gehringer_2

This lead may not last long but at least they got Manning off the hook.

hard to believe this team wouldn't be better with two guys off the street replacing Maton and Haase.

RUNZ! after WALKZ!

Cuas breaks up the shotout.

Torkelson gets another chance to do something EDIT:OK -Make it: Carpenter gets a chance to do something.

Haase can't square up a middle-middle FB on pitch one then flails at a couple of pitches out of the zone and pops out. he's lost.

Riley "WillieMays" Greene sends his greetings from CF.

Unbelievable how many of these aszholes don't really care if the country just goes down the tubes as long as they get to stand on the bridge as it sinks below the surface.

Yup - just out of whack a little one inning. There are simply no words to describe the ineptitude of these hitters. Greene and Torkelson off their feed even a little and it's shut out time.

Hinch has gone really passive. Why isn't Baddoo running there? You've got the backup catcher in, he's catching on one leg and you have good speed on 3rd. Odds are Fermin isn't even going to make the throw. Make KC make a play why not!

That's a Willie Wilson double.

yeah - Spencer is swinging out of the zone, which is the one thing he's been pretty good about - so not good to see.

and wrong base anyway - he wasn't throwing him out at home.

Sitting might be the one way to persuade him to exercise his opt-out! But I'm guessing it's being over-read. Hinch isn't about to bench him for any extended period because they're still convinced they are going to fix him.

It will be really depressing if Cunningham, Duren, Ivey and Thompson are not a core that a reasonably competent GM can build a more than 30 win team around.

They sent Riley to Rookie league, but he only played 9 games there before they moved him up to Connecticut and in 100 more PA the bumped him to A ball all in the 1st sesaon. Sounds like Clarks is at least as advanced as Riley but with A- gone I would think he has to go to FCL at least for starters.

I guess I don't follow why you'd want to trade a high level prospect at the Tiger's stage in their development process. I can see 'buying' guys, but they are still a building team, you want more guys like Jobe. I'd move prospects to prop up an established team as it's starting to fade because I know I'm close to having to start over anyway. I suppose if your trade partner wants to be stupid or is taking a salary dump, like the Cabrera trade, I'm not going to say 'No", but how many trades are you going to be offered where the future WAR imbalance turns out to be 4:1, unless you find another Al Avila desperate to unload a Justin Verlander.🤬

I'm still hoping for a miracle at the VP slot but it's probably already too late.

Well, that's an easy best guess (sort of like Hillary 🤣). Now of course Harris could just be BSing, and in fact probably is BSing, but if you take him at his word that how they play leading up the dealine makes a difference to his decision making, then he is stating he is willing to look beyond the best estimate probability because that number cannot possible become favorable for them between now and then. All I am saying is exactly what he has said, that it is not unreasonable to come to a conclusion based on the present, that the past may not necessarily condition the future as strictly as the numbers in the form of the most unbiased past based predictors say it will. Or TL, DR version, sometimes things change. Personally, I do continue to think that doing anything to chase success this season would still be a mistake.

it's not that they don't use a number, it's the number isn't worth much because the underlying data has low validity. Projections for guys like Lange, Greene, Torkelson, Cabrera, Lorenzen, Skubal, Manning are not worth the paper you'd print them on right now. They could all end up anywhere, good or bad. Will they call up Keith or Meadows, would either hit if they did? WTFK!?

No they don't, not really, because *nobody* knows how this combination of players will play, it hasn't happened yet so there is no statistical record about it. That is the thing about sports metrics. You use statistics to try and pick out a signal from noise, but you are still assuming there is a true unchanging signal there to measure. The reality in sports is that the thing you are measuring is changing all the time, so your measurements are actually far more precise that the real certainty of the underlying phenomena. It's especially true with a bunch of young players whose current track records are short enough that there is even less certainly about whether they are better or worse they you think today.

To a point. The playoff odds are only a measure of the accumulated past up to a point - your win/loss record and the number of teams ahead of you, and the records of who you and they have left to play. The Crux of the bet for Harris is whether the team that took the field on July 14 is different/better team than the one that played the first half. The current odds alone can't tell him that because they are primariy the results for that 'other' team.

Hitting the road bridge is symbolic, getting the rail bridge again would be more important.

In hindsight (which of course is easy), they probably should have just left Javy alone - he's only gotten progressively worse for all the things they have him 'working on'. He's ended up sacrificing all his power to 'control the zone' but there has been no benefit in his OBP and definitely not in his net OPS. That's the thing about hitting, you never know when you start out to change a guy if you aren't going to make him worse - it happens all the time. Sometimes a player isn't doing it right because he's never had the benefit of the right coaching so for that guy you unlock improvement, but the devil is that some guys evolve into 'doing it wrong' because for them doing it wrong is the only way it works at all and if you start messing with them it's only grief. When you decide to demand a 10yr vet deconstruct his approach you better be sure you have an alternative that's going to work. IMHO, the Tigers have had a little too much confidence in their own smarts in handling Javy. YMMV