gehringer_2

and Roberts remains a total putz - he will go down as the chief of the most debased court in US history, either because he is too much of a closet right wing radical himself, or just too gutless to do his job. The idea that the chief has no real power is nonsense. How long would a justice stay on the court once a chief suspends his decision writing privileges?

I would like to see them broom the entire hitting coaching staff in Detroit and start over. Sure the odds are high it is just the players, but after three years of seeing the same failed approaches at the plate, I'm ready to take the chance on changing it up.

You don't need to see a flag on his house to know that Alito's mind is driven by a sense of Christian entitlement. Unless maybe his next claim will be that his wife is the one writing his decisions as well....

I imagine the other aspect is that you have a big slice of people - our so-called low information folks ----but let me amend that - maybe not low information per se but low quality of information. They watch their local TV station's half hour happy talk at 6, or hang out on social media without ever actually going to primary sources like 'real' MSM.

This is true, but (by virtue of their approach) they are stuck in a chicken and egg situation. I believe it is largely because too many of them are selling out for power that opposing pitchers are using it against the Tigers with great success. The Tigers are trying to short circuit the process. You have to *hit* before you can hit for power. The Tigers give away so many strikes and so much of the plate so much of the time looking for that perfect pitch to drive that they are no threat to hit at all. Prove to pitchers you can hit it where they pitch it and you will force them to mix their approach and then you might start seeing pitches you can drive. Or you can just wait for those few games against incompetent pitchers and pad your stats once a week.

The three batter rule may the worst thing to ever happen to AJ.

yeah - the admin is talking all the time - but it doesn't cut through the noise. If it doesn't bleed it don't lead and good news is boring. The GOP has captive media, the left has media dedicated to false equivalency to protect their journalistic virginity.

I remember someone suggested it might be good to see 10 more games from Keith before sending him down....

I give Monroe credit, he is eviscerating the Tigers team hitting approach in this series - but on the radio.

I just can't take anymore. Tork takes middle middle on pitch one.

no doubt the who of who they have brought in is part of the equation, but that's no comfort to the result.

So now you have a player losing his cool, a manager showing up said player on the field. This bodes well for clubhouse comity.

the tiger self professed approach to hitting has always seemed to me to be optimized for hitting bad pitching. So you get it and you clean up and struggle the rest of the time. The DBacks pitchers didn't ever have the sense to pitch Baez outside.

good to see those stern words from AJ have settled Lange down..... 😰

will we ever see a hitter come to the Tigers and have better than his average year?

score two, give'em right back

Carpenter had some decent pitches to hit, couldn't barrel any up. But he kept the line moving.

his little hot streak has pretty much petered out. He just swung under a middle middle batting practice change-up, not as bad as not running it out, but close!

Witt showed you the difference between controlling the strike zone and defending the strike zone.

As Jim Price would say, this team has its daubers down.

there again is what is wrong with the tiger approach. tork took two fastballs for called strike looking for something better, but then ends up topping a change-up because he has to protect with two strikes. Especially with all the umps in the league calling pitches outside for strikes, it's just too suicidal to just hope for mistakes.

And that is exactly one of the things that has obsoleted the idea of forcing guys to throw more pitches to get teams to their bullpens - bullpens are pretty damn good today, and deep enough that no-one has to go twice through the order. Maybe if you are lucky in three games you tire out a BP for your opposition's next series - great victory there.

I have no problem with the way they moved him up to AAA. You really can't do much coaching when a guy is at 900+ OPS, which is where Tork was through AA. But they let him out of AAA just based on his power without him ever proving himself as a more rounded hitter (he hit only 234 in AAA) and that probably was a mistake. You may have great power but if your bat to ball skill isn't better than 234 in AAA you are going to have some struggles in the majors. Which has been amply proved. (I would note that in the transition to statistics like OPS and RC, that are better measures of a hitters *productivity*, it should be lost that plain old BA is still the measure of bat to ball skill.)

That was Hinch's view at one point last year (as per a recorded interview available somewhere for someone ambitious enough to find it, which wouldn't be me. 😉 ) That could well be. But I believe a couple of things which probably run against the grain to the general view: The first is that I don't think hitters pay all that much attention to coaching if it's not coaching they sought out because it happened to make sense - or 'click' for them. Examples would be JD, Carpenter. Every hitter knows what a fine balance it is that allows him to succeed at all and I think they are all (very rightly) reluctant to change much. But what they can decide -apart from the actual mechanics of hitting, is what kind of hitter they want to be. Cabrera is a case in point. When he was still a great hitter, he always made a conscious decision to play for the RBI with RISC. That was a choice, and it led to him consistently being near the top in RBI% in baseball. He could have swung for the fences all the time and put up bigger OPS and HR numbers in a career, but HE thought getting those guys in from 2B was more important to his team. That is the kind of thing is not really coach driven, it's not a matter of hitting mechanics, it's a matter of your sense of game awareness and playing for your team. I cite this because IMHO, right now this is Tork's biggest problem. He is too worried about crushing the ball 500 feet and not about those one at a time base runners and RBI that would be the difference in those 1 run games. Now it's possible that that is the vibe he get from management - if so they should stop. But I don't know if that's true or if it's just Tork himself who can't bring himself to play the best game for his team instead of for himself. Now, all that said, he took the ball to RF twice last night, and if that is the beginning of a shift in his approach, I'll take everything above back. But we'll see if it continues or not.

no question - and probably no different with writers today.