gehringer_2

The flip side is he has Foley in better shape for tomorrow. Strategies always look better after the fact when they work. 🙄

would have been nice to have an arm in LF that could have held that runner.

Riley not seeing anything well. Was a mile from the 1st pitch breaking ball, froze on the strike out breaking ball.

Holton was warming up.

7 total base runners in 7 innings. That's a WHIP of 1.0 for the opposition pitcher. Poor.

That AB is a lesson in the importance of delta velo. Faedo came in with 95, Schnieder fouled it off. Came back with 85 and Schnieder nailed it but was way in front and it whistled foul. Then Faedo threw 92 and Scheider nailed it. So why? He's shown you want he can't hit and you pitched right into it.

Gio took it a little easy on that throw and it fooled Canha. Would have been better to have just thrown it hard.

7 pitch inning for Olsen with 3 hard hit ground outs. Javy and Gio pick'n em.

Perez with a 98mph line drive At'em ball.

Keith's worst AB of the week. He came into the game hitting over 400 in his last 50PA.

Current US immigration law is so completely screwed up - there is no way any of these good Chinese folks qualify for political asylum under any reasonable definition, and I would note the Senate GOP just refused again to visit the issue. Now on the other hand, these folks probably do have the skills to come the US under an H1 or green card system that was actually working and should have been allowed to apply that way.

We need to get some RH bats going. Canha, Rogers, Urshella, Ibanez, Tork, Baez, all pretty non-productive over their last 50 PA.

Yup. Have to 2nd the emotion. The Jays gave this one away in the 4th without all that much help from the Tigers. 2 HR is nice but 7H and only 2 by RH bats. McKinstry again made his case for Javy to stay at short. Still, it's a win.

McGonigle and Clark each on base 3 times tonight in 6-5 loss. McGonigle 12BB, 12K in 91 PA, Clark 26BB 28K in 170 PA Parker 2/3 3B BB.

yeah, I'm older than that and was able to pretty much pay my own way through at UM from my second year on and graduated with zero debt. Kid's not being able to support themselves at upper level schools like UM is a terrible indictment of US social policy over the last 40 yrs. It's become one big profit center for the loan industry instead. Pretty much the same for the SO. She finished owing a total of $3K, and we though that was pretty bad.

Greene tagged one ball tonight, but the other ABs were pretty meh.

very nice

Let's have a win tonight, shall we?

can I love half the staff?

I wonder if he went to the pen he could throw a little harder. He and Wentz share that same property - they can be good when the fast ball is hot and they get good delta velo - not so much when the FB is a little lazy.

It's more than that - at least in Torkelson's case. My compliant is the Tiger approach as per the way Tork has described it more than once, gives the pitcher no credit for being able to command the strike zone. "Take a strike until you get a pitch you can drive up to strike two" then go to survival mode, is I think, a recipe for failure against any but the worst pitchers. I think the 1st strike - fine - but after strike one you have to shift to contact mode because strike two is too late. The Tigers take too many pitches that can be hit. Maybe not for HRs but that they could put in play in better shape than an emergency swing on strike two. I would even go further to say that every pregame approach to looking for a zone has to go right out the window once you see what a guy is actually throwing and what an ump is calling. If you park yourself waiting for middle in and he is painting the outside, plus the ump is calling a ball's width on top of that to the outside, and you take a thigh high fastball on the outer third not understanding that you are just going to get something further away on the next pitch, all I can say is good luck to you. I would like to the focus to move more toward covering the strike zone rather than looking for zones. Any one can do the latter, but a good development program and batting practice habits should be able to improve the former. And I still reject that more than one or two players on a roster are ever swinging at balls they know will not be strikes. That is the other place I think the mantra breaks down. Now eventually, they will sign only players that fit that mold, that already have good pitch recognition, and for them the coaching in that direction will be superfluous but the staff will look like geniuses! Anyway , it is what it is, the spitballing is mostly for entainment (at least in my case)...so YMMV.

