gehringer_2

I guess I thought formalized substance abuse diversion processes were in the CBA? No?

the ~5-6 yrs from ~2015 up to the pandemic were really wasted. The economy was doing fine by then and they could have put things on a firmer basis but they had to keep trying to over rev the engine. If there hadn't been so much money sloshing around beforehand I doubt the exit from the pandemic would have been half this out of control.

So ---- Moulton was a guy who had already done OK in the majors as a util/platoon righty (a couple of part time seasons >800 OPS) and was trying to hang on at the of a short career. Maybe we should stipulate 'guys on the way up'.? OTOH - Madison's is a good comp - and not the most optimist projection! He did get into a few MLB games in his career though.

what I worry about most is the team taking more or less one size fits all approach to hitters. I'm sure there are guys (probably like JD) who want every piece of data they can get - who take notes on everything that happens in the batter's box for a whole career. The problem is that there are also guys who spend a whole career just grippin' and rippin' and the more they try to analyze it the more paralyzed they can become. And players are everywhere in between. One of reasons I worry about this is because the tech gives us a lot of insight on where the batter wants the bat to be in a general way - what kind of path, angle etc. So since we know more about this stuff now, it gets a high priority. But the reality is that is not the most important thing for a batter in the majors. Most batters can get the bat to the spot they pick for it to be, but help with that is still fine and there are guys who will benefit from it. But the real trick for a successful hitter is in the visual/perceptual neurological hardware telling the batter where that spot is accurately - ie. where that spot he needs to get to is going to be when the ball gets to him, and none of the swing analytics stuff actually helps with that part a bit. Now if a batter can process all the data and not have it impact his ability to just see-ball hit-ball, that's great. But if you have any number of guys who literally can't be thinking while they're hitting, then you better be willing to support alternate approaches for them in your org. Now TBF, I have no idea what the Tigers actually do with their hitters - this is just what I worry they might be doing. Like everyone else, I'm just seeing the outcomes.

yeah - the org/Hinch seems to play a lot of favorites where the favoritism is based on non-performance factors. The whole org seem to approach young players in a totally random way. Overplay some, don't give others any kind of shot, makes very little sense in an org that should be dedicated to their emerging players instead of all the also-rans that have been taking up space in the lineup and roster for several years that have no future. They have been constantly half in and half out on playing/promoting young players.

The lack of accountability for the situation with the hitting is unfathomable. Can you imagine where Coolbaugh *and* probably Hinch and Avila would be by now if George Steinbrenner owned this team? Probably Siberia.

More and more every day I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this team's approach to hitting. Whether that is Coolbaugh, Hinch or Avila's influence or some combination it's reaching a point where it's statistically too unlikely that that so many hitters could come to this team either from other teams or from the minors and all crash. You can put JD Martinez on one side of the ledger, and almost every other player who has ever been on the roster on the other.

Yeah, for a guy willing to give as much thought to foreign policy and politics as he was, his economics chops were woeful. He was clueless. The monetarists at UChicago were still just voices in the wilderness to the Nixon admin.

Nature abhors a vacuum and the human brain is hard wired to seek analogy when faced with the unfamiliar. He is also fundamentally unaffected by anything we think or say about him here. Judgments here, such as they are, are all understood to be conditional on various sets of postulated conditions. At some point there may be a true story that deserves praise, pity or opprobrium. I don’t feel the need to worry the speculations until and unless we ever know it.

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. As long as the central bank understands that and has price stability as its mandate, inflation can be controlled. In the post Vietnam inflation, inflation got out of control longer term because the central back still understood its role as controlling interest rates as an end in themselves, instead of using interest rates to control the money supply and thus prices. The Fed has the tools to control inflation, the issue how close they can stay to the goldilocks point of not moving too slowly on one hand and too fast on the other. Clearly they were way too slow coming out of the pandemic. Their difficulty is that when they act, it's typically about 18 months before the effects reach equilibrium in the economy so when market behavior swing fast - like in a pandemic, they can't read the signals very well. So they do miss and sometimes pretty badly. But that said, the idea that an inflation is going to become a long term issue given the current understanding of monetary theory at central backs seems far fetched to me. This kind of view is probably why long term rates have resisted much rise. OTOH, I suppose the world could just keep getting crazier to where any kind of management becomes impossible.

To Randy's point, fast runners really are 'responsible' for a lot of hurried left side IF throwing errors, so maybe it would be fair they get some kind of credit. But then you'd have to divide catching and throwing errors into separate classes, which I'd be OK with.

this make sense since there is almost nothing other than a ball off the glove that can generate an error on a ball hit to the OF in the air. You can stand there and let a fly ball fall next to you in the OF and it's still a hit.

how do you separate that from guy who just stands close to the plate and don't know how to get out of the way? We have certainly seen a lot of hitters come through the Tiger org in recent years who never learned how to bail correctly. OTOH, Don Baylor did make a skill out of leaning in and getting hit on the thick part of his shoulder.

Nobody knows anything. This is such an odd set of circumstances everyone is guessing.

I'm ready to move on. He's been in the majors 6 yrs, has had 1 1/2 good seasons. Unless there is an undisclosed injury they think is going to be different in the future, Other than that, we appear to be beating a dead horse. He doesn't bring enough with the glove to play with that bat.

so you're saying he should have been used to it?

not a matter of punting the situation to the corp, just of availing yourself of various resources that probably would have been made available had he stayed in touch. In general it's often true that people are their worst enemy when it come to not reaching out to people that are willing and able to help them.

Right - he's 25, the switch either went on for real or it didn't. Might as well find out. What is a 25 yr old getting out of more time in the minors? It's not like you have a fragile young ego to protect from failure.

let them vaporize their petro-dollars on crazy projects, that many fewer guns they can buy.

if mom took a powder, and there isn't any other family in the US that could take a lot of managing, but you might think the team and Ilitch enterprises could have been a lot of help if he had bothered to ask for it. I suppose sometimes people don't have the imagination to realize what they can ask for.

Lol, I thought maybe you were saying he was too short (stature) to have made it in the NFL

Lordy, what can a 25 yr old pitcher have done to his hip that req’s surgery?

???

almost hard to believe he never took a snap from center in the NFL.

Is that a faint chanting I hear in the background? "We want Kerry! We want Kerry! We want Kerry!....