gehringer_2

Cited just to illustrate a point. You have a dozen guys on the roster that all strike out less then Riley (and one who Ks a lot more), and none of them are half the hitter that Riley is. Should tell you that K rate in a vacuum maybe doesn't tell you that much about a hitter's productivity. Certainly at high enough K rates, a hitter can't maintain enough BaBIP to be effective, but across a band spanning at least 20-30%, I don't think you need to worry that much about hitters' K rates.

That's why the Dems want the debate. For good or ill they think Trump works better as an idea than a reality so they want to help get the reality out there.

This is true, but the Wings are also slow, and Chiarot isn't likely to be any faster next season so I'm not that wedded to his size if SY replaces it with more closing speed and at least reasonable strength. It's a trade-off - you have to be able to stand your ground but OTOH, it doesn't matter if you can win an engagement if you can't get to it.

"The Bank of Palestine has tried to convince Israel to help it transport money out of its vaults in Gaza earlier on in the war." LOL - Money is thicker than blood or politics. I guess they know who to turn to when it matters.

Among players on the Tigers with more than 150PA, Riley Greene has the higest K rate, and twice the o_WAR of the next best hitter.

Malloy is the example for why every stat has value when applied correctly. BA is practically an orphan today, but it was his lack of BA in AAA that was a signal that despite a good OPS, Malloy might struggle in the majors. Obviously I hope he can find a way to make the jump, but he's showing he's not the sure thing some thought he could be.

Trading present tense productive players for even top prospects is usually a loser, especially the way teams are valuing them now. IIRC Verdugo was a top prospect in baseball. Red Sox gave up Betts for him, Betts is still an all-star, Verdugo is a journeyman and not even with the BoSox. White Sox tried the same and got nowhere. When it comes to all-star baseball players there is no replacement for the bird in hand. At the time we thought we got a decent return for Verlander, in the end not so much. If you had given up an all start in trade to TB for the consensus best prospect in a generation in Wander Franco, it still would have blown up in your face. Until a guy proves he can play and stay in the majors, he remains a crapshoot.

If they are sellers at the deadline I wouldn't bet against it.

the thing you don't credit enough here is that it wasn't only Bill Clinton that stopped guy marriage or Joe Biden that led a law and order swing. Those were where the majority of public opinion was at that time on those issues. The public moves on issues-it's a process, and sometimes the move is a huge distance, culture evolves. Politicians in general move with it, not ahead of it. Sometimes leadership makes a difference - maybe it did on LGBTQ issues to some degree, or maybe not. But in the majority of cases political outcomes are lagging, not leading, indicators of where the public is on an issue. It was the same 28 yrs ago as it is now. Why can't Biden just turn around the country? - because a huge number of voters are still electing GOP members of Congress and may even re-elect Trump. 30 yrs ago same sex marriage was still losing a fair number of ballot initiatives. California of all places, had its voters overturn same sex marriage as recently as 2008. A Congressperson is supposed to be a representative. If the people he represents change, he has to change with them at least enough to be re-elected. The US public has always had a deep reservoir of reactionary tendency. Of course that's become more obvious today than ever.

The Twins definitely unlocked something for Willie as a LHB. He's added >200 pts to his LHB OPS with the Twins.

it's the voters reluctance to identify themselves as more sympathetic to one party or the other and then to vote in primaries. More than 50% of the American electorate has this idea that there is some kind of virtue in being a 'free agent' and not aligning with a party and just showing up for general elections. When enough people do that, the field is indeed left to the wackos. Maybe one answer is what California is doing with non-party primaries. That basically makes every candidate a free agent needing to appeal to everyone. I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the details of how its working or what the downsides are but it does potentially address the problem of people getting to general elections with very narrow support.

yes - legally the issue is 'what is a public resource', but Congress easily could have redefined it they had been willing to deal with technical evolution or the Reagan admin hadn't been hell bent on dereg anyway. When you think about it, it's not there is anything special about over the air broadcast that led to it's regulation, spectrum allotment is just the fig leaf for the rationale. It was the content the orginal regulators were after. When you put cable up you are still using public right of ways, easements, etc. and you still need permits to string wire where you string it, so to me the difference is a legal fiction. And the reality is that most local cable cos operated under local government charters anyway. And its the same argument still playing out over IP reg in general, which is what we are talking about today. I have to imagine there can't be many coaxial RF systems still operating anywhere.

Hinch is not the problem as a manger per se, he may be a problem if what he and/or the org in general believes about hitting has become obsoleted by the most recent evolutions in the game. Just spitballing here but with HRs and batting avgs in particular down so much everywhere we may be looking at contact hitting becoming the next comparative advantage. That would be a shift from where the org has been recently.

it didn't arise directly out of dereg, but it could not exist in it's current form under the old fairness doctrine. But the real sin goes back another step: the reason the fairness doctrine had to be dropped was because under Reagan the FCC declined to regulate cable and Congress wouldn't explicit expand the mandate (Reagan would have vetoed it anyway). The broadcast industry cried foul about the fairness doctrine - rightly - that they shouldn't be held to regs that the cable industry, putting the same product into the same markets, were not.

It always struck me that Weaver had no real idea how to construct an NBA team for the current game. The pistons as a group have just been a collection of misfit toys, or to be really generous, a team built for a completely different era. And once you add Monty doing nothing to put the pieces he had together into anything like an optimum configuration, you have what we got! Before you can decide what pieces you may have, management first has to have a concept of what the team they want to build should look like. If Langdon has that he's already way ahead of Weaver.

right - that's the beauty of walking away still on top, fans can extrapolate that you would have been the greatest ever. No-one will ever know if Sandy could have come back and gone on to be the greatest ever -we know it's unlikely, but the question teases for him in a way it doesn't for Pedro.

Pedro has an argument if he could have sustained it. To compare - Sandy Koufax's dominance was only about the same duration. But walking away at the top of his game instead of hanging around being mediocre has left Koufax with the more lustrous legacy.

When Norris 1st came over from Toronto his fastball was electric. His arm had potential star stamped all over it. But injuries and the inability to ever solve his mechanics issues were the end of that.

The best living pitcher is still playing - Verlander. If you ask me the 'greatest player' question I formulate the answer in terms of who I would take 1st to build a team around, and it would have to be ARod. As good a bat as anyone other than Bonds plus defense at either of 2 premuim positions.

On the flip side, even a bad owner only needs to make one good hire - if that was Langdon, good for us.

Pretty terrible last 30 min from the Oilers. I didn't think think they where going to wake up in time to hold on in this one and that once the Panthers went 6 on 5 they'd be sure to tie it up, but pulling the goalie seemed to finally wake the Oilers up a little.

note Hinch talking about a pitcher making it hard for the Tigers because he didn't do what they thought he would. Maybe think about working harder at just recognizing what is actually being thrown at you and spend less energy trying to outguess what a guy whose team can also read scouting reports is going to do.

Do they get any points for repeatability?

I think this is possible just because if he can’t make the transition now, there is no remaining point for him at AAA either.

As badly as he started he only gave up 2 to a good offense plus the added outs he had to get because of some poor defense, so I don’t take this start as a step back.