I'm talking mostly generally here. As per Hinch - no - not so much in terms of game play - if you listen to Hinch he has said pretty much what I just wrote - that you have tendencies but as a manager he will overrule that guidance if he sees something that he thinks is tilting the game board. If I have a complaint it would go more to the way I hear guys like Torkelson (and Hinch) talk about what they are trying to do at the plate. For my money - on offense, what I hope they do is analyze their own tendencies and then go out try to confound any other team using them against them. Probably in the long run the best thing is to try not to have any clear tendencies at all. The ebb and flow about 1st strike pitches now current is a great case study in the idea of see tendency/compensate/overcompensate/reverse tendency. So 1st came the idea to work counts to get to bullpens on the theory they are weaker. That assumption may not even be a good one any more but be that as it may, in response the pitchers have said, "If you're aren't swinging, I'm just going to get ahead" and have thrown a much higher percentage of 1st pitch strikes than is actually a good idea. You never want to reach such a high strike percentage that a batter *knows* you are going to be in the zone - well unless you are Justing Verlander at 25 with a virtually unhittable FB where you can just say "here it is if you can hit it". Most guys need to maintain some uncertainty in the batter's mind to be effective - so the ideal strike % on a given pitch is probably closer to 60% than the 70+% that some guys were throwing (and being lauded for). But then the batters finally wise up a realize all the cookies going by and suddenly the hot stat is the how high OPSes are for guys swinging at 1st pitch strikes. Soon pitchers won't be trying to throw 70% 1st pitch strikes. So it sort of goes back to the driving by the rear view mirror paradigm. Using data is great but you have to stay current and you can't get caught being the last one doing the old thing when the new thing becomes where the comparative advantage is. And it's the new thing that is going to be hard to see from past data alone - but the data plus a little game sense and you have the tools to predict what may be next and get ahead of the competition - like that swinging at 1st pitches isn't such a bad idea......

the key is to have your antenna up for what is going on. The last couple of years when the shift was still in play against KC was always instructive. Late and close KC would always start going oppo and catch the Tigers still shifted. It was pretty predictable but the Tigers never took it away. But I think its maybe a bigger issue is with the way they come up with hitting recommendations. This notion of getting pitches to drive makes perfect sense, and if you look at league data for hitters most of them drive the middle in better. But once you telegraph to the pitcher that's all you are looking for, you just made his life easier and the stats you collected on the average batter in the average situation go out the window because he's not piching to you the way he might pitch to everyone else. And so you don't drive anything because he knows to just keep it away from you until 2 strikes. Sound like a familiar outcome? Your opposition are not automatons, they are perfectly capable of acting on the same data you have to confound you. The data can never get you out of having to play the real time cat-and-mouse game. And that's a good thing or it would be a very boring game.

I disagree this is correct even based on the rule book. The logical way this has to be read is that once IFFR is called, there is no out on the catch so there is no fielding 'play' - so there is no interference with a fielder making a play. Whether the SS catches the ball or not has no effect on anything - that is the whole concept of IFFR. The only interference that could come on an IFFR play would be if a runner tries to advance and someone blocked a fielder from making that play. There must be something at risk for there to have been an interference. But I'm confident the league will some find some pretzel logic to continue to defend bad umpiring.

There was or maybe still is a common layman's misinterpretation of quantum uncertainty that an observer influences an event. That isn't actually an accurate way of describing quantum uncertainty, but there is a similar thing that can happen in analytics driven baseball - which is that the application of the data to game play changes the game as it being played in the present tense, in part possibly invalidating or at least reducing the value of the data set you are working from. It's a bit similar to the complaint about the Federal Reserve. They work from collected data, but the economy has always moved past the data by the time it's gathered so people describe the fed trying the manage the money supply as like trying to drive a car only looking in the rear view mirror. Baseball analysts have to be careful not to fall in to the same kind of possible error. To me there are two pieces of the data revolution is baseball. One is in the metrics - the ability to look inside batted ball data, pitch data, catch probability on fielding plays etc. And use of statistics to normalize out noise from ballpark effects etc that make comparisons between players better today. This stuff is all pretty unalloyed gold. The other half is the is the game play tendency data. I think you have to take this part always with some humility because the game play can certainly change out from under your data. Every team today knows what their own tendencies look like and they can also determine how much their opponent tries to play to tendencies, and then decide how much to deliberately play against their tendencies. The whole thing can get very very meta....