gehringer_2

What can you say? He was an easy guy to dislike.

IDK, given the wastage rate for pitchers you do have to pick a lot of them to keep up. It also goes to the central question of projection accuracy. I think the Tiger philosophy going back to Dombrowski was that young pitcher measurables are better and more reliable than those available for young hitters, so your chances of hitting with an 20 yr pitcher who throws upper 90s are better than with a 20 yr old hitter putting up a 900 OPS against 20 yr old pitchers who are miles from MLB quality. I don't know if in the end that's a supportable theory or not, but the Tigers have built a pretty good pitching staff, though it's fair to say they may have gone overboard and left themselves poorly balanced. And I guess you could say that conversely, their skill at picking hitters was poor enough that maybe they shouldn't have spent any more draft capital there!.....

there was nothing wrong with giving him a shot there given that his college coaches thought he was a good fielder, but the Tigers sure oversold it and that is probably part of why.

LOL - and Ovechkin - your active scoring leader is a "Euro" who is hardly some kind of dainty player.

and Max with a HR in that game. 8 RBI between the two of them.

TBF Mize has a 97 mph FB and at least once in a while shows signs of being able to spin it. But that's why I did say only for a while. This summer is put up or shut up time for Mize to prove he has a future. He needs innings to redevelop command, and an occasional misstep is maybe to be expected, but he has to start showing steady progress and turning in more good starts than bad - and in 6 of 9 outings he's given up 2 ER or less - so while tonight was a fail, it's too soon to panic about him.

When I'm as depressed about the team as I am now I'll follow gameday instead of watching live. You actually get more detailed data and the extra level of remove eases the frustration. They all get DVR'd so if there is miracle comeback I haven't missed it.

well, Al Avila 'considered' for 3rd, and his ASU coaches did claim he could/would have played 3rd but that Gage Workman was playing 3rd who was already a SS level fielder - so they didn't and we'll never know if he might have been able to master it while still young enough for the change to be easier. So in 2020 he was a 3b in some people's minds, but not so much ever in reality.

In defense of Mize, the other choice for a team looking for a pitcher that year was Brady Singer. If the Tigers had taken him they'd be ahead of where they are with Mize, but I think you can still argue Mize has more total career potential - at least for a little while longer.....

Riley with 2 ~100mph EVs. Also nothing to show but good sign.

lost cause and he has nothing to show for it but Tork is going to RF tonight and hitting it hard. If he'd keep that up in just moderate doses I have to believe it will help him turn his season around. He'll get pitches to turn on when hits some of the ones he can't the other way.

That is the risk of taking a college pitcher on the strength of game results achieved with breaking stuff. Major league hitters are not going to swing at most of the breaking ball out pitches a guy gets in college. When Casey got tothe MLB that great split turned into a just a ball that hitters spit on most of the time. And suddenly the mediocrity of the FB is revealed as a problem. But he does have plenty of arm, and if any coachinig staff can help him get good shape on his pitches it is this one.

His velo was good, but they were hitting all his pitches, FB, Slider, Split -- they had hits on all of them. In his first season the issue was his fastball was flat and hittable. He had fixed that so far this season. His FB vertical break numbers aren't bad tonight but it only got a couple swing and miss.

He's looking pretty frumpy....

Maybe a legal type can comment but I've always found it strange that jurors are not instructed in the law of the case until after they have heard it. Just on 1st take it would seem to be more logical to give the jury instructions on the law of the case first so they can better weigh what they hear/see against what they understand are the legal elements of guilt or innocence. I suppose there is a theory to why we do it the way we do, there always is.....

Meh - the thing that's great about playoff hockey is that there is no accounting for how much a team does or doesn't raise their energy level against a certain other team. The "worse" team can beat the better in the SCP.

Yeah - when I watch Torkelson I mostly see a hitter who can be better than he he is if he would make better decisions - how much better is unclear but better than he has been. The question then is what drives those decisions - his coaches or the voices in his head? Either way, until he is willing to be a more intelligent/situationally aware hitter he is going to struggle to be a productive run producer even if he does put the ball in the stands occasionally. It is sad that he missed being around Kaline, whose is exactly the kind of hitting thinking he needs to move toward IMO (i.e. he seems to want to be Babe Ruth, but he just isn't)

If the prosecution let a true believer slip onto the jury, all bets are off of course - as they will be unassailable by logic. OTOH, it's actually a pretty good case as far as I have followed it. They is no question the payment was made, given his history with his wives and women in general it's hard to credit that he paid Daniels off for Melania, there is no question Cohen denies it was for legal services, there is no question Trump's side claims it was - but no witness who could (i.e. Trump) has testified to rebut the 1st person testimony of Cohen about what transpired between he and Trump. The black and white evidence dovetails with the story as Cohen tells it. Oddly enough the defense's big show that Cohen illicitly skimmed from Trump in another case only adds to the argument that he didn't think he was getting enough in commission for the 'legal work.' He would not have been as unhappy if that's what those 11 checks were for. It will depend a lot on the leadership dynamic on the jury. It is always the defense strategy in hard cases to raise as many red herrings as possible - confusion is how to generate doubt when the facts are against you, which is basically how this case has gone. From my one criminal jury experience I would suggest that it ends up falling to the clear thinkers on the jury to keep explaining to the soft headed ones why those red herrings are immaterial to the facts of the case. If that dynamic is in play - the prosecution wins. If the jury has no leadership, you won't move holdouts.

Numbers don't always track logically. Close to home, from April to May Torkelson has raised is OPS by 134 points but his OPS actually fell by 15.

So the defense has rested after only two witnesses. Trump will not testify. the jury gets a week off to mull things over before summations. I think that's a horrible idea - but it is what it is.....

talking about 'staffs', James Rowson, now the hitting coach for the #1 offense Yankees was with the Tigers in an assistant's role when they hired him last off season. I'd love to know if the program he runs there is any resemblance to the one the Tigers use, or not.

A competitive game is not necessarily a non-boring one!

IIRC on top of that the opposition had mostly walked Torkelson in his last full season so there wasn't as much to see there either as might have been.

I've thought for a while now that 'control the zone' is actually a pretty useless focal point for hitters. It's an attempt to draw a parallel to what is successful in pitching but is basically inapplicable to hitting. Show me the hitter that swings at balls deliberately - I'm sure there are a few but not many. The real key to all hitting is pitch recognition and being quick enough to the ball to act on what you see in time. I can't really see any sense in which a hitter 'controls the zone'. You guess as well you can that it's a good pitch but there is no procedure or technique in the world you can do in the box to increase your certainty of it; you either pick up something in the pitchers release or the spin or you don't, and once you decide to swing, the zone goes out the window and you just have to get the bat on the ball wherever it ends up. And guys who do have recognition skill but will wait on only perfect pitches will never be competitive against good pitching.

there is actually a lot of it in the NT - they called it 'demons'. So maybe on second thought it's better if they don't recognize it - they'd be subjecting all those poor folks to exorcisms. That wouldn't be fun, especially now that there'd be no chance of at least meeting Max Von Sydow for your trouble.