gehringer_2

Yup, for a number of years through mulitple DCs, M has decided that defending the middle against the pass was not going to be the highest priority. There is no shame in that per se, every team has to decide what they are going to be willing to do less well, but that is where you attack M and if you are good enough, may beat them. The other thing is that when it finally happens that M runs into an offense that can run up time of possession against them, we have no idea if that D has the legs to play 35+ minutes if they have to - you may see them get behind and then start have it snowball, losing the battles up front on D. Not saying it will happen, saying we don't know because they haven't been tested in that way yet.

The insoluble problem with polling in the US is that opinion is much easier to measure than probability of action. There simple aren't any questions a pollster can ask that will reflect whether a voter is actually going to vote with anywhere near the accuracy they can measure who the voter will vote for if they do. The mismatch in American elections continues to be that it's easier to tell who people want to vote for than whether they will vote. As long a people in the US do not vote (or stay home) with more consistency, US election polling is going to continue to be problematic. I don't really see any solution in the near term.

there's another UTube story out there and I don't remember the details well but IIRC, the claim was that some time near the break up, Ringo had walked out on the group and Paul had had to fill in on the drums, but apparently (from the audo evidence) the producer (Martin?) persuaded Ringo to come in overdub the hard part of the track and it wasn't clear from the story if the rest of band even knew, but when the reviewer broke down the audio tracks it seemed pretty clear a better drummer had taken over. I did see Ringo say for himself that one of the characteristic things in his drumming was the artifact of being left handed but using a right hand setup. It changed his crossover timing just enough to give him a unique sound but that wasn't something he'd ever planned.

meh - I don't hate Musk, but his empire (atl least the Teslo part) is a house of cards at this point and better for it to fall gradually than crash suddenly and create a lot of havoc.

looked like the shot hit him somewhere between his forearm and hand. 4-6 might be right for a small bone break - finger or wrist.

Grohl on a roll? In a hole? On a bole?

IDK, I think ER could go either way. He had a pretty good track record, so to me it's not so much the 30 that would bother me, I don't think that is so old for a pitcher, it's whether he's ready to be a professional athlete again in '23, by which I mean able to bring his full focus to the task. Not implying that as any kind of moral judgment, but just as the reality that not many guys can compartmentalize enough to bring the psychological intensity needed to succeed as a pro athlete if their life gets too complex for them on the outside. Of course if he has a good year in '23 and then does opt out, that's no long term help to us either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (well, unless we shocked the world and made the playoffs!) It's seem like that is the thing with rooting for this team in recent years, it seems like everything - or at least too many things - are always up in the air at the end of every season.

Of course I picked the 65 number as relevant to our Tigers. If we signed Correa we would be a ~$100M payroll(last time I checked), 66 win team paying top dollar for marginal wins, would we not? Now I suppose if Harris does a Svengali act and somehow has the roster rebuilt into an 85 win team and then signs Correa, that's a scenario. But then you have to ask, if he got the roster from 65 to 85 wins without paying $9M/win, can he get it to 90 wins at the same lower marginal cost per win? 🤔 (and of course, to be clear, given that we don't care about Ilitch's money, but just considering the logic of the hypothetical)

Mon Dieu! Francias, ze langue de piedballe!

I actually liked the computer strength of schedule rankings. The current system is too heavily weighted by previous year bias of what teams were in the recent past. For instance I'm sure every voter started out taking a win over MSU as more meaningful than a win over Purdue. With the portal allowing teams in the 2nd tier to rise and fall very fast, getting rid of the human memory element makes even more sense. But we won't get back there because it puts schools under too much pressure to schedule better teams and no-one wants to do that!

Ross has gone off the deep end on pretty much everything. 'nuff said on him.

this is how I would set up the post season tournament as wel. Puts it back to 8 teams so you get three full rounds. You still have some scheduling issues if one series goes 7 and the other goes 4, but that's not as bad as the current bye is. But practically speaking, they simply won't back down the number of playoff teams.

and who would have thought that not having Purdue or Illinois on the their West schedule would end up being such an advantage for OSU? Their road sched the rest of way is nothing but PSU and then they have M at home so the everything is as aligned for them as it's ever likely to be.

