gehringer_2

something like 30 yrs ago the Lions made a big splash to trade for OLB pro bowler Pat Swilling. Gave up a 1st (8th overall) and 4th. That 1st turned into Willie Road (HOF). Lions got one reasonably good, but nothing like hoped for, season from Swilling but that was it.

LOL - it's the same shirt in both pics! Guess that puts to lie the old saw that "the clothes make the man"!

No, no, I don't mean Harris is calling in game shots, what I mean is that Hinch has no choice but to use everyone he has. He needs the innings from all those guys, and in that sense, it's Harris' job, not Hinch's, to make sure the guy on the roster are up to the task. IOW, don't 'blame' Hinch for using Sommers, that's who Harris put in that spot for Hinch to use. My arg is that you can't expect a manager to be able to 'hide' guys in the modern pitching game, and particularly given the state of the Tiger starting pitching. Harris did what he was able to bring in more arms at the deadline, but if that wasn't enough, that isn't Hinch's fault. I'm actually just defending Hinch here.

Just accept how bad he is. There is a lot of hand waving here in an attempt to paper over that what presidents say in public does matter. The very idea that the leader of the US government would publicly legitimize the forced removal of the entire native population (and one that has been there for 3 millenia no less) is a massive departure from anything you would have gotten from any other admin, Dem or GOP for that matter, and it gives radicals in Israel a gift they could never have gotten anywhere else. Trump is a walking international relations disaster.

He always seems like such a force, but in truth you know Trump is the walking casebook of stroke candidacy - and that could be just a terrible outcome. Imagine Trump with some partial disability or esp an outcome that is clearly personality altering. But if he is on the way to a Doc, it's probably a bunion.

If he wants a tougher team he needs to get rid of soft players. Why is Rasmussen still here 5 yrs later? Why are our two biggest impact signings in Yzerman's tenure finess players: DeBrincat and Kane? You can't change what you are doing without actually changing what you are doing. If you want to get off the road you are on at some point you need to make a turn.

The problem in the ME is that people generally learn their lessons by getting themselves and the people around them dead. Be nice if they could get there while still breathing.

well they certainly aren't trying to learn from the GOP model, which was to build from the outside in with with non-governmental influencers, think tanks, lobbies, media, until they had critical mass to win elections. The Dems keep wanting to do it from the top down, which I don't think ever creates the conditions for the shift on the ground even if they win the White House every couple of cycles. I think there are big Dem donors, maybe not like the Koch's, but they don't have the imagination or maybe the patience, to do the kinds of things the Koch's, Murdoch's or the Heritage foundation have done.

I think Jerry has been short of a full deck for some years already. Another guy I think has been kept afloat by dedicated staff.

TBF, in his pressers, over the years he usually does come back to defending 'building for the long term to win a cup' in some manner, say as opposed to talking about "trying to get over the hump" and into the playoffs. So notationally, that is what he usually says. OTOH if he really had no short term focus, he could have come in and traded everybody on day one and played for more years of top picks - and he didn't - though 20/20 hindsight maybe that would have been more successful, we'll never know now.

Some of the missing Epstein files no doubt.

and you never know, the other team's goalie might blow a fuse, your goalie might get hot, a top seed might be looking past you and get ambushed, you might draw a team with a better record than you but that you happen to match up well against.

The best pitch to hit is always the one you were looking for. The long time theory in baseball is that even if you know the hitter may be sitting dead red, it's still harder to barrel up velo, so when you are down to just hope, throw the fastball. And if you are Will Vest or esp Aroldis Chapman, that probably still holds. But I don't know how much that holds anymore for a guy Morton with a relatively 'hittable' FB in a league where the hitters have adjusted to handling 100. If your fastball is of the hittable variety, you either need to locate it (And Morton was having trouble commanding it) or throw off-speed, and in either case if you leave the pitch over the plate you may end up in trouble. So I won't argue too much with what he decided to throw. The bigger problem is we have three starters that you can't trust past three innings and a bullpen that is isn't up to that level of support. When he issues his 4th walk in as many innings - in a perfect world you don't even want Morton to face the heart of the order again even if it is only the 4th inning. Maybe if he has Hurter, Eglert, Holton, Brieske lined up like he did last season he goes and gets him anyway, but how can you want to do that with this BP? It's frustrating but unless some of these pitchers raise their game it's going to be a bumpy ride.

to finish the thought - The thing that bothers me the most is that I don't even think they are as good now as we give them credit for. The conventional narrative from last season is that they played badly down the stretch. I think a more a likely story is that McLellan came in mid-season and got the Wings to play their 'A' game while most of the teams they were playing were in mid-season doldrums mode, and when it started getting close to the finish line and other teams raised their level of play to their "A" game, they left the Wings in the dust.

why should hockey get such exalted treatment that a GM should get unlimited time to turn a franchise around? What's is fair then? 20 yrs? You get two full player career generations before you are expected to put a quality product on the ice? There are a lot fewer moving parts to assembling a hockey team than a baseball team, and the Tigers were every bit as bad at the bottom as the Wings ever were. The fact is that Jason hit it on the nose - one player per draft is not enough to ever get a team to good even if the that one player is a good one - that is still below your roster replacement rate. You have to consistently hit on an average of more than one player to rebuild a franchise. And it's true a lot of teams don't hit on more than one, but when you need to get better that's what you need to do.

This Tiger season is beginning to remind me too much of last years Lions' season. Great team that takes on too many injures by the end of the season to remain great. Though with the Tigers it not just injuries but also pitchers just lost to ineffectiveness - Brieske, Hurter, Holton,

You can do the math for any pro sport the same way - divide the roster size by the average career length. 6 yrs is typically quoted as the average NHL career. There are 20 roster spots, you need to average a little better than 3 players per year added to keep up with natural attrition - or find more above league average level players that tend to have longer careers. If your system can't provide that many, you have to make trades that net the amount of added value that you didn't get from your drafting -i.e "win" all your trades. That is extremely hard for any GM to do, and Yzerman is no exception there. In the last couple of years the Wings have met that target, not clear if thy can this year.

One of things I have finally begun to understand about bullpens is that in the modern game, managers don't really decide who they are going to use out of the bullpen, GMs do, because you have to use everyone - there are too many BP innings needed to hide anyone or just save them for mop up. You just don't have the spots with starters' innings constantly falling. So if a guy in on the roster, he's going to pitch - and you are going to take your lumps if he isn't any good.

what little hope is left is Melton away...

The pitching staff is starting to reach critical failure mass - which is what happens when a manager loses so much confidence in his bullpen arms that he leaves starters out too long. The result is failed starts and failed relief, and it all snowballs into outcomes like this.

What villainy is this? Even our Sommers become the Winter of our discontent.

+1. Ann Francis was Emma Peele before Diana Rigg wore her first Cat Suit.

and trying to push 300 lbs guys around on the line of scrimmage is just the thing for L4/L5 issues.

They also lost a ton of income from collapsing cable fees.

No, we are saying that it sucks the proven overall talent level isn't better 6 yrs in. The best we can say for Yzerman right now is to take the comparison to the Tigers. If you take 2016 as Al Avila's first draft in control of the Tigers as a turning point, it took to last season - 8 seasons - to build a competitive baseball team and development system from zero. Do we think Yzerman is within two years of a team that can challenge for a cup? Maybe, but a lot of guys are going to have to make a lot of progress to meet that bar, and most people don't even think Avila was a particularly good GM. Is there an argument that it's harder to rebuild a hockey org than a baseball org? Then again, the Wings have been "sub-contracting" most of their important development responsibility to European teams.