gehringer_2

I don't think you can consider position too much at the top of a baseball draft, you have to go BPA. I think people are just surprised they had Clark higher on their board than Langford, but to listen to Harris and you hear him telling you that they aren't scouting performance as much as the factors they have identified as projectable. I certainly can't pass judgment one way or the other on whether they are right, but just from what I've read about the two prospects, I can believe the Tigers probably think Lanford is already closer to his ceiling than Clark and that's why Clark was higher on their board.

Unlike some guys that are all fast twitchy, he looks very smooth in his movement. I'll take that as a sign he has the fine motor to become a better shooter, but I guess time will tell.

Non-sequitor. They use cobalt in the alloys to make gasoline powered cars also and in lots other stuff as well. Kids are not being abused because the cars are electric.

Y.o.u..c.a.n..n.o.t..m.a.k.e..i.t..u.p..

+/- is probably more useful for comparisons within a team, and even then it breaks down for Dmen like Seider who have to be on the ice against the opposition's best while lesser defensemen are 'protected' by not getting those minutes. If you are going to compare across teams you can take the team's even strength goal differential, multiply it by the player's total TOI/4920 and substract that from his +/-. That result should be more comparable for players across differenct teams.

The only guy they will miss from last yr’s crew is Hronek, and that’s only if he doesn’t play like me did two yrs ago.

I think the willingness to focus on HS bats to such a degree indicates that whether they are correct or not, this FO believes they can look at a prep hitter and project with more confidence than the old regime I think that is what you have to do. Get outside the top 10 picks and pretty much any bat that achieves an OPS+ positive in the majors is an extreme outlier and even big stats from college end up not being all that predictive. So we'll see if Harris and Co. are as good at this as they seem to believe they are. I just hope we don't lose the ability to find arms that the old regime - despite all their other flaws- had done a pretty good job with.

Dont have to play the same lines against every opponent. If you are playing a team where going small won't hurt you, that's always an option - at least at home with last change.

He's still on the WM roster. Lakeland is just rehab.

no way their losses split 4 -1 div/non-div. Not gonna happen.

Stew does everything 'OK', which is good on a bad team, but does he do anything well enough for a good team?

and GR has a new coach too! I guess the simplest reading is that whether it's true or not, Zadina thinks Lalonde didn't/won't treat him fairly. It's a bit odd overall because in the one presser Yzerman seemed to go out of his way to say he liked Filip and still thought he could be a good player. Whatever. The total void the deal was a better outcome for the Wings than anyone could have hoped for a month ago so Wings' fan can't complain.

I don't remember the exact words Harris used, but from the way he phrased it what I picked up was that Clark was not their top player overall, he was BPA when they picked, i.e. I think they would have taken Crews if he had been there. So assume the common denominator being defense compared to Langford.

IDK, seems as much like a guy that's just in a hurry. He could have come to Wings camp, fought for a job. If he didn't make it he tears up GR for a season. If Wings aren't ready to give him astarting gig next season they would almost certainly buy out his last year and he's a free agent next yr with about $1.5M more in his bank account than he makes with SD and a year of good health on his resume. It's fine, he can do what he wants to do, but it wasn't like he was signing his life away on a bad deal as the alternative to agreeing to void his contract.

Team driven results for a pitcher can't mean a whole lot in HS. Part of why it takes a big committment to be good drafting preps - you have to go see, gather, verify for yourself. You can sit in the Front Office and collect stats and film of a college kid playing in a major conference and have some idea about the value of his stats before you ever decide to scout him yourself, but there is no way around all that being more work for preps.

Wings do have the personnel in the system to provide upside surprise if one or two more guys breakthrough, but that would be gravy.

the 'cork' season for short.

Meh - even if he succeeds with the Sharks the Wings weren't wrong about him. He wasn't succeeding here and he had the chance to play under two very different coaches so you it not like you blame it all on Blashill for not liking him or the like.

and Biden is correct because if Ukraine joins NATO the US is immediately obligated to put US troops on the ground in Ukraine and US pilots in the air face to face with the Russians and I don't think too many sane people on the planet want to see the Russian rat backed into that corner. That was avoided in Vietnam, in the Middle East (multiple times), in Afghanistan, and it will be avoided in Ukraine. Either article 5 means something or it doesn't. NATO will help Ukraine fight this war but they will not fight it for them. And that is the right policy. When the war is over, the NATO security umbrella can be extended over Ukraine then its becomes Russia's choice to precipitate a direct conflict with AFUSA.

I'm less on board with taking HS pitchers. Just my overall impression but I think the projectability of pitchers improves more from 18 to 20 with pitchers than hitters so I don't see as much motivation to shop prep pitchers. Plus only a few guys (Eury Perez excepted) are physcially mature enough or have commmand enough to successfully throw starter's innings in the majors until they are 22-24 anyway so they aren't going to be ready much sooner for being drafted sooner. I remember the Dodgers had everyone hyped up about Urias at 19 and he still didn't find success until 24.

The core of a baseball team is about 15 guys who average at leat 5 yrs per career. So all you really need is 2 to 3 core level players per year combined from the US draft plus the international draft and the occasional undrafted find like Foley. Doesn't seem like so high a bar, but the Tiger's hadn't been able to get over it often until recently with the Tigers finding Mize, Skubal, Turnbull, Manning, Tork, Greene, Carpenter, Foley in the last few years. Of course if they improve they have to keep that up with lower picks.

and we're not even talking about the goaltending, which ran hot and cold last season. That also has to be better.

you also want one strong checking line that can hold up against the other team's top lines so you don't always have to waste Larkin and his line out there playing defense or killing penalties incurred by overmatched defenders. The thing is, I thought they would take a big step last year and it turned out to be baby steps at best. Plus it was disappointing to see how badly they collapsed after the deadline deals. They went into the off season with a much worse performing team than they started the season with, so they are having to build from a point worse than even last season's starting team. So I'm a little gun shy about predicting progress.

Truly. Between agents with their agendas and scribes that need new takes to capture eyeballs, a lot of silly stuff goes out. Especially once the season ends for all the prospects and there is nothing real to add to anyone's data base. At least in football there is speculation about combine performance after the season ends and then the actual combine etc. With baseball in the weeks once regular seasons and finally the college WS is over there is just nothing more to add. I think the speculations about whether teams might have internal reasons for not picking in strict player ranking order are more reasonable. Some FO information does leak. But that's a separate issue from the player rankings. But this year even the very reasonable speculation that Pittsburgh would make an underslot play turned out to be wrong.

When it comes to scouting individual players - of course. OTOH I think sometimes there are things that even releatively casual fans can see if they have been following the game for a long time. It's not that hard to see when a front office is just doing something wrong, like the Tigers late discovery of player metrics or their disregard for fielding in the system for so many years. For me right now one might be the way teams fall in love (overvalue) with college pitchers that are breaking ball specialists. I don't know if the ability to measure spin rates has gotten a lot of professional people head over their heels, but a 'devastating' college breaking ball is too often a pitch abandoned a year or two into a pro experience - Casey Mize's split being exhibit #1. I just hope jackson Jobe doesn't turn out to be exhibit #2.