I've come to look at the playoffs as just another tournament. The only problem to me with the current playoffs that they make too big a deal out of the winner. If I ruled the world, the team in each league with the best record would get a diamond ring and a $1M per player 1st place prize, and 'tournament winner' would get the trophy - period - and of course all the media adulation they can stand...

Michigan and Tennessee each have only one signature win so far, and in each case its value will end up depending on what that opponent does the rest of the way. Right now Tennessee gets the benefit of the much higher confidence in Saban vs Franklin, which is certainly fair enough, but still subject to revision if 'Bama does continue to falter and PSU rights the ship.

it just means you have to do away with an explicit wild card round and just have the highest seeds start playing the lowest seeds from the get go. The problem isn't really that however, it's that to do a balanced (no byes) schedule playoff requires 8 or 16 teams and the majors don't like either of those numbers. Just go ahead and do the inevitable and bump the playoff to 16 and the problem is solved - or not!

I don't think you want to take pitchers out of their regular starting schedule or ever give an everyday hitter a week off, so it's a detriment on both sides of the ball. I don't think there is any doubt the long layoffs hurt. But that helps scramble the odds and randomize the outcomes, which increases the value of the last playoff spots, and overall the leagues probably like that.

Tigers aren't without hope. I would count Turnbull's return, Skubal possibly mid-season, Greene and Tork improvement, Wentz and Colt Keith as reasonable hopes. That is 6 roster spots of possible improvement. If Harris brings in 2 or 3, the level of upgrade could be significant. For all of those things to go right would be about are rare as the consistency of things that went wrong in 2022, so we are due a little better luck. That much? Who knows? But to excel in a particular baseball season is, as often as not, driven by an ample dose of good luck.

true enough, but it still means that if a 65 win a team pays 9 million/win out of the gate on their rebuild they are going looking at a 225 million payroll add to get to the playoffs (assuming 90 wins). From a $30millions base payroll like we've seen some teams bottom out with, that might be conceivable, for a team with a payroll already at >$100M, it has to be a depressing prospect.

I think between the all the conference shuffling and the portal, it's getting harder to get a read on how good teams are anymore. That said, Stroud does seem to be awfully good.

Wins 90 to 95 might be worth $9M, but clearly wins 0, to say 80, cannot be because we don't have teams with 800 milllion payrolls. So I might argue the Twins did not get their money's worth because their team turned out not to be close enough to good to take useful advantage of 5 high cost marginal wins (i.e make the playoffs). I have to wonder if the revenue value to Minny for 78 vs 73 wins covered Correa's value in absolute economic terms either.

They still haven't shown a lot of talent going over the safeties' heads, but it was also not a very good day to be throwing the ball long in A^2. And interestingly enough, Harbaugh saying Monday that JJ had to run more was not a just a media feint, he did run it more to good effect.

Willi is right up there for sure, but I thought I'd pick from players whose failure cycle had completed and were gone. 🙄

Xi is either crazy or getting really bad advice from his medical science people. Xi doubles down on zero Covid It's not going to go away, he needs to get his country's immunity rate up to where he can accept that it has become part of the background 'normal flora' for the human speices so his country can get on with its life. Given the state of understanding of the virus today, Zero-Covid remains a completely foolish and very economically costly windmill tilt. Seems like Xi may intent on proving he will be able to run China into the ground faster than Putin ran Russia into it.

Fair choice, but for me it was Niko. A player whose limitations were completely obvious to everyone *except* Al Avlia from pretty much day one. He encapsulated poor pre-acquisition scouting, inability to raise a player's level, refusal to honestly evaluate current talent, and commitment to looking for the wrong player profile in the first place - all in one.