gehringer_2

ah so it was WM that went up one. I remember they had reordered the system but forget which way. What I remembered was one group of guy got promoted to the same place they were which was pretty different, so it was WM to WM not Erie to Erie.

who swapped with west Mi? Thought it was Erie....

Didn't the Pac-10 have lousy viewership? And that's what's been imported into the B10?

He may be a great golfer but he will need sports writers who can write copy that makes more sense than that headline.

that is maybe the one part of the common perception about climate change that lacks nuance. Climate change almost certainly means things will get worse for most, but not necessarily for all. There will be places where climate may improve - in particular some places have been arid for the last cycle may become less arid - that is one chance among the generally unknown futures possible for the Pacific Southwest, and given enough CO2 production, Greenland could one day live up to its name. The problem is that the economic, social and political cost, upheaval and chaos that will accompany the migration of maybe half the population of the planet from where it is now to those places people will still be able to make a living is incalculable. The climate doesn't need to kill us, famine and disease driven by wars between winners and loser in the climate lottery will do that.

Maybe because of all the higher ed chaos coming from the gov they are too distracted, but I did expect that by now some kind of vision or leadership would have emerged somewhere in the AAU group around designing a sane future instead of just getting ping-ponged around between media demands and court decisions all the while carrying the cost load while everyone else takes home the $ they have to raise. And the current board of regents at UM lead the disappointment. The academic athletics world is swirling and they install a care-taker president and care-taker football coach when they could most use leadership that would be in place long enough to have a vision and implement it.

was Erie still A+ then? By the numbers the big production drop was going to AA so if you were seeing it at A+ he really wasn't close!

Lol- It's not like Christin Stewart had "Fail" tattooed on his forehead at UT. He still looked like a pretty good pick up through high A. You'd like to believe your system can tell those things before a guy has ever come close to seeing MLB pitching, but it's not always that easy. You probably can fault the Tigers for hanging on to him too long after it had become clear his bat wasn't going to play in the majors though.

can only do the QO once though, sadly.

when cars were cars and men were men, we didn't need no stinking arrows, you filled you tank from right in th middle, behind your licence plate. (that placement also made it convenient to get incinerated when you were rear-ended, but all in all a small price to pay for your constant confidence at the filling staion.)

at least Buffalo had to play Montreal so only one could gain ground. The Blackhawks did force a shoot out and win so Carolina only picked up 1pt.

I saw 'Tim McCormick' and did a double-take.

Whoo-hoo! -- JUST LIKE HEALTHCARE!

would appear so.

absolutely. It goes back to my point about 'fame' being a less precisely defined concept than statistical performance. If HOF voters had seen a lot more of Lou making high-light reel plays it certainly would have raised his standing. And it's almost ironic that it's only the most modern of our tools - Statcast, which can now tell us that just because a play has an acrobatic circus ending, that doesn't mean it was a better overall play than a player with better anticipation, first step, and quickness (i.e. a Whitaker) could have made without the drama. 😉 To be clear, I have nothing against a dive to make a play, but some that you see in the majors today would be unnecessary if the fielder had better -- or at least alternate, techniques in his toolbox.

He and Austin Jackson, two of the last great glove men who didn't dive to cover ground.

something seems weird. Maybe Ivey was one of those guys who was doomed to outgrow his pre-adult quickness when he got to his twenties, because a broken fibula is not an injury that should create that kind of deficit - unless there was more to it.

Well that's the thing, you can't expect a guy to quit just because he's not as good as he used to be, at least if he is still being reasonably productive. So that's going to be the story for most good players who aren't forced to quit early by injury. That said, it is getting to be more extreme with teams having given out so many contracts that run well past when the player has any real chance to still be productive. The team is then reluctant to release the non-productive player because they don't want to pay him to play out the string somewhere else, or they are still hoping for a little reprise performance season like Murray had at age 39 (2.4 WAR), or sometimes it's marketing the star chasing milestones (Cabrera), and sometimes it's just dumb all together.

But that is why the criteria for the Hall are soft. I think there is a certain value to the game in guys that have really long careers. It puts a larger body of fans into a common experience of having seen that player play - and I think that has a sort of intangible value beyond counting stats. And there has always been a certain tension around guys who are totally dominant but flame out and guys that very good for a very long time. Koufax only has 53 WAR, but he was best most people that saw him had ever seen. 11 of Ryan's 27 seasons were at less than 2 WAR, so he built his total on a lot of mediocre seasons, but he was part of the fabric of the game for 27 freaking years. I don't think there is a need for hard choices on those questions. It is after all, the Hall of 'Fame', not the Hall of 'Stat'. Coming back to Ryan, there were relatively few seasons when he was actually among the best pitchers in baseball, but he was certainly the most famous pitcher in baseball for most of his era.

I could have seen him play maybe that year or a couple more because there was still a chance he might find a way to get healthy - the batting eye was still there. But the last two years were certainly terrible. Part of that was probably the Tigers also - they should have given him his money and put him on disability but they wanted to milk 3000 hits etc.

I don't even remember Cash as being a particularly poor fielder at 1B for that era - certainly was pretty fair on foul pop-ups. Granted - If he'd been playing today he'd have been DH'ing in his over 35 yrs.

interesting thing with Casey is that since he came back from his TJ he has learned to be effective against LHB, who hammered him early in his career. He has a slightly inverse OPS platoon split - but managers continue to send LHB to face him - he faced more LHB than RHB in total last season.

Both RB saw their success rate fall by about the same % - which goes right to the OL. But Gibbs rushes per game were about the same as last season. A chunk of the shift was that Montgomery lost rushing attempts to not to more runs by Gibbs but pass targets to Gibbs.

what is the opposite of a 'virtuous circle'? A 'veering of vice' maybe? The problem here is the problem for these owners is not the players, it's their fellow owners, and the way out the mess is revenue sharing, not a salary cap, but the old boy ownership club ties apparently being thicker than water - if not fully 'blood' - they won't explicitly go after their fellow owners. So instead of a solution, they'll get a strike, which will cost everybody money. And in the end the settlement won't really settle anything because the root problem will still be there waiting to rear its ugly head when the next contract expires.

they seem persuaded that Anderson is going to hold his own. I don't know if there are enough comps of guys coming to the MLB from Korea to have that kind of confidence that a 2.25 ERA there is enough to translate into success here, but they seem to think so.