gehringer_2

LOL - he's only 40yrs late on that one.

If we could get back to normal institutional stability I'd be glad to argue with my most liberal friends about a lot of things, but old style liberal/conservative policy detail debates today feel like worrying about the hang nails of a patient with a metastatic carcinoma.

something like that. IIRC Way back, when the state first passed the enabling legislation for city income taxes it did specify the city had to be 1M population because nobody outstate wanted their municipality starting one. Somehow that got changed/waived but I don't remember those details. Obviously Flint is nowhere near 1M and the city itself is now well under 1M and since they keep bringing it up in A^2 that requirement must just be gone.

This is a big difference between this and the prior regime. Say what ever else you will about Avila, he belived in drafting pitchers high and often exactly because they went down so often. I understand the other view but I'm not sure that just because there is a lot of uncertainly in doing it with great deliberation, that means you actually have any reasonable chance of assembling a play-off calibre pitching staff by chance pickups. I may be being unfair, as has been noted, Harris did pivot toward more pitching in the recent draft but they've had a lot of bad luck so we haven't seen anything out of it.

LOL - good call. fwiw - AI/Google image search says the image is this guy (who died last july) - but looking at various pics I'm not certain that's good ID either.

I'm not so worried about the 8 on the field. They field and run really well and hit enough. More certainly in CF would be nice but if McGonigle sticks some combination of Meadows, Baez and Vierling should do. I remain very nervous about the pitching staff.

chicago keeps talking about implementing some sort of such tax Unless a city is surrounded by water or mountains, a city income tax is a business death sentence. In the midwest where there is open land and freeways? The arg when the city passed the tax was 'nobody is going to move over 1%' but of course that ignores how many businesses relocate every year as space and facilities needs change, and every percentage makes a difference in the decision about where to go next. So not an immediate death sentence, but a slow slide into negative growth. They keep talking about it in A^2. My response is always 'so Flint is your model for the future of Ann Arbor?'

oops - Forgot the Detroit City Income tax - 2.4% resident, 1.2% non resident. The City is addicted now of course, but that is a single factor that drove and keeps thousands of small businesses in the 'burbs. If they could ever get off it it would do wonders for small business dev. At the time of the bankruptcy I remember there was some discussion of the State ending all the MI city incomes taxes, but it didn't happen.

Wings are kind of fun right now because we don't really know how good they are: Are they going to fall back at some point and be the same old thing, or have they turned a corner as a team and can sustain making the playoffs or even 1st place? It's contrast to when the situation with the Wings was that we knew they had more than enough talent to win but they might not be hungry enough or tough enough to match the talent.

Michigan has a 4.25% flat rate income tax, which is probably a bit below avg, but generally high property taxes.

A^2 news reports it's Kent Syverud, who had announced earlier last year he was retiring as President of Syracuse. He is a UM Law School alum and had achieved his tenure at the law school befor he left for Vanderbilt. He clerked for Sandra Day O'Conner. However, he is 70 yrs old, so basically another transitional hire while they look for someone for a longer term. You also question how much is heart is going to be in the job if he had already decided to retire once. I would guess Garcia had the name already as the pic in his story is the Law Quad. My guy Gallimore had apparently asked not to be considered.

quantity is pretty useless in baseball. Until some of them do something to prove quality, you got nothing to plan on.

Indeed. They way the team mishandled Scherzer always reminds me of the Joni Mitchell tune - "You don't what you've got till it's gone". They could have paid Scherzer any amount of money and they've have made it back with he and JV anchoring the team for the next 10 yrs. But management always thinks it was all their skill and not just as much luck that got them where they are, so they think they can just easily do it again, any time. Not.So.Much.

Winwood was 15 in 1963 when he was a founding member of Spencer Davis group.

I don't see a pitching pipeline forming to support being good 3-5yrs from now. Maybe it's there in the lower levels waiting to break out - I'll be waiting.

LOL - not sure if that doesn't do more harm than good, but who knows?

