gehringer_2

Good column about baseball and gambling by JR Moehringer in the NYT. (NYT supposedly still allows non-subscribers to view some variable number of stories per month) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/06/opinion/gambling-baseball-ohtani-pete-rose-fanduel.html?searchResultPosition=1

thinking back on the comparison with Leyland, one comparitive weakness in Leyland's teams is that they weren't drilled on the little stuff the way the Tigers are now. I don't think we would have seen the total PFP failure we had in the WS from a Hinch team.

I want to see what he has when he come back next year, two years out from surgery, but can't disagree that so far on his return his pitch mix isn't enough

Bottom line is all he could have done is quit, and if he had done that unexpectedly, it very likely would have produced enough scrutiny on the team that someone probably would have gotten the story and the result is he would have thrown all the players on his team under the bus. So sure he could have, but not exactly a decision that's in the same ball park as rocky road or rainbow sherbet.

I wonder if lack of activity on the portal was budget driven. I know people don't believe that a program like M ever worries about money, and big donors not withstanding, Manuel having to beg $$ (16M) from the general fund this year is sort of big deal in terms of historical precedent. The program is not supposed to cost the rest of the school money. That's the bases for maintaining peace between the jocks and the gowns.

and what if Underwood starts doubting that playing in this regime meets his career plans and bolts?

two games in, 21 posts? Sic transit gloria mundi

Urquidy with a good outing for the Hens tonight - 3IP, 0H, 0R, 3K. Unfortunately Brant Hurter got lit up for 4 runs on 4 hits in 1 IP and took a blown save and the loss. Doesn't appear close to figuring it out.

Your in the neighbourhood - that's close enough.

Did Haynes miss a blitz pickup or drop a pass or something?

And the truth is, Americans buy illegal drugs voluntarily. We 100% create the market and then accuse the people of filling it of being the problem. So the whole premise is at best a half-truth. Can anyone argue that the Venezuelans are responsible for more US addiction than Purdue pharma? How many Sacklers has JD or his boss dropped any bombs on? I'm sure that family has at least one Yacht our erstwhile drug enforcement wannabes could have blown out of the water.

this is the thing. Can you imagine Murrow and what used to be CBS rolling over for a demand even from a Pres as popular as Ike?

I would have liked to see Leyland manage with some halfway decent arms in his BP. You just can't do much when your GM gets you one 38 yr old guy that used to be good and calls it a day.

poor play by Riley to give up the extra 90 ft EDIT: Skubal says "I got your back"

I guess it on one level it might be ironic that the CPP should throw a big party for the victory in a war they didn't have all that much to do with, but OTOH, Nationalist ineptitude and corruption in the war effort did a lot to catapult the CCP into power when it ended, so in that sense the War is something for the CCP to celebrate. And of course it's also a chance to take a swipe at the US by playing 'our' role.

It's baseball. Every single player that gets called up the big leagues has to be 'auditioned' in front of real fans in real games before his manager will decide how to use him in the future, it's been part of baseball since forever. A manager can talk all the 'win this game now' culture he wants, but there is *always* a parallel imperative to manage for the season - regardless of what they say to their team and the fans. It's a matter of 'do as I say' for the players because that's what they need to do, while I do the stuff I don't want the rest of you thinking about.

in a sense it is. He's got less than a month to decide who he can use in what situation while there is a lot of turnover going on in the personnel. He has to balance the cost of losing a game now versus the value having a clearer picture of how he can use what he has in a playoff elimination game.

To speculate a little about the obvious: There is always the possibility that an individual player, in particular one who is struggling to perform at the level he believes he should, is frustrated enough that the combination of his struggles and the human need for ego protection have driven him to transfer responsibility for his performance to factors outside himself. That's always something that can happen. You do the best you can for a guy in that situation but in the end he has to straighten himself out. Obviously some managers are better at managing people than others, but to think any manager has a set of psychological magic beans to meet every single situation is unrealistic. I wouldn't take that kind of situation as a reflection that there is a broader clubhouse issue though or that there is some other guy out there that could have fixed said player's problem.

IDK, maybe it's different in baseball because the season is so long and the guys have to live with each other in such close proximity for so long, but usually the bottom line is players respect coaches that can get them rings, and AJs done that. This doesn't feel like a team with clubhouse issues, but then again, local sports journalism has fallen to such a low level a lot more could fly under the radar than those of us from who have memories of an old world might expect.

There have always been injuries in pro-sports but the wastage rate among pitchers is getting to be so high that baseball is basically just as bad a football. It's really getting really depression to watch my teams put in competent managements, make all the right moves, then still get their seasons blown up by injuries. We talk about the playoffs being basically a crap shoot because the probabilities are so close to even between teams with similar records, but today every season is basically a crap shoot because no matter what kind of pitching staff you assemble, it still has an even money chance of evaporating before season's end.

I used to talk to kids about engineering ethics now and then, what I should have have to them but never did was that best way to have ethical courage on the job is to have a spouse with a job good enough to support the household if need be. 😉

He must have been a fail as an informant as well considering all the jail time served from that 1st round of investigations.

Skubal, Mize, and pitching chaos the rest of the way I guess.

Johnson is just what you get when you send Jimmy Swaggart to law school. Every bit as false.

the old line is that when the US sneezes, Canada catches cold. When the US catches cold, Canada gets pneumonia. Driving it over a cliff is not exactly what Trump is doing to the US economy yet, but at this point he's run over the curbs and is tearing up the neighborhood lawns.