gehringer_2

and even the second one is optional.

✔️

Today Jobe looking like the guy everyone has been talking about.

this sounds painfully familiar but I'm only up to about 6 months and it does seem to be improving but ridiculously slowly. It's not lumbar sciatica here either, the back is fine. As you suspect in your case - I think I compressed or over stretched it on a long ride late last summer.

'Appears'? Methinks Lisa needs a trip to the Optometrist

The Hall of Fame is based on whatever the voters decide it's based on. That's sort of what makes it interesting. If we think having people use their judgement to decide is problematic, formulate any kind of hard criteria you like and I guarantee you'd have just as many arguments that guys that did or didn't cross the bar were or weren't better choices than other guys that did or didn't. The choices could be made less ambiguous, but I doubt they would be any less controversial.

agains, it betrays how little these guys actually know once outside their particular domain. If the government buys a truck, that's just as real a piece of production as if i bought it. And if the government pays a Post office employee, the service is just as real as if that service was provided by a UPS employee paid privately. IOW, Elon doesn't know jack about what he's talking about. But of course, we knew that. I did have the advantage of having Elon's ignorance demonstrated to me a while ago as some of our kids got a hyperloop project proposal funded. Everyone at the Eng School laughed at the whole idea, but we took his money anyway. 😂

pretty much. I've had the sound off most of the 1st.

wings need to pick it up - CBJ been carrying the play for too much time. also - surface seems slow.

I'm waiting to see if the appearance of machines that can emulate real pitchers (trajekt etc) begin to do anything close for for hitters what Rhapsodo etc has done for pitchers. I've often wondered if one of the reasons (beside better pitching overall) that modern hitters don't manage the BA and OBP of prior eras is the degree to which it's harder to face pitchers with whom you are not familiar. In Kaline's day, you played 162 games against the same 8 teams - in a year or two you'd seen every pitcher dozens of times, today you maybe see a guy twice in a season. That had to be a big advantage - well you would think anyway. So maybe the pitching robots answer the question on that: If you can take 50 AB against everything a particular pitcher throws before you have to face him live, is he going to be easier to hit or not in the real world?

Got some chase and lazy flies on the high fastball, probably left too many sliders in the middle of the plate for next month. Will need to keep the breaking balls down a bit more. But a good outing for now.

The other aspect with Torkelson is that his senior year was also pretty much a development loss because nobody would pitch to him. So he actually has had two semi-non useful years out of his career.

All we need is for the Gardener to have been charged with the double homicide by the over zealous sheriff and you'd have a Quincy episode.

exactly. They had almost a Bobsey twin PR thing going with Greene and Torkelson, but Greene was a more advanced hitter. Torkelson was never given the time/forced to improve his contact skill to a sustainable level before he was called up. Sort of points to how you can't just grade MiLB players by their productions stats. Just because Tork could hit the long ball and pump up his OPS didn't mean was as ready as Greene.

Say hello to Wenceel Perez, Tiger centerfielder.

It more a matter of philosophy. If Riley takes outside, in a month that's all he's going to see, so he's going to have to make an adjustment to cover the plate or he's not going to get anything to hit. I guess I'd rather see him encouraged to figure out how to deal with the outside pitch from the get go than commit an approach to take it because to me that's a dead end against good pitching and he will have to make the adjustment in the end anyway. IOW I see it as a "static" analysis result. Sure, if pitchers didn't change the way they pitch to Riley, he could just take the number of outside pitches he may be getting now. But the game isn't static. The opposition is going to adjust as soon as he starts taking and then the prior analysis about how effective he will be taking outside goes out the window. But let's see what happens. The talk in ST is usually in more absolute terms than a player actually ever does.

Something that bothers me about the Tiger brain trust approach to hitting is that it is somewhat contradictory. Early in Tork's career, Hinch always stressed that Tork needed to selectively hunt pitches he could drive. Then we end up at a point where he's only hitting middle-middle pitches and comes the realization he has to cover more of the strike zone - that "control the zone" applies to hitters as well as pitchers. OK fine, to me that's a good approach. But then two days ago we get a story in the Det News that they see that Riley hits the inside pitch much better than the outside pitch, so he's training himself to take the outside pitch even if it's a strike. Well, wait, how long before Riley sees nothing but outside pitches? I can't help the impression that Tigers' approach to hitting is to assume a hitter will always get his pitch, IOW, it doesn't give MLB pitchers on other teams credit for doing exactly what they expect their own pitchers to do. 🤷‍♀️ Now I suppose if all you want to do is be able to beat bad pitching, that approach may still be enough to get you to the playoffs. But good luck beating good pitchers with it.

Maybe the dog killed itself eating spilled pills.

The good new is that so far he is not taking strikes (SSS disclaimers of course). That was the 1st hurdle - being aggressive in the zone. Now the question is can he hit what he's swinging at. I expect - actually hope, to see his K rate go up at least a little, which is a tradeoff that will be to his advantage if it unlocks better ISO.

It looked like he hasn't learned to, or isn't able to, split on his stretch, his front knee stays at 90 deg; so that is something to watch. But as RS noted, it's when he has to start fielding Javy's scattershot howitzers that the test will come. Sweeney and Kreidler are a piece of cake by comparison.

Yeah - there are two ways to look at this: OOH, as you note, it's not a true boycott that will put any actual economic pressure on any vendor because they don't really care if you buy today or tomorrow as long as you buy. But OTOH, it could be quite effective as a signal of the breadth and organizing power of the opposition movement.

One of the changes in politics in the internet age is that it's really no longer possible to target different messages to different audiences. Back in the day a Pol could have acknowledged the base's frustration with all the FAFO and leopards eating faces rhetoric they wanted to hear to get charged up, but then still had a messaging system to the 'outside' that was conciliatory. But in the internet there is no such thing as an internal vs external audience, all there is is bulletin board material for the other side.

holding pattern. The Fed is also up in the air about "QT" (the unwind of all the QE done starting with the crash). According to this month's Fed minutes there is debate about slowing or stopping the rate of asset sales because of concerns about fiscal decisions and overall bank reserves.. QT is fundamentally deflationary, so slowing/ending it will be inflationary relative to the current rate of asset sales. Of course when they get to the asset level they want it's going to stop anyway but the target wasn't supposed to be reached till at least late this year. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/feds-quantitative-tightening-expectations-upended-by-debt-ceiling-worries-2025-02-26/

They almost put the outdoor game in Columbus too late in the schedule. The forecast for Friday is 58F and windy - not a good combination for outdoor ice. But if the forecast holds it's supposed to drop to 32 and cloudy by game time which would be a better game.