gehringer_2

there was no reason to let Alex go but Al always felt it didn't look right for his son to be on the team. The story was the rest of the FO had to push him to agree even pick Alex when when he was the best player left on their board.

"About as poor a start" might be a bit strong for less than a hit an inning and more than a K an inning. He is definitely walking too many. As noted - lots of time for command to develop.

about whom he had an absolutely foolish sense of impropriety about keeping.

One of the things that could help, though it's too early yet, is battery standardization. One of the things UM is trying to get some US money for is for the Engin school to work on cradle to grave design standards to make production and recycling of batteries efficient. All kinds of work to be done in this area for sure. LOL about Bessie. I was working everyday in Toledo when they almost succeeded in corroding a hole in the top of the containment vessel. Between the risk of being in a refinery whose operator thought doing equipment maintenance was for saps, to being within contamination range of a nuke plant run by one of America's worst utility operators, yeah, fun. But nuclear power can be done safely enough. Again though, it's something that is not a good match for market economics. The market says you must spend as little as possible on safety and still be safe - but that is not a workable standard to apply to nuke. You have to do it like the Navy does, where the safety discipline is absolute - no $$ considerations. I'd be curious how France has their nuke industry structured. Might be something there worth importing but I've never looked into it how they are set up. (and of course, heaven forbid America ever take a lesson from anywhere else in the world.....) As an aside, Sun was eventually driven out of the refinery business, in very large part because of the cost of their poor maintenance and investment driven refinery operating failures. So in that sense the market had the last word in the end, but you could never allow as many plant failures around nuclear as Sun had before being forced out the business!

Carpenter K rate: April: 35% May: 28% June: 22% That's what they wanted to see. If he doesn't revert that could be his ticket to AAA. Unfortunately the rest of his hitting has also fallen off in June - OPS back to ~720 for the month

When you trot Eric Haase out there as your clean-up hitter, it’s time to foreclose on that mortgage.

He does appear to be seeing the ball again. Now he just has to hit it more often.

didn't they make it through the whole season without a starter missing a turn or something close to it? I have the recollection that team had the kind of injury luck you can't bank on.

of course in Detroit we had two great examples of guys who were hit first, see if the power comes later, in Whittaker and Trammell. Both eventually developed fair power, but even then not the kind of power you are hoping for in a 1B/OF targeted player.

absolutely. That's just what so weird with Trump and his audience. He's out there defending himself against a charge of doing something nobody cares that he did (truth is the ultimate defense, right? Pence is a Wimp.) and BTW, in effect calling Pence a wimp every which way but loose in the process of his self-defense. The whole thing couldn't be scripted by some kind of moron, but Trump revels in the delivery and the fans lap it up. Completely Bonkers.

Seriously, get on the phone and start talking to guys who have been hitting coaches about the approach you are taking and when one starts making sense bring him in place of Coolbaugh. It may not be fair but as you say, Hinch has to do something for his own mental preservation and confidence that he can master the situation. Hell, at this point I would not be averse to Al bringing in a new manager for Toledo and bring Lloyd back up here as a counter point voice. He's seen more than most and has done a lot individual hitting coaching work. He may be able to give some of these guys something Coolbaugh and Hinch are not. But you have to do something just because you have a situation that is starting to fester badly. Hinch says "We are doing a lot of stuff - you just don't see it" but it's all from the same playbook. They need to breakout of the thought paradigms they are circling in. Grossman may have aged out, but I don't believe the whole rest of the team is this bad. They are doing something that isn't working and need some new eyes to ID what it is for them.

I think the argument over command vs power arms just comes down the the irreducible fact that everything you do as pitcher is magnified in the problems it presents to the hitter if you do it at higher velo. Guys who are successful in the majors without a 90+ mph FB have to have really extraordinary added value in their stuff to make up for the time they are giving the batter to see the ball. So the trade off is that if I look at a guy without a power arm, he *might* be the next Greg Maddox, but the odds of that are so low I'm going to take the hard thrower because the odds he develops control (which are low) are still no worse than that the soft tosser turns out to be the next Greg Maddox because those odds are also really low.

crazy,

I have a sinking feeling that the only way this team turns around is once they are completely written off and every shred of anything salvageable for the season is gone, they will start to play better because the stakes will have gone to zero. If I'm Joe Madden I'm sitting home watching the Tigers thinking I was working for the wrong ownership.

How much is 'tunneling' a new concept as opposed to a more in depth take on Jim Prices old "keyhole" paradigm? The ultimate idea is not to give the batter any clues to what is coming until it's too late. Things like identical release points and arm motion are maybe not so much new ideas as that like everything else, there are now more measurements to take to tell you how well you are doing it.

Education is probably the common factor. Better educated. people live longer and vote democratic, also support education so that their states stay better educated.

so that was their 5th single to go with one double..... EDIT: OK - take that one back off the board.....

Me neither. We set the DVR as we made a late dinner, but after checking here and the cartoon that will be another recording that goes direct to the bit bucket. Feel bad for Skubal, but unless your are Steve Carlton, pitching with no run support is likely to eventually fry your psyche.

TBF, Harold has always had a tendency to make plays that look lackadaisical - esp when he played OF. I don't really know if that's because he is or if he just looks that way (some guys do - e.g. Whittaker used to). In any case, I'd counterpoint that I don't think that is not necessarily anything new for Harold.

I think it's a little ironic that as the data has gotten better it may have gotten harder to parse. I could be wrong but I was under the impression that when Brooks first started posting spins, they were numbers that were imputed from the velocity and break of the ball because that data was available before true spin data. But I wonder if that number wasn't actually more useful because it's the break you care about. Brooks used to do vertical break heat maps and those seemed to correlate better to a power pitcher's effectiveness than anything else. Pitchers whose fast ball had both a high maximum break and wide variation in the break tended to be most dominant. If a guy spins the ball at high RPM but his inclination and grip aren't optimal, it won't break as much as another guy that keeps the seams cutting the air flow more efficiently. So now you have to look at a bunch of additional factors to get spin 'efficiency'. All I really want to know is how much 'apparent rise' does a 4 seam fastball have because that is what generates the miss when you play it against any other breaking ball that generally goes down. With the current statcast suite I tend to ignore raw spin data and just look at break.

every org makes mistakes

I thought Ausmus was in a FO, did someone put him behind the bench again? ....(checking WIKI... they have him as the A's bench close. I thought he was still in LA. Close but not managing)

Best thing that can happen is he and Tork feed off each other. The team is an odd mix for Tork, the position players are mostly Latin or older. Tork has been pretty much a cohort of one.

who was the last last manager to work again as a manager after managing the tigers? Buddy Bell? (Trammell hasn't, Leyland retired, Gardenhire retired, Ausmus not rehired - must be someone I'm missing....)