gehringer_2

actually, I think you could break guys down into groups based on those that are missing the ball vs those that get their bat to it but hit it less than optimally. That might give you some rational guidance as to what various guys should be working on. Hopefully they do some of that now.

also Yzerman making sure everyone has to fight for their gig.

You have stated that Rodriguez is entitled to his privacy. I don't think anyone particularly argues with that - but OTOH, I don't see that his privacy is invaded by our speculations. We aren't paparazzi snooping around his house or opening his mail or even demanding the Tigers provide us any answers. We're just folks standing around the water cooler wondering WTF is going on with our baseball team - of which he was supposed to be a major part.

tires are a good example of how different technologies evolve at different rates. Tire tech is clearly light years ahead of where it was yrs ago, yet even with all that - tires still are a major limit on race cars. You could easily imagine a technology evolution that might have produced a tire so good that its life/grip/performance was no longer a limiting factor in racing at all. Just put it on the car and forget about it, sort of like the wheel or a spring. But that kind of breakthrough hasn't happened in tires. I suppose basically because while the chemistry of rubber has improved in all kinds of ways, it's still basically the same class of chemistry. A breakthrough like that might require invention of something completely new in material science. And since the current level of tire performance is now so high for passenger car requirements the economic development incentive for a revolution in tire tech probably isn't there. If something new comes along it will probably be by accidental discovery.

yes - it would definitely being even more entertaining if the team were a soap opera and could play as well!

There might be a few women who would take issue with that....

Jacques Cousteau meets Madeline L'Engel.

where-ever he is, he needs to be playing. So if the Tigers were not committed to playing him, they should not have brought him up. So whether you think he should be at Toledo or at Det, either way the fact is he needs to be playing everyday, and the fact that he isn't is just more Tiger player mismanagement.

I guess I thought formalized substance abuse diversion processes were in the CBA? No?

the ~5-6 yrs from ~2015 up to the pandemic were really wasted. The economy was doing fine by then and they could have put things on a firmer basis but they had to keep trying to over rev the engine. If there hadn't been so much money sloshing around beforehand I doubt the exit from the pandemic would have been half this out of control.

So ---- Moulton was a guy who had already done OK in the majors as a util/platoon righty (a couple of part time seasons >800 OPS) and was trying to hang on at the of a short career. Maybe we should stipulate 'guys on the way up'.? OTOH - Madison's is a good comp - and not the most optimist projection! He did get into a few MLB games in his career though.

what I worry about most is the team taking more or less one size fits all approach to hitters. I'm sure there are guys (probably like JD) who want every piece of data they can get - who take notes on everything that happens in the batter's box for a whole career. The problem is that there are also guys who spend a whole career just grippin' and rippin' and the more they try to analyze it the more paralyzed they can become. And players are everywhere in between. One of reasons I worry about this is because the tech gives us a lot of insight on where the batter wants the bat to be in a general way - what kind of path, angle etc. So since we know more about this stuff now, it gets a high priority. But the reality is that is not the most important thing for a batter in the majors. Most batters can get the bat to the spot they pick for it to be, but help with that is still fine and there are guys who will benefit from it. But the real trick for a successful hitter is in the visual/perceptual neurological hardware telling the batter where that spot is accurately - ie. where that spot he needs to get to is going to be when the ball gets to him, and none of the swing analytics stuff actually helps with that part a bit. Now if a batter can process all the data and not have it impact his ability to just see-ball hit-ball, that's great. But if you have any number of guys who literally can't be thinking while they're hitting, then you better be willing to support alternate approaches for them in your org. Now TBF, I have no idea what the Tigers actually do with their hitters - this is just what I worry they might be doing. Like everyone else, I'm just seeing the outcomes.

yeah - the org/Hinch seems to play a lot of favorites where the favoritism is based on non-performance factors. The whole org seem to approach young players in a totally random way. Overplay some, don't give others any kind of shot, makes very little sense in an org that should be dedicated to their emerging players instead of all the also-rans that have been taking up space in the lineup and roster for several years that have no future. They have been constantly half in and half out on playing/promoting young players.

The lack of accountability for the situation with the hitting is unfathomable. Can you imagine where Coolbaugh *and* probably Hinch and Avila would be by now if George Steinbrenner owned this team? Probably Siberia.

More and more every day I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this team's approach to hitting. Whether that is Coolbaugh, Hinch or Avila's influence or some combination it's reaching a point where it's statistically too unlikely that that so many hitters could come to this team either from other teams or from the minors and all crash. You can put JD Martinez on one side of the ledger, and almost every other player who has ever been on the roster on the other.

Yeah, for a guy willing to give as much thought to foreign policy and politics as he was, his economics chops were woeful. He was clueless. The monetarists at UChicago were still just voices in the wilderness to the Nixon admin.

Nature abhors a vacuum and the human brain is hard wired to seek analogy when faced with the unfamiliar. He is also fundamentally unaffected by anything we think or say about him here. Judgments here, such as they are, are all understood to be conditional on various sets of postulated conditions. At some point there may be a true story that deserves praise, pity or opprobrium. I don’t feel the need to worry the speculations until and unless we ever know it.

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. As long as the central bank understands that and has price stability as its mandate, inflation can be controlled. In the post Vietnam inflation, inflation got out of control longer term because the central back still understood its role as controlling interest rates as an end in themselves, instead of using interest rates to control the money supply and thus prices. The Fed has the tools to control inflation, the issue how close they can stay to the goldilocks point of not moving too slowly on one hand and too fast on the other. Clearly they were way too slow coming out of the pandemic. Their difficulty is that when they act, it's typically about 18 months before the effects reach equilibrium in the economy so when market behavior swing fast - like in a pandemic, they can't read the signals very well. So they do miss and sometimes pretty badly. But that said, the idea that an inflation is going to become a long term issue given the current understanding of monetary theory at central backs seems far fetched to me. This kind of view is probably why long term rates have resisted much rise. OTOH, I suppose the world could just keep getting crazier to where any kind of management becomes impossible.

To Randy's point, fast runners really are 'responsible' for a lot of hurried left side IF throwing errors, so maybe it would be fair they get some kind of credit. But then you'd have to divide catching and throwing errors into separate classes, which I'd be OK with.

this make sense since there is almost nothing other than a ball off the glove that can generate an error on a ball hit to the OF in the air. You can stand there and let a fly ball fall next to you in the OF and it's still a hit.

how do you separate that from guy who just stands close to the plate and don't know how to get out of the way? We have certainly seen a lot of hitters come through the Tiger org in recent years who never learned how to bail correctly. OTOH, Don Baylor did make a skill out of leaning in and getting hit on the thick part of his shoulder.

Nobody knows anything. This is such an odd set of circumstances everyone is guessing.

I'm ready to move on. He's been in the majors 6 yrs, has had 1 1/2 good seasons. Unless there is an undisclosed injury they think is going to be different in the future, Other than that, we appear to be beating a dead horse. He doesn't bring enough with the glove to play with that bat.

so you're saying he should have been used to it?

not a matter of punting the situation to the corp, just of availing yourself of various resources that probably would have been made available had he stayed in touch. In general it's often true that people are their worst enemy when it come to not reaching out to people that are willing and able to help them.