Sportz could talk baseball, but he seemed to get it into his head that it was up to him to defend the purity of the board againt heathen know-nothings - whatever. I'm going to be clear that I'm alleging nothing here () but Sportz' behavior on the board got to the point where it reminded me of someone who on too many occastions had had a few too many before logging in.
You have to be impressed. The Okwara deal is a good marker. Not that it was an earth shatterning deal or anything, but just because finding common ground on an agreement like that requires finesse - I bet most orgs would just have cut him and then would have had to go find someone else comparable to sign for depth. If the Lions end up getting more cap relief than a cut/new sign would have gained and Okwara gets a fair deal - Win-win.
And the thing is, transitions like that can take time to bear out even once you have the mechanics part down. If a guy has always thrown a flat FB, he had to learn to keep it down in the zone. If he learns to get high backspin in it, he has to learn to throw it up in the zone as a backspin FB thrown at the bottom of the zone is often a serious mistake. So all that muscle/perceptual muscle trained to throw that FB low has be retrained to throw it up.
LOL - just got surveyed by MLB. You'll be glad to know I told them to deaden the damn ball!
And shitcan the gambling advertising. (of course I would say to shitcan any advertising so the topic on that question was almost immaterial on my end...)
I think you can be a decently productive offense with 2 week slots in the batting order, but that's about it. And of course no team has any good excuse for one of those spots to be at DH.
In the Tigers case they have $40M excuses, but they still don't add up to a good excuse.
I think they they are set up pull the trigger on Schoop pretty quickly if he doesn't hit. Between Palacios, Lipcius and Kreidler as options I don't think we are going to have to live through Schoop 2022 V2.0.
So if I had to guess today - Torkelson is looking promising, Greene will be fine, Maton looks solid, Jake and Haase appear on track, Javy performed to his normal level at WBC. The other 4 lineup spots still looking pretty sketch to me.
He's the current version of Buck Farmer. A guy who never pitches quite as well as his arm entices you to believe he should. He's still on the young side so they'll keep giving him chances to improve the stuff to the level of the arm - if he's at AAA that's painless enough.
Tigers try to send the runner home from 3rd on a steal attempt from 1st to 2nd and he's out by 5 ft on the return throw. Tigers declining the Cards' offer.
what works against Short is that he was already 26 when he got 180 PA in '21 and didn't do much with them, so it fair to be skeptical a ST performance at 28 is going to carry over all that much. He'll have to do a lot to overcome the assumptions in place about him.