Society is due for a paradigm shift. We used to think of speech as in individual thing, but with the internet that's become a concept that needs updating. What we have now is an information space we all live in, and just like the air we breathe and the water we drink, the informations space, or more properly the information environment, can be come polluted to the detriment of us all, just like water and air do. And the reason there is a difference is because in the 18th century you never had to worry about the information you needed literally being drowned out by the noise. We used to have a problem with things not heard because they were suppressed, today the much bigger problem is that things can't be heard because they are drowned out, buried in the noise of the for profit information machine. It's not clear how to navigate the new world, but we have to get over too slavish a devotion to the systems of a world that no longer exists.

what worries me is that you got almost 9 WAR of improvement between '24 and '25 in the core group of Green, Tork, Dingler, Baez, Keith and Torres. I don't see those 5 players as having the potential to improve by anything close to another 9 WAR as a group. If they are going to actually be any better, you are banking it's going to come from Vierling, Meadows and the possibility of McGonigle or Max Anderson. None of these have near the probability of giving you the kind of gain that you could fairly anticipate the '24 group would grow to in '25. They will only be better this year if the pitching is better. It might be, but with the pitching it's just as likely to be worse depending on who gets hurt.

I wonder how that works out in terms of where the CC cos $ come from. No fee cards are a great deal if you keep them paid off, but how many people do and what is the income distribution of that cohort? Maybe the poor are better off paying their fees up front where they see them than paying more interest they never take the time to tally up. I don't know the answer but I don't think it's clear a priori whose ox get gored the most in a move from interest to fees.

I'm fine with Casey. He'll compete almost every outing and give you an occasional really good outing. That's fine. I really like Olson's stuff. If he can stay on the field I think he would be their number 2, but that's a huge "IF". Flaherty is just too unpredictable for me to be comfortable with, and when he loses it he give up runs so fast it's tough for a manager to react fast enough. Tigers would like to believe Anderson has turned a major corner and is now MLB ready. Hard to prove that until we we him against MLB bats. Melton hasn't pitched enough to prove anything either. So like a lot of years, plenty of potential, a big chunk unproven, and not necessarily great depth after the those 5 - whom you know will not all make it through the season unhurt.

Among guys I saw a lot - which is to say Tigers, the two that really stand out were Magglio one seasaon and Cabrera. Maggs only did it once, but that year, it he just didn't miss, it was like he was in control of every AB. And the same with Cabrera - in his good years, you knew that even if he made an out, it was a BaBIP out - he could almost always hit the ball hard somewhere. I think ~400 is probably somewhere near the absolute limit for BA. You can hit the ball hard everytime and about 60% will still be fielded - so any time a BA starts getting into the 350 (or ~400 OBP) range and up, I think you are looking at a hitter pretty much in control of the large majority of his ABs. Kaline may have been as good as that, but I didn't see the beginning of his career, and he was in the middle of his career at the height of the pitcher's era when a mere 300 BA was winning batting championships. In that period nobody could get close enough to that 'hit it hard every time' level where as a fan, you knew that player was a threat to do something every time up the way Cabrera was.

they'll give Bassett two years and he'll be out of baseball at the end of '26.

can't argue with anything but this last line. If they are in contention they keep him. If they trade him when they are headed for the playoffs they might as well burn down the ballpark as well.

I don't think these numbers come out of thin air. You present a brief to the arbiter (it's a panel but I'm going to use singular anyway) - your arg for why your number is correct. The Tigers no doubt have a well laid out story that carefully works through all the comps and using perfectly reasonable logic, gets them exactly to $19M, and that is the set of assumptions and logic they will present to the arbiter. Of course Skubal and Boras will have done the same homework but with a different set of base axioms, and the logic there will lead to inexorably to $32M. Each side then hopes the base axioms the arbiter picks to start with are closer to the ones they used than the ones the other side used.

And that is the same risk a team faces if they want to set up on their own - i.e. they can't guarantee how much advertising and subscription revenue is going to be. Still, you would think that for an organization like ilitch's, that is already steeped in entertainment expertise, at some point they'd rather take it on themselves than keep negotiating give backs to the black hole of failure Fox/Bally/Diamond/Fanduel has been.