gehringer_2

LOL - We complain now, but the Tigers today are nothing like the old Briggs/Fetzer Campbell regimes where the no 1 reason the Tigers ever moved a player was to get ride of anyone that wanted to be paid fairly and was willing to say so out loud. From Jim Bunning right through to Lance Parrish. Ilitch did lose Scherzer, but the Tigers had made a fair offer. I still believe Max wanted out of JV's shadow even if Tigers had matched the offer -- and personalities hadn't gotten in the way.

Cowans for Thompson was a lousy trade. The Tigers did need to rebalance - they were too left handed, but that was still a poor trade. Injuries did end Jason's career relatvely early - or the trade would have looked even worse.

Right. It's definitely hard to figure how much the salary dump or years of control factors should be weighted in a prospect vs vet trade, but they are not small considerations to the FO's making those trades.

Guns and Tax avoidance? - he's a damn GOP hero!

I wouldn't call Javy's arm weak, just wild.

I know it isn't supposed to happen because you normalize for the visiting team, and I admit I haven't run the numbers, but it has always seemed to me that when you look at park factors, teams that can't score end up dragging down the park factors for their park. I've wondered if there is a second level correlation - when teams have inept offences, if the teams playing against them also score fewer runs on average than they might and I wouldn't even be surprised if any such effect could be greater for the winning team on the road. It might be also be weather but otherwise it does seem odd Copa's park factor drops when the Tigers offense is horrible.

As much fun as it is, this story apparently is coming from a divorce proceding, so red flags, grains of salt, and more may be warranted.

yeah - if you could get them to play together, having mulitple good ball handlers on a team could be exhausting to play defense against. IF.

Red Sox just took a 3 run lead over the Twinkies in the 6th. If the Twins lose the Tigers are 4 games back with 91 to play, and getting arguably their two best players back before by the ASG in Greene and Skubal. Harris may be correct in that things are "premature" in terms of thinking of the Tigers as a good team, but they don't need to be a good team to win this division this year.

In his last AB he was sitting off speed, got a middle-middle hanget at like 82 and still didn't square it up. Not a good look.

Hinch had me second guessing letting Alexander pitch to the two RHB in the 8th. But no doubt if Foley had been available he probably wouldn't have.

Lange managed to throw a few FB for strikes. That's what he needed to do.

well you might as well use him - if he doesn't straighten out we've got bigger problems than losing one lead to the Royals.

The plan to cut it down was probably on the table from the beginning but they probably wanted to give it a shot. The wind does blow out to LF a lot, it could have played smaller than it did. Look at what happened to the Yankees - they thought they did everything they could to make it play exactly same and it still ended up playing way smaller. But you can't do much to make a park bigger once the stands are in - so if you get it wrong, get it wrong big.

C-Mo was different guy during the all jock broadcast. Much more relaxed - more conversational, fewer platitudes. If he would bring that to the booth it would be an improvement.

consider the opposition of course, but Olsen cruising.

3 up 3 down for KC. So far, so good.

we won't know for several years but I wonder if the shorter games will help starting pitchers. Is there some weird reason that throwing 100 pitches in 90 min is less stressful than doing it in 180? Probably not - but you never know.

With the Tiger bad luck with pitching health, the only way to be sure would be to hold the guy out of competitions until after the WS when he became trade eligible, but if they did It wouldn't be the 1st time the Tigers held a drafted pitcher out of competition the summer they drafted him

Of course the value varies. If your left side is Adrian Beltre and Alan Trammell, you maybe have to make one tough scoop per week. You are playing opposite a Javy Baez and a Brandon Inge you are making mulitple per game and it's a pretty huge deal. Right now for the Tigers with the Baez original article and the cast of thousands at 3rd - it's a huge deal.

Correct. The park was a strong outlier as originally built when the current BPs were part of left field, but the numbers are what they are. Since the BP renovation, the park has played pretty much middle of the pack. The 430 to the corners of the CF wall was certainly at the limit - so now they've undone that, but OTOH, the RF power alley and RF and LF corners are ordinary. So the park did favor pull hitters a bit. Which has always left me at a loss as to why they have spent so much time in recent years talking up gap hitting. All that gets you a COPA is a lot of loud outs. Hitters that gained you half a dozen triples at the expense of probably several dozen HR never made sense to me.

Henning's only problem is that he is a just a little over reactionary against the Hemmingway/Stein school of writing where adjectve is basically a dirty word. Lynn never met an adjective he didn't love and he bends his prose to the breaking point with metaphor, allusion and description that could make a romance novella hack blush. Cute, but it gets silly at times - make that most times. And maybe part of it is since he is 'semi'- retired and writes less volume, he's gotten even more style extreme in what he does.

bingo there.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. - Arthur Clarke I think this is a key to understanding where we are in society now. We are living in the confluence of a highly technology society where the educational system does not prepare people to understand technology and even when it does, often trains them so narrowly that they can comprehend only a small sliver. The result is that while Americans 'know' in an abstract sense that techonology isn't magic, at any practical level they are so ignorant of underlying conceptual frameworks to understand it that that one bit of abstract knowledge doesn't help them. They are still just as subject to the voices of self appointed Shamans as any paleolithic hunter. And so we have seen debates on scientific/techical questions where facts actually do exist devolve to the level of religious argument in our politics I count myself as tremendously lucky that I happened into an extremely broad techinical education (and put in 50yr since trying to keep up) that allows me to look at primary data from most any field and at least make some sense of it. I don't say that to brag at all but only to say that I personaly can't conceive of how poeple without that kind of background manage to navigate the modern world. To constantly have so much uncertainty, to hear so many conflicting voices and not having tools to sort it all out? I can see how it would leave people in a constant state of subconscious level anxiety and in turn prone to charlatans that promise easy resolution of complexity into simplicity. Heck, if you do understand technology it's frightening enough! So to bring it back to your point, people end up anti-expertise because they find themselves unable to make determinations about expertise, with the result often being "I don't understand any of you and your conflicting claims! A pox on all your houses" as the response. And then in addition to that, since the rise of cable TV and especially the internet, the function that elites used to play as gatekeepers for expertise in mass media has broken down. Even if I didn't know immunology, I trusted that a wack job doctor would never get to appear with Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news.

To be brutally mercenary about it, that maybe be good for Maton, but the team doesn't exist for Maton - the equation is supposed to go the other way. For the current Tigers, 3B is the position of need, but as you note, he sure doesn't play 3rd well enough for much investment in him to be worth it on that basis, and at 2nd there are other options that appear at least equally useful so what justifies the level of commitment to Maton's 'develpment' over other objectives -- like winning a game here or there? One the other side of the ledger he did flash some power, hitting 4hr in April, but he's only hit 2 since.