gehringer_2

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

I don't like the position coaches being off limits. At this point he's been here long enough that everything Hinch says is response tested boilerplate, It would be a lot more interesting to hear what the coaches are working on with players, but that appears to be verboten under this regime.

We had some kick ass schools in Detroit once.

209 at AA? Harris might as well buy his ticket to the land failed GMs. That’s a NYC centric proposal if I ever heard one.

then again, Malloy's joy may also be short lived...

This. I think Piston fans are much too sanguine about Cade re-upping. Sure it may cost him a little money to win his freedom sooner, but I find it hard to believe a quality player with the option isn't looking hard at getting out of the worst org and owner in the league as fast as he can.

Probalby what keeps them going against the general exodus of their educated young people are businesses that keep restocking the pipeline of reasonably high performing people by transferring operations there to capture low wage costs.

I was completely crushed when they traded Bunning. It was one of first traumatic experiences of my childhood where the adults in my life failed me. And WTF good was a greek goddess supposed to do for a baseball team?

I'm not sure how you could ever do any kind of double blind study with validity. We do know that almost every left hander that does hit LHP tells a story of having drilled against it to a degree beyond what appeared to be any reason at the time so I think you can say with some confidence that you won't succeed if you don' try, but proving that trying improves the odds of succeeding across a wide cohort would not be easy. You could do the inverse - track whether guys that got put into platoon service got even worse against LHP when they when back to playing everyday, but I'm not sure that's the quite the same question as the developmental one.

Yup - that's what pitchers do. If they never flashed all-start stuff at all, they'd have never been on anyones radar to begin with. I think that's true more often then not for a pro athlete. The difference often is not the highest level they can achieve when everything is right, it's how high the lowest level they fall to is when everything is wrong. A lot of guys can be great occasionally, very few can be consistently great. We see the former and hope they turn into the later, but if they always did it would be too easy, right?.....🌈🦃

Looked through the gamecast. Pretty much everything he threw got hit, but mostly his FB, which started out with decent velo (~95) but by the fifth when he was lifted was down to ~92. The kid does not seem to be developing the endurance to go deep into games (though we can probably say that about Skubal as well, but less so). Sometimes Manning has enough life on his FB to be able to throw it without spotting it well, but not today - he threw a lot over the middle and a lot got hit.

Sure - bit everything tells you something. K rate can also be deceptive if taken too simply. As I noted yesterday, Riley has a higher K rate than most of the current Tigers roster but makes a lot more useful contact.

I agree that BA has been replaced by better measures of a hitter's *productivity* but BA still measures an important skill, especially for a young player who has not grown into his full power potential. Contact skill is still fundamental to every other productive thing that happens on offense. So to me a young hittter's ability to maintain a good average is still important. And I think that is born out by what we are seeing in Malloy. In the minors his excellent walk rate pumped up his projection by higher level measures, but his inability to put the bat on good pitches in the zone is a problem for him against MLB pitching.

The next dilemma is what to do with the OF. Perez deserves to stay but it looks like Parker will be back. Gio is so good at 3B you're not going to give Vierling as much time there as maybe was planned in the off-season, but he's your 2nd best hitter so that means he plays more OF so you will have Parker, Green, Perez, Vierling and then you get Carpenter back from the DL, plus Canha rotating through DH.

people need to re-orient expectation (including myself) given the drop in league BA. Keith just pulled his BA to a point above league average today. He still has plenty to work on but there's nothing to panic about with Colt. Perez has also been a bright spot. I suppose to be fair, if you had added Perez and Keith to a lineup with Carpenter and a Meadows and Tork that hadn't backslid, we probably wouldn't be having 10 run weeks. OTOH, every team suffers injures and guys that slump - you have to have the depth to manage it.

Up until this season, Wenceel Perez has had Isaac Paredes V2.0 written all over him as the next guy a long time in the system the Tigers would give up on. Maybe they dodged that bullet.

Kreidler starts out with a miss on his right, comes back with a miss on his left. Maybe all the injuries have taken their toll, but we're not really seeing that great a glove.

Vierling with a loud out there. 107 off the bat on a line. 640 XBA

After several good catches on the day, Vierling airmails the cut-off man, gives up a potential out.

LOL, Kreidler comes into the game and immediately is beaten by a ball to his right after Gio had been giving a clinic on how to go to your right at 3B

speaking of Colt facing a LHP. He hung in pretty well and got rewarded .......by Pham

I just hope they are not scoring the rest of week's runs as well.

Or you are just seeing their real opinion of the player's future. Riley plays full time, but even with the investment they have made in Keith and their supposed faith in him as a hitter, he been allowed only 28 PA against LHP so far. Don't like that. Maybe the team would claim that since he hasn't been off a great start they are trying to protect him, but it's still coming at a cost of him not getting to see that pitching.

We got a very early IBM in our office maybe 82-83? In '84 when the Mac came out I brought on home on a 1 week trial, but couldn't deal with the tiny screen. We had had some Lisas at the engin school so I knew the prototype of the apple GUI but the Mac seem too cramped so I bought a build your own clone - must have been end of 85? The Mac was $~2500 at the time so I know I spent less than that, but maybe not much - that would have been with a 10MB HD. It was an 8088 which I souped up by upgrading to a Z20 CPU. I mean, can you say - Wow!

If you strictly platoon young players out of the gate, you guarantee the inability to hit same side pitching will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am mildly surprised that a team supposedly committed to development would take such a short term gain at the risk of long term loss approach. But if you follow the numbers to win today, that's where you end up.