means his UCL number will be the next one to come up.

It was Jack Eichel of the Vegas Knights who had disc replacement done last year over the objection of his team doctors. He's at 29 pts playing 18min/game this season so it apparently worked for him. There was a lot published about it at the time and I read a bunch of the articles. It was was no laproscopic clip and stitch. The surgery sounded incredibly complex - not for the faint of heart. IIRC the local interest connection was that people were pushing Eichel as a Wings trade target.

Or maybe reorgainzing Tiger management simply wasn't at the top of his to do list when he found himself in charge. I think owners like Stienbrenner and Jerry Jones who keep/kept very high profiles around their teams give the public the idea these owners spend a lot of their time nursing their teams. And for sure owner like to spread this impression so they can also bask in the glow when success does come. But I think the reality is that for most them the teams are the equivalent to an average person's hobby, in the sense that they do not hold anywhere near a primary claim on their time. Chris acted to replace Holland and Avila each when the discomfort level rose to where he had to pay attention. He seemed to be perfectly capable of doing a quality hiring search and finding a hot commodity talent once he decided to so I don't buy the idea he didn't know what to do or how to replace Avila if he'd cared to. So sure, at this point it's hard to argue his laissezz-faire probably didn't cost the team years of rebuilding time, but I'd put it more to the side of immediate change simply not being a priority in Ilitch's world. And TBF, Avila wasn't telling a very different story than Harris is now - he just didn't execute.

Could well be. And if you have a practice pushing a new technique that they are in the forefront of, there is prestige and money and possible position and maybe even better outcomes for patients, to be gained by expanding its use. Maybe it's a great therapy, maybe it's unecessary in 50% of the cases. The point is that at the front end of any new technique no-one really knows because the 'science' or maybe here 'technology' is a more appropriate word, is unproven. 20 yrs ago vertabral fusion was the big thing for disc issues, today my sense is that the consensus is that most of them should never have been done. So far this reads to me like so much of the COVID debate we've been through, where people line up around issues as though certainty is obvious when it isn't even possible. A kid (and family!) who sees their potential payday theatened by a reluctant doc (who maybe isn't much of a sports fan anyway - he was too busy in Med school to be interested....) might be pretty unhappy. But that has little to do with answering the question of whether or which doctors were or weren't acting in good faith.

after watching this team though most of the new century I'm unable to be sanguine about that. When you have guys that get outs, even if they make it too exciting it's easy to forget what it was like when you didn't. It's only been a short number of years from when the refrain "but there's no-one he could have brought in" was seen almost everyday here after a starter was left in well into a shelling.

I don't mind trading one of Soto and Jimenez, but sending both out is probably inadvisable. I want a deep BP on this team even if it's going to lose 100 games, just so Hinch has no excuse for over extending young starters.

I didn't realize there was still an order book on the freighters - it's been a long while since the last passenger version was delivered hasn't it? I wonder if these birds still cut it for frieght but not passengers because in passenger service they could never actually get near their MTOW? IAC - end of an era. also striking contrast in the design of a modern high bypass engine compared to a 1968 power plant.

true, but by the same token, virtually no player starts in the minors able to hit MLB pitching either. If you arrive there with no capability to get better, you are already toast. It's a place to learn to get better - nothing wrong with trying to expand a guy's skillset.

IDK, I suppose there may some guys too fragile (Castellanos?) but I have a hard time believing that in the main, a professional athlete is incapable of processing hitting and fielding instruction simulaneously.

The suggestion wasn't to make him a regular 3b, but that it would have been a piece of the flexibility they would probably like to have to bring in another 1b/DH bat. The thing is Tork is only half of the equation though, Cabrera is the other half that pretty much leaves the option moot.

