gehringer_2

That ball hit by Riley is what Scales was talking about the other day. For as much as you get this goof ball mantra from Craig Monroe about 'letting the ball get deep', you aren't going to do max damage that way if you aren't Miguel Cabrera in his prime. Hitting the ball deep with almost a golf swing got him a weak flare to left, he needs to get around further to drive the ball hard to right. All that said, he's still has time enough to figure it out.

I think he could have some success if Hinch keeps bringing him in after a guy throwing 95+.

He's usually prett good about swinging at strikes, but the whole team is taking a lot of strikes tonight - maybe taking pitches is the game plan - they did get a lot walks off Rea.

In that AB Tork took a FB down the middle and then swung at pitches on the margins. Sometimes what you take is as big a problem. He was maybe looking off speed, whatever - he missed his best chance that time.

Dan is sure Boyd is done. 3 RH bats coming up next -probably right.

Yup -Boyd needs to get out of this himself if Cisnero is warming up.

Good throw from 2nd and Haase is dead meat - he didn't make a good throw so it was the right call! Riley with another ball chopped into the ground - worked in his favor that time.

they're staying back on the breaking ball because Boyd can't get enough on the FB to put it past them.

Typical Boyd, lots of Ks, lots of bombs. He's not going to win many with less than 4 or 5 run support.

maybe the worst play I've seen Riley make - maybe an indication he brooding over his hitting instead of keeping his head in the game. Not a good sign.

It's an optical illusion. from behind the pitcher you see the ball move more than foot sideways, but the amount translated while the ball is actually over the plate is less than a ball's width. The computer - no matter how you set it up, will still get that more accurately than a human ever does.

two walks with CS in between. This team can't get out of its own way.

Dan defending the human K zone. Says the computer couldn't get pitches with horizonatl break right. He's wrong, but I love him anyway.

Don't throw a hittable pitch on 0-2. How old is that advice? it's definitely a minority of pitchers who have stuff good enough to throw 0-2 in the zone. I wouldn't put Boyd in that group.

I don't know about the reliability of the site, but I saw a Polish language tweet today that was a video of a drone tooling around Red Square in the middle of the day with the claim it was Ukrainian. Very eenterestink Natasha.

yup. The ol' Obi-Wan-Kenobi threat. That one he made to Vader turned out to be a pretty empty. He didn't do squat arcross 8 more movies beside rent space in Skywalkers head.

Nerve conduction does slow down in the 90's

Funny, isn't that just where Minnesota was for all those years with Garnett? DejaVu all over again?

something...rodents...something....ships......

Gerrymandering doesn't help with statewide votes. But you are already seeing Red states trying to arrange to vote the EC by district.

Yeah - Licht is trouble. He thinks there is some triangulation between truth and falsehood waiting to be found. He's wrong. He labors under the same illusions as Desantis. Trumpism Lite is a losing proposition. You don't attract any of Trump's audience by pampering their addictions to fantasy because you can't do that better than Trump or Tucker or whatever talking heads real RW media puts out there.

The morning show is maybe not the place where CNN wants that level of contention, but then you shouldn't book that guest. But he deserved the pushback - if there is a bigger problem in US jounalism today than giving BS a free ride I don't know what it is.

well I can't fault Don on this one. The idea that Black American gained any Civil rights ground in the US as the result of the 2A is about as totally FOS as anything you'd find on Russian State Tv.

I'm watching for Torkelson to start walking. That's his game. He's already starting putting the barrel on the ball more and he's not late on fastballs this season so that's big progress. With the umpiring being so horrible in two of the Tigers series already it's tough to judge, but when Tork is confident and seeing the ball he's going to walk more. I have some hope he's going in the right direction. OTOH, Greene seems to be regressing. As posted above, I think his swing is getting long and loopy. Maybe he can get that back under control without a step back to easier pitching, maybe not, but right now I think I'm willing to give Torkelson a little more rope than Riley, which is the reverse of where I have been in the past. The other ironic thing with Riley is that he recently has a lot of trouble with low and in, which is often a happy zone for a LHH, but not for Riley.

You can never take what a manager says all that seriously, but with regard to Greene he just falls back on his "Riley has to swing at strikes" mantra. Whether he actually believes that and whether they are actually coaching him strictly on that basis are open question to me. So in recent years there has been a lot of talk about keep the bat in the 'hitting zone' for a longer time. To me this basically means you have to swing the bat at least close to the plane that the ball is coming in at - probably between about 5 and maybe 15 degrees tops depending on the pitch type. Any more upper cut than that and you start making the job of finding the ball with the bat from a one dimenisional problem into a 2 dimensional one. Judge for yourself if you think Riley is swinging that close to level much of the time. It looks to me like he often lets himself get too much uppercut. Now maybe Hinch is right and when he goes after better pitches he doesn't do that, but Scales commented yesterday that Riley needs to hit the ball further out front, and you can't have too much uppercut or by the time your bat gets out front you will just top the ball into the ground or just swing over it completely.