gehringer_2

I suppose, but from the construction side It's not really a 'moment'. Setting each section is a long, slow, drawn out process - with many steps. Sort of like watching grass grow and picking a point at which to say "it's long".

Wings had the 5th highest GF in the conference and the 5th worst GA. They still need more defense more than more offense.

BTW, on the topic of Torkelson hitting fastballs, he did hit a couple of 95mph pitches decently tonight - a 106mph GB to 3rd for an out, and 320 ft 95mph fly ball he got under too much (32 deg LA). Nothing to show but at least he was getting around on some velo.

Yes - I think what gets lost in discussion is that to actually 'control' the zone it has to go both ways - it must not only mean not swinging at balls, it has to also mean not giving pitchers too many free strikes -- or else it's a policy for failure. It's no different than the fact that controlling the zone for a pitcher means more than just throwing every pitch down the middle. A pitcher tries to throw as many hard to hit pitches in the zone as he can, in turn a hitter has to try to convert as many of those pitches into hittable as he can. That's where the whole game lies. Teams with batters waiting for cookies will never do more than win on days they are lucky enough to face sub-replacement pitching. Now on the plus side, they have talked about trying to make Torkelson "more athletic' in the box - and I have to assume this means to enable him to reach more pitches, but the roster in Detroit is deep enough into being passive hitters it's going to take a broader effort to dig out, even if the coaching will is there.

Ah yes, remembering more bad old days when a marginal knuckleballer was the ace of the staff.

Petry and Dan hitting the connection again that the Tigers take the most 1st pitches of any team by far in a context clearly implying the connection to the inept offense, a point also having been made by Monroe and Gibson, none of that, let alone multiple years of terrible results, appears to be motivating this coaching staff to reconsider its assumptions.

Point taken.

Yup, this too. But do you think anyone in the US media will actually provide a serious challenge to the stupidity of any of this?

without running any numbers I'm going to make a 1st pass assumption that the number won't match up. Tariffs were the primary income for the Federal government prior to the income tax and simply were not yielding enough money, which is why the income tax was established in the 1st place. I pretty seriously doubt you could come close to replacing the income tax with tariffs. Not to mention the elasticity effect. If you push tariffs up to get more revenue, imports will just fall in response. That might be a nice outcome for US manufacturer's but it would still leave the Treasury empty. You also have a stability problem. The income tax is a popular tax with governments because after property taxes, it is the most stable. The business cycle plays havoc with consumption taxes and would even more-so on tariffs, leaving the gov with a huge headache over year to year variability.

and that raises the question of whether pitchers are really inconsistent or just their measurements. Undoubtedly both to more or less degree depending on the case. With relievers you have the added issue that the sample sizes can be too small in a given season to get reasonable stability. Numbers from a guy that puts up 200 IP are going to be more reliable, assuming you don't have changes in health, and of course we don't necessarily ever know about those - a la the year Verlander was pitching over the abdominal tear (aka sports hernia). In the case of WHIP, I'm not going to argue it's accurate enough to compare guys on different teams to a 0.1, but taken inside a staff, where the guys are pitching more or less to the same opposition in the same ballparks, it's going to be a pretty good relative number once the sample size is reasonable. FIP is valuable, but I think the assumption a pitcher has no control over batted balls is too extreme to be completely valid either. Swing and miss is certainly going to be inversely correlated with barrel rate but not perfectly. But there is still a different between missing because of movement and missing because of misreading the pitch type and also what areas of the zone a pitchers prefers pitching to. Pitchers who 'fool' batters on pitch type are likely to give up harder contact when the batter guesses right than a guy that gets by more on pitch movement, so there are still additional complexities to OPS against beyond just K's and walks.

people from the east coast - can, or at least used to, differentiate different types of short vowels (schwa?), that we tend to merge so I think east coasters can identify Michiganders and maybe other midwesterners that way. I had a college friend from Philly, pronounced: Merry, Marry, Mary in three distinct ways. I think locally you would seldom hear any difference between the three.

I don't know what he thinks constitutes having confidence in a 'swing' or 'approach', those words can mean different things, but objectively, for Tork to hit in the majors he has to hit more strikes and take fewer strikes. He will never be a good hitter in the majors constantly down in the count. It's both as simple to say and maybe as complex to do as just that. Yes, you absolutely have to be willing to give a pitcher his due when he makes a perfect pitch, but the distance between too many pitches Tork takes and perfect is way too big and needs to close.

The fact the he has “no control” in that respect may be true, but in the real world once all factors are aggregated, good pitchers still give up fewer base runners than bad ones and that is measured quite handily by WHIP.

If you've ever known a 6 yr old, you know their little minds will tend to get fixed on random things for extended periods.

IDK. Aside from any/all of the above, I would guess the combination of the increase in the injury wastage rate and the expansion of pitching staffs/bullpens has simply drained AAA of every even remotely competent arm. Consider that in January we thought the Mudhens would have a kickass staff whereas they're actually pretty bad. At some point you overrun the population's ability to keep the pipeline full. With US youth baseball in decline and Latin America fully exploited, where are more arms supposed to come from? Which goes back to the MiLB contraction issue, Even if the players are theoretically out there (which I don't take as a given), if you narrow the mouth of the filter, you can't catch as many.

right - the big problem that no-one has a good answer for is that the gulf between AAA and MLB keeps growing larger, so projecting hitting success in promoted players and preparing those players for what they will see in the ML are both suffering.

so who remembers this guy" and the mother of all reality TV shows....

On the road all day. SO doesn't let me drive with TV on and the laptop open. What can you do?

You can slice it any which way, but the product on the field is not entertaining to watch 4 nights out of five, and if management can’t at least manage that, they need to stop charging real money for unentertaining entertainment. It’s one thing to lose, it another to lose boring, listless and lifeless.

And yet most players in the league were not drafted 1 or 2 overall. So I guess the other way to interpret this would be that most mlb level talent isn’t obvious at draft time, so the teams other than the lucky 1st two in a given year that can find it will have a big advantage. And of course the other factor is that a lot of the total WAR generated in the league does not come from the domestic draft at all.

No, but bad and boring aren’t necessarily the same I guess.

Other than Skubal, and maybe Greene, there’s pretty much nobody on this team that’s holding much of my interest right now. It’s been a while since I’ve been this bored with a Tiger team this early.

A.J. Hinch's patented bullpen magic pixie dust appears to be turning into dryer lint this season.

rally falls just short enough to tease.

If the load is 280 feet, I suppose the load plus the transporter is well over 300 - probably 350 or more. I was commuting on US 23 when they were building one of the big windfarms and they were transporting 75M (220ft) long turbine blades. Nowhere near the weight of course but still stupid big to be on the freeway.