gehringer_2

Gardenhire was fine. He had nothing to work with but he kept things on an even keel and took pretty good care what little pitching he had. It was funny that he seemed like a reasonably mellow guy for a manager, but inside the losing was eating him up to where he had to bail.

Imagining anyone carrying out a car bombing in Moscow is hard enough.

I wouldn't so much call it innocence, but there has been a big shift in primary market for college football from students on campus to the non-student off campus ticket buyer and TV viewer. For instance, before Bo got to UM, the average game attendance was more than 50% student body and locals. When football exploded and they started to actual sell - out the stadium, it was suddenly a different mix, with a shift to a higher priced ticket holder and the TV audience. As that trend has continued decade by decade, the student body has sensed they are no longer regarded as a valued audience and their participation has fallen off, which contributes to the shift in the 'feel' of the competition to one closer to that of pro sports.

I tend to think a good many people in the game believe this, but since they have no idea what to do about it, it doesn't much merit talking about. If pitchers find they are suddenly more successful - esp at pushing up their K rate - after they start throwing a hard slider, how would you go about stopping them anyway? Again, maybe this is something that is just another long term result of the rabbit ball and the absolute need to prevent balls in play - or maybe the slider is just easier to command than a change-up or curve so it's harder to get guys to learn the latter, especially on their way up when they might have the time needed to refine the more difficult pitch. Plus now you have the reduced minor leagues and shorter draft increasing pressure on pitchers to reach a high level fast.

exactly. At what point do have to believe it is more than bad luck?

If the FO had been right about Schoop, Candelario, Castro, Barnhart, Grossman, Meadows, and Mize/Skubal/Faedo/Rodriguez don't go down, this might have been a successful year and it would have covered whatever issues there are in the org for more time. By the same token right now, as bad as things may be, they look even worse because this season has been such a perfect storm of disaster. But what has happened this season is a combination of misjudgment of talent or mismanagement of same. Either way the buck stopped with Al for those things. The only question left for me is whether mismanagement was significant and how much lies at Hinch's door. In the end I doubt it matters as I don't see Ilitch eating Hinch's contract at least through the next year.

Verlander's spin pitch was his FB, and that is a different animal. The underhand spin on the FB is from the natural roll off your fingers - hand size, finger strength, skin texture, finger joint configuration and elasticity all provide that without any axial torque on the elbow. Of course there is still torque on the elbow with all pitches, but you aren't adding any extra twist throwing a 4 seam fastball. My totally unscientific impression is that throwing pitches where you pull your thumb down and rotate you palm outward - basically the slider is probably more dangerous. On the other hand the rotation on a curve is overhand, you are rotating your thumb up and your palm in. Just stand with your hand up and your elbow at 90 deg and flick your wrist down while pushing your thumb forward, then flick it down while also rotating your thumb down. Even in that simple exercise you can feel the difference in stress on your ulnar tendon thumb down compared to thumb up

Norris' stuff in the last two games as a starter is better than T Alexanders, plus Tyler has proven he can be useful working in relief. They need to be in in evaluation mode with everyone. They already (should) know Norris will fail in the pen.

It keeps getting harder to like AJ's managing

Xi is still operating China in pretty close to the same way right now.

Cody says organization is more important than the coach, but I think he has it at least a bit backwards. If the parent club's hitting coach is not driving the organization on this kind of thing, who can/will? Isn't it his job to be the expert in hitting development tech? And again, why does Hinch get a pass on this? Coolbaugh works for him and is manifestly not performing. The Tigers supposedly already have sophisticated video mechanics analysis equip - do they stow it all away under the bleachers at Joker Marchant for the season when ST ends?

Tigers sending Norris to the Pen. I will go out on a very short limb and predict it will be a pointless move as he will fail there again.

you can look at it as just coming out of Spring Training for him again. Jim Leyland held Max Scherzer to roughly 6 inning starts early in his career, though Max often got to 100 pitches or more to get in 6. He held JV to 6 IP per start in his first season as well. I guess I'd be more bothered by him missing a regular start the rest of the way than whether he goes 80 or 100 pitches per start this soon on his return. Not to mention the Tigers have nothing but time for him to build his pitch count.

LOL - maybe the next big competitive advantage will be finding pitchers who can get get batters out with LOW spin breaking balls.

P.S. Jobe should be a good test case. How long can his elbow survive spinning a slider 3000 rpm? If his elbow survives what he is doing, then all you can say is that human physiology is just too variable on what effects it to make any rules. If his fries his UCL do we call it predictable?

Good question. So the coach looks at the rapsodo output and says, "when you put your fingers here you get 150 more rpm. Does anyone then model what that just did to arm stress? Does anyone even have tech good enough to do that reliably? There are no free lunches in physics. From Newton on down it's still 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction.' If you are teaching guys to put more torque on the ball, you are teaching them to put more stress on their arm. To my mind that is the big difference with the fast ball. The spin on a fastball is not induced by any secondary torques on the arm, it is the natural result of the primary throwing motion. But as soon as you start putting cross rotation on the ball, you have to do that by inducing a secondary rotation at the elbow or to some degree the wrist.

I noted before that one possible input from the coaching staff is what kind of sliders guys are throwing, what kind of % they are throwing it and now early in the game (before they are completely loose) they are throwing them. I don't think anyone knows very much about what kind of impact these things have in any reliable way, but they are all things I can believe we might one day realize were making a difference. They have also starting doing bio-mechanics, and you never know - if a computer model is faulty or flawed they may be advising guys into potentially destructive mechanics. It's has to be harder to validate computer models against human physiology than against mechanical systems, as absolute accuracy is much harder to come by for the functional dimensions of a human joint than a manufactured bearing.

so you're saying Hinch is being wagged the dog again, but this time by the suits?

Precisely.

Isn't that still the manager's domain? He is the final filter in front of everything the team presents to his players in terms of data and tactics. If they suck, he needed to tell the back office guys to stuff it by now.

Just thinking out loud, with all the other reasons around out there - the live ball, the maple bats, the better hitters 1-9 putting more stress on pitchers, changes in the K zone; I also wonder if the trend to cutting down deliveries has had an overall effect. Back in the day a lot of guys had big windups - and I wonder if somehow on average, cutting all that down may have increased stress on arms. The big thing today is 'no wasted motion' but maybe there were reasons that motion wasn't a waste?

That is where I believe Gibson has it wrong. Pitching is not like running. For most guys pitching is destructive, so pitching more may make their bodies stronger but it's going to run the clock on their arm. There may have been a pitching style 30 yrs ago where that wasn't true, but it seem to be the inescapable conclusion the way guys throw today. If there was a way to get back to a mode of pitching that didn't destroy arms, I can't think of anything I'd rather see, but if there is any org where it's not the case today, it's ours.

That's good night's work for Manning by any measure. Rodriguez Sunday? So maybe we are back up to two. If we can finish this season with 3 names as sure things for next year's rotation that may be the best we can hope for....

I've heard one - some talk in the booth about Coolbaugh and Candelario a couple of weeks ago. But apparently to little avail.

Riley battled there, but Sandoval never made a mistake, even with no help from the ump.