gehringer_2

There's incentive to win your division if you play the lower seeded team and have home field. If that's not enough just make it more money - 🤷‍♀️

1st round byes are no advantage in baseball. That's the only reason I'm willing to see the format changed even if it means adding teams. The layoff degrades your hitters' timing and trashes your pitching rotation. Apparently the people that set this system up were either football people, or people who didn't know the difference between the two.

Situation unchanged since the day he was drafted.

According to the local rag (Detnews) : so there's that.

Williams is still a big key to their ceiling going forward. When your best downfield receiver is a TE, you need better downfield receivers. Which, just to be clear - is no knock on LaPorta,

that blitz didn't work

yeah, you wan't him to have to make the shortest punt do decline the DOG. I'm not sure you have the option on a procedure call?

that was almost too easy

bad place to waste a challenge

There are definitely toxic cultures out there - sometimes related to religion but not necessarily. The Russians have been just as murderous as Islamic radicals like Hamas - and Putin would claim it's being done in the service the Orthodox church, but since half of his army is actually Muslim that probably doesn't really wash either.

OTOH, he'd been playing high level sports for a long time before it hit so something changed for him. It's tempting to say whatever changed should be able to be changed back, but not always how it works.....

I was surprised no-one on the team had even been keeping in communication with him. I guess since his contract is up and he was done for the year, there was no 'investment' interest at play, but I still found that odd. Maybe isolation was the prescription - who knows? We don't know if his issues are just a baseball performance thing or if he's having broader problems generally. I sort of thought if he were doing OK in life outside his own baseball career he might have shown up to see Parker play. I can understand enough of the reasons why he wouldn't but I still thought he might.

There is an epidemic of coaches not taking sure points. And the thing is, it's sort of self-reinforcing because since they lost by 20, you can look back and justify yourself that 3 points didn't matter. Amirite?

Make it 10. Should have been 14 but Tua V2.0 missed a wide open TD.

MLive story makes it sound like they're sending Edvinsson out to play Chariot. I'm really done with Ilitch managements that won't commit to where the future clearly has to be - both the Wings and the Tigers. I don't believe for 2 seconds that more time at GR actually 'benefits' Edvinsson. He'll still need to get over an NHL learning curve when he gets there - more time at GR isn't going to change that much.

I wouldn't place any bets on that.

probably because some exec hears something in what they do that makes him say to himself, "With a little work they could sound just like ''X'", where 'X' is some group that made someone else a lot of money. Attempts at copycatting in the entertainment industry have been going on for as long as there has been an industry. Same paradigm as sitcom and movie genre copycatting. The boardroom won't care if you don't have the creativity and luck to start the next big thing, if you are at least good at jumping on the bandwagon when someone else starts one.

there's a long sad story

This assumes he is even interested in continuing a baseball career. Does anyone know that? I can't see the Tigers doing anything low class. OTOH, they have paid him $8.3M for 42 games over 2 yrs. There would be no reason he should be suffering financially that he needs to remain a ward of the Tigers.

You can put that one at Leyland's door. Old school. Play your regular guy even if he is hurting because somehow he'll overcome it. Polanco didn't. It's an even starker contrast to a management that won't play a guy with a hangnail now.

I'd be surprised if Turnbull only netted 2.4 in arbitration.

They have him - his name is Andy Dirks. If they can't see that it's everyone's loss.

How would we remember Sandy Koufax if he had pitched 5 more years at a 100 ERA+? Cabrera was more dominant at his peak than a Jim Thome ever was and that does count for something. Greatness is not only all about counting stats (and I'm taking WAR as fundamentally a counting stat). The fact that some of the greatest players of all time couldn't play 20 years doesn't diminish the value of their dominance in its time. There is nothing wrong with recognizing that even it demands more subjective considerations. Some value judgments deserve to be argued about on aesthetic grounds instead of always being reduced to the quantitatable.

Oh - I already write them off. Thinking more along the lines of suburban Moms. Lets just say, Jordan is not their type.

Funny thing is, I'm not sure Jordan would be 'worse' in the long run. McCarthy is a much more glib and polished liar than Jordan is. Jordan is so transparent I can't see him fooling nearly as large a segment of the population.