gehringer_2

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.

No pitch data today, but I was looking back at his 1st start and his FB was hitting 96, touched 97. I believe Manning is a guy for whom velo is key. In the past his effectiveness pretty much tracks his FB. When he's down around 92-93, he's AAA. At 95+ he can help this team.

It's a little bit of "even though it was you that broke it, but we know you can't fix it as fast as you broke it"

Yes - No doubt there is a certain aspect of "if you want a better society, you've got to be the better people that start making up that society." But to be clear that doesn't mean compromising on what should not be comprised. Or maybe: You can soften your attitude without softening your principles. And it's not like the left doesn't have enough trouble with attitude already - (mea culpa)

Yup. Repeaters aren't going to do what most people are looking for, which is not just signal but more speed and bandwidth. If your house wireless coverage is poor because your router is stuck in a bad place (for instance because of where your service entesr your house - say the basement.....) - the one thing that may work which is cheaper than a mesh system is just buy a single WiFi6/7 wireless access point - put it in the center of your house and hard wire it to your router. Then turn off the wireless from your service provider's router and use the wireless access point. This only works if the problem is where your router is now and if you can get a cat6 to a better location, but if you can it's a cheaper solution than doing a mesh.

300K and you've got a recession.

That would go back to the argument that in this semi-conductor world, your either design, or you fab, but doing both is going to either leave you without enough fab customers or without enough ROI on your fab capability - it's the basic argument to break Intel up. I'm not necessarily throwing in with that view - just offering that as a view that has a lot of currency right now. And it goes back to the customer trust issue. All those oil companies trusted us with their data at least in part because we did not compete directly with them - we had no dog in the fight of who was doing things better, our job was just to help them do whatever it was they were doing. Maybe Intel's fab people are the most upright in the world and maybe the corporate divisional firewall is the best ever, it's still has to be a harder sell to get your design competitors to use your fab. Not impossible, but it adds another complexity. Of course it will help a lot overcoming those reservations if they end up being able to offer best in class. There certainly are companies that do successfully both contract to and compete with their customers in other industries and there are other synergies to having both units under one umbrella. In any case, if the fabs prove out, they are going to make a lot of money, if they lag the company likely gets broken up and the current share holders will likely realize a premium - so I'm not surprised the stock seems found a support level despite the doom and gloom that continues to swell around it.

I have no clue how trustworthy people are in the semi-conductor biz so could be. I can say that a counter-point would be that the company I worked for in oil industry services had contracts with all the majors, we had everyone's data, we never shared anything with anyone - there was an ethic - you just didn't do it. Of course, the business was not high profile enough anymore to have media types banging down the door trying to pry something loose either!