gehringer_2

the lead is down to single digits!

I think with Morton and whoever is the 5th fill in de jure you just go back to openers for one or two, then short stints (<=4 IP) for everyone but Flaherty, Skubal and Mize. Don't let anyone else go even twice through a line-up if you can help it. If the quality of the pitching is bad, you use variety to try to keep hitters from dialing in. It's a strategy that teams have been too proud to use on any consistent basis for 120 years but it's a real strategy and it can help and it's about the best card the Tigers have left because Hinch has the skill to manage it.

so where was this action? That doesn't(didn't) look like much of an open ocean boat, but maybe they use the cheapest hulls they can hang a lot of engines on figuring them to be disposable.

because baseball, you don't pull your starter in the 4th. And here I thought after last season and pitching chaos that Hinch and the Tigers were past all the old rules. Seems like every imaginative manager still wants to go all trad as soon as he has a good team.

if this weren't our team this staff collapse would be comical.

Talk show might have been better

there is some truth to this. You can talk about breaking stuff all you want but in the Majors it all has to play off your FB because major league hitters can adjust to any breaking ball they see too much and won't swing at that many pitches out of the zone. If you recall, Brady Singer was actually the golden boy the year before that draft, but his velo sort of fell off a cliff and that moved Mize to the head of the pitching class. But the thing is, Chasf is 100% right, Mize may be subpar for what you hope for from a 1/1, but there was still no apparent alternative that was a better choice. The only guys from that draft that ended up more valuable were black swans. And I think Casey is still even money to have 15WAR career.

this may certainly be true, but in the larger view, he still can still only ask to call up someone who is there to call. The quality and depth of a roster is still primarily the purview of the GM/POBO. A mananger can offer his input, they can/should work as a team/on the same page, but a manager has too much immediate stuff on his plate to have more than incidental responsibility for assembling the 40 he has to work with.

Whiting is BP's largest refinery, in my experience in the industry, BP was its worst worst operator. But things will only get worse at US refineries. US gasoline consumption has been flat since 2017. The 4 million EVs on US roads have already eliminated the production of one medium size refinery from the market, and the rapid increase in the numbers of hybrids, plug-in hybrids and EVs displacing ordinary IC vehicles is a pretty solid guarantee that the US is now turning the corner past 'peak oil.' As the existing refineries fight for market share to keep their operating factors up, margins will be squeezed, maintenance will be deferred, and more refineries will end up down on an 'unscheduled' basis. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

Tell me you are not saying that in proposing to dispossess 2 million Gazans that Trump is 'right'. But I will argue that I do think things would be different. Biden was clearly willing to go around Netanyahu to provide direct aid to Gaza, and granted the logistics of setting up his proposed temporary aid pier into Gaza turned into a snafu, if Trump had not won the election I do belive that at the direction of a Harris admin at minimum US and the US armed forces would have forced the issue of bringing more aid in Gaza.

You think I'm dinging Yzerman because Avila was bad? - I'm dinging him because he hasn't done as WELL. Yzerman will be doing well once he has as many of his draft picks on a playoff roster as Avila does.

been there done that. Once you compress a sciatic nerve past a certain point, it becomes a long road back to full mobility.

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.