gehringer_2

JJ has to prove he can play mistake free (or at least mistake free enough) under pressure - i.e. against a good 'D' and I'm not sure this audition theater Harbaugh has set up in the cupcake schedule is enough to sort it all out. OTOH, McNamara's cockiness is beginning to reach pathological range. A kid going public to more or less complain he's a better judge of his performance than his coaches has also got 'problems' to sort out!

4th quarter usually belongs to better talent....

His, or the team's?

This one sounds more interesting. I could see something like this actually bringing defense back to the NBA......

I don't know how easy it always is to separate things. Your mental state can be driven by your physical. Lets say (purely hypothetical of course) he has some kind of vague chronic fatigue or just enough brain fog that he can't focus on the fastball well enough to hit it. Give a pro athlete an even barely discernible and hard to identify dose of that kind of post infection effect and you might have an effective driver for a full blown case of clinical depression. I think it's probably accurate to think of a lot of kinds of sports pros as more 'resilient' than the average person, and I think a guy like an NFL interior lineman probably is. But what a hitter does exists so much on the very edge of the limit of human physiology and neurology, that you could see it from the opposite side, they have very little if any resilience in the face of what might be fairly trivial deficits for other kinds of athletes. I could see that making your mental state more precarious than what many people have to face daily. Of course on the other hand, the very fact you make the majors in the face of those realities probably self-selects for people who are not easily knocked off stride. Never having sniffed that kind of talent I can only guess!

So one thing I would like to see in the regime of new GM: Every year under DD and AA, there has been one pitcher - usually a journeyman starter signed in the off-season, who they spend the whole season trying to get or keep in the rotation, when the fact is that the guy is simply terrible - worse than half a dozen other options they could try but don't. This year it's been Pineda. I hope he is the last in a long string....

Well, if they wanted to make them shorter than 5 min I predict they have succeeded. 🤔

that way I look at it is that you never do know where a hitter's ceiling is going to be. He can OPS 1000 at every level up to AAA and still crash and burn in the majors, but one other thing is also true, guys that can't excel where they are are never going to get to the next level let alone the majors, so every time a guy plays well enough to be a candidate to be leveled up, that's a good thing for the org and a positive for a fan. Pitchers are a little easier I think, and maybe that is why a low competence organization has managed to do better with them. You can measure that a guy has a big league fastball when he's at A ball. You may not know if he will develop the command or consistency to be effective in the majors, but the arm and the pitch shape are there to see regardless of the level of hitter he is throwing to. OTOH, it's really hard to evaluate whether even a good MiLB hitter's pitch recognition skill is going to be good enough against MLB pitching until he faces it.

Could be my memory is poor (well, no 'could be' about it 😢) but it seemed to me McNamara was throwing the ball harder than I'd ever seen before, in fact maybe too hard on at least a couple of occasions when his receiver seemed to have been expecting less mustard. Obviously if he has worked on his arm strength that's a theoretical virtue for him, but only if he is able to use it to some advantage.

Of course in Russia's case it hard not to give them credit even when they don't deserve it since they are trying so hard.

The COVID overlay has also been mentioned. That is enough of a wildcard that it leaves all kinds of room to speculate. Long term diffuse chronic after affects of viral disease in general are probably much more widespread than are generally recognized by the public or the medical profession. If the COVID pandemic triggers more research in that area it will be a good thing. The difference for a professional athlete is that most people can manage to keep their lives together and hold down their employment while being at only 50-80% of their top form for a few months or maybe more while some physical normalcy hopefully returns. An MLB hitter does not have that luxury.

I think there are enough people who work in places with favorable policies that the clinics have a practice, but I would venture to guess that by total percentage, that would be well less than half the population of American workers.

Yeah - Karch is probably the most professional of the guys on the local scene, In fact, if they were going to pick someone from the Ticket to do the Tigers, it should have been Karch. Then again, maybe with kids still at home he didn't pursue it...... Jansen is fine. To be fair to Dierdorf, in his day he was as good as any, but he had stayed on well past his 'sell by' date.

Parker's turnaround has been so abrupt it's reasonable to be skeptical that it could be as much fluke as development. All he has to do to shift the narrative is.... keep it up.

"That's just like, your opinion, man"

Simple play on the TD but beyond the quality of downfield blocking, Cade got rid of that ball really fast, which also makes that play work.

But that is exactly how movements like the IRA provos eventually put themselves out of favor. Sometimes the hard way is the way it has to happen....

Clearly. That said, it's also fair to keep in mind that any particular speculation by a poster here may not represent the view of anyone beyond himself.

Oil in a gas pipeline? Russian innovation?

Moving great pitchers almost never works to a team's benefit. The Tigers dismantling of the Verlander/Scherzer duo will go down in history with the idiocy of the 70's Mets letting Seaver, Koosman, Ryan all get away.

Yup. Ukraine becoming independent is 'divisive' also come to think of it.

On the one hand you can argue the conventional wisdom that you aren't going to win any votes calling voters bad names - but OTOH, there are going to be some people for whom being labeled 'proto-facists' by the President of the United States, may bring them up short enough to maybe give a second thought to what they doing - people for whom the office still demands a certain attention even if they are basically in political opposition. Or maybe not. But I think the idea that there is some kind of honey that is sweet enough to move the hardcore is probably a pipe dream, so all you can hope for is strategies that work at the margins. In the Washington post today - Micheal Gerson, onetime Bush operative and 'old school' conservative Christian, wrote an fairly incredible piece (in terms of being far longer and deeper than any typical opinion piece) which was in part political analysis, in part religious history lesson, but much more an impassioned religious sermon imploring - in fact challenging - anyone who calls themselves Christian to re-examine how anything they claim as 'Christian' faith can be squared with today's Trump Republican party. Can't say I have ever seen anything quite like that in my years of watching US politics and media. (It hit a nerve somewhere, I've never seen a Post column pull >6500 comments in less than 24hrs!)

With Biden the general problem is that he's an old man trying to give a younger man's speeches. They need to get him to adopt a speaking style more fitting to his physical limitations. Slow it down, calm it down, keep the rhetorical peaks to fewer, which will make them more dramatic anyway. Reagan and Clinton showed you don't need to put out a lot of verbal tension energy to give an effective political speech. And the backdrop didn't need to look like Christmas in September.....

Yup. Of course if the player is getting high levels of NIL, whether his tuition becomes taxable is going to be small potatoes to his 1040 bottom line anyway. AFAIK, the tax exempt status of a tuition scholarship does not depend on your income. Now if your grant contains something like a stipend for work performed, like what a teaching fellow receives, that part is already taxable as a TA is an employee as well as a student just as NIL will be.