Disc replacement. That explains a lot. Disc replacement is still controversial. There was a lot heat generated last year over an NHL player considering one, though his name escapes me. I find it completely believeable that no-one at UM wanted to do one. There isn't necessarily any issue of competence or care here, it's simply a techinical practice difference of opinion. I can easily see a conservative doc telling a 19 yr old that the risk of cutting edge spinal surgery wasn't justified *in his view* if the deficit is such that he could have a perfectly normal life without the surgery but also without football. That sets up an unresolvable difference of opinion. In that case if the young man takes the agency to go somewhere else that is the correct answer. He gets what he wants and the Docs at both ends are comfortable with their decisions. Maybe nothing to see here really and nothing wrong with the outcome even if some set of fans would have rathered a different one and some folks feel the need to justify their honest decisions by belittling those of others. C'est la vie.

It does happen. Taken together '21 and '22 could be taken to predict either that the Tigers will be terrible because 21 was all outliers, or they will bounce back big time because '22 was all outliers ---- or anything in between. Skulbal might be back in June, might not be back at all, etc. But despite not being able to predict what our up and down holdover players do, we can hold Harris to a standard where more minor league players keep improving their skills (and TBF some of that did happen last season - Lipcius, Perez, Meadows, Keith, etc) and the trade moves made at MLB level actually do improve the overal future WAR in the org even if in small doses.

That is a good uni. But I like the Red mostly as a chance of pace. I still like the blue more for everyday. I think it plays better against the floor color on most courts. Red is best everyday on the white of ice.

Having an SO that did 30 yr there, I can say my impression is that the overall tenor of the place is an advanced but still conservative practice attitude. Yes it is a great medical research institution at the cutting edge, but patients with everyday issues are not viewed as potential experimental subjects.

but to come back to this, giving Al the last couple of years may well turn out to have been a big mistake, but I would note that the major critque we keep hearing is that Ilitch is too cheap, not that he was too loyal. The evidence about one doesn't support the other and the long term implications of one are not the same as the other. Loyalty is a much more complex issue. How many capricious owners have put good teams into purgatory because they were too quick to fire a great GM that got in the line of fire of their own impatience or ego?

If there were no complications, in most cases a civilian would just take a break from the activity that causes the problem and give it a year to heal naturally and maybe only look at surgery if it wasn't healing, but a 9 figure athete would rather do the surgery and not risk the potential loss of more time, which is fair enough.

there is that.

I'd agree it made more sense when the divisions were larger so 50% of your games were in division. You could better argue that the team that won the division pretty much had to be the better team regardless of it non-div record because it was hard to win your division without beating the other teams in it head to head. There are now only 6 divisional games out of a 17 game schedule to that shifts the logic IMV. But you still have an issue with strength of schedule variation in the NFL being so large. Maybe the 'best' way would be some formula where SOS was a factor, but if the NCAA experience is any precedent, the fans would end up hating it.

I think it is certainly true that today, with every athlete trained to their physical limit and coached to play even beyond that, injuries are pretty much the major determinant for any successful team. The thing is, we feel cursed now, but that is because you tend not to notice how good your luck was when nothing bad happens. In 2006 we had 4 pitchers make 30 starts. That was incredible good fortune, and exactly what got us to the WS. Today any fool can see that in MLB, the first team to figure out how to keep their pitchers healthy and throwing hard will be on their way to being the next dynasty.

The fun part was it looked he didn't know either.

I have a hard time figuring why Chris is constantly tagged as the problem when he has been willing to spend on MiLB and training facilities (which his father wasn't) and ponied up substantial cash last year. I don't believe the issue is resource. If that is what was holding them back Avila would still be here doing what the owner who didn't want to spend money wanted him to (given that theory). A problem right now is that other than the stupid money contracts being handed out, which almost every baseball observer here concurs are foolish for the teams offering them, there is precious little available mid-tier where the Tigers have the scope to operate and could theoretically be making upgrades to the team. Teams are keeping young mid-teir players in the fold more than ever because teams know they are the undervalued commodity in the game. I won't bother relinking the dead horse GIF but the Tigers' problem is coming up with enough players of their own to get to within striking distance of what you can do in free agency. Fans who constantly grouse about them not spending Mets level money need to find a different team to root for or accustom themselves to being disappointed because the Tigers, along with more than half the other teams in MLB, can't and will never play in that money league. Mid teir managements have to win with smarts and working harder - that's just the way it is.