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Precisely. People tend to misconstrue the defensive value of a player based on the loud plays they make, such as diving stops and scooping errant throws. But loud plays have lower value than the everyday plays that good range gets you to, and you miss 100% of the plays you can’t get to.

This is not a partisan issue. This is an institutional rot issue. But there is one side more invested in keeping the rot as rotten as possible, and spoiler alert, it ain’t the Dems anymore. You may argue against that, and you’d be right in normal times. We are in post-normal times now, it’s time for a new normal, and if either party is still a viable force when that time comes, I believe it will be Democrats working toward that new normal.

Exactly.

Once this fever has broken and the adults seize control of the levers again—which I hope to live to see—there is going to be a lot of talk about remaking the American system of government in a dramatic fashion.

Looking at defensive stats in Fangraphs: The 2024 Tigers were a legitimately elite defensive team. Last year we were by most measures barely above average. In 2026 we're on pace to be one of the worst defensive teams in the league. The projected OAA of -87 would be historically bad. Even accounting for small-sample noise at six weeks in, the direction is unmistakable. This is more of a range problem, than an error problem. The fielding percentage has dropped some (.986 → .986 → .983), and errors are on pace for a normal season (~99), so we're not making dramatically more mistakes on batted balls we get to. We're simply not getting to as many batted balls. Team zone rating (RZR) for 2026 is .795, down significantly from last year (.815) and 2024 (.804). Where the collapse is coming from: Tork is the single biggest culprit, -4.7 Def, -3 OAA, -7 DRS in 358 innings. First base is supposed to be a defensive non-event, but Tork continues to actively cost us runs there. Wenceel in RF has flipped from a plus defender (+2.7 Def in 2025) to a significant negative (-4.6 Def, -4 OAA) in 2026 Riley in LF has been a consistent negative (-3.9 Def, -2 OAA) and his numbers have been poor for two years now, so this isn't new. But it does factor in. Kevin at SS and 3B is a combined -2.0 in Def across 355 innings. He's a rookie finding his defensive footing, and the metrics reflect it, although we all know he won't long-term at shortstop anyway. Carpenter in RF has been poor in limited time (-3.5 Def, -3 OAA in 150 innings). Hao-Yu Lee at 2B and 3B is a combined -2.3 Def, also a young player. There are some bright spots: Dingler behind the plate continues to be excellent (+5.9 Def, +6 DRS, +5 FRV in 272 innings), on pace for another elite defensive season. Gleyber Torres had been a genuine surprise at 2B (+0.9 Def, +2 OAA, +2 FRV) before going out, and was better than expected from a player not known for his glove. Matt Vierling in CF (+1.2 Def, +2 OAA) and Parker Meadows in CF (+1.0 Def, +1 OAA) have been fine in their center field work. The story is that our defensive identity was built around our infield athleticism and outfield range, and both have deteriorated, partly through personnel changes, partly through young players who haven't found their footing yet, and partly through positional mismatches. The 2024 team was exceptional—this one is looking like a genuine defensive liability, which matters a lot for a pitching staff that relies heavily on ground balls.

Agree with this, and I believe there must be some Murphy's law corollary somewhere stipulating that the greater success a front office achieves, the less the team needs to recede in order for them to get fired. After a string of championships and finals, a GM will get ****-canned for his team crapping out in the early rounds twice in a row.

His goal is not to contain China, but to make sure he gets his when they carve up the entire world three ways.

Well, not all of them ... 😉

I learned about it from Alex DelVecchio.

Which words/idioms? I watched your clip and honestly, none of them leaped out at me. I am always keenly interested in this kind of thing. There was an example of what you mean in Killers of the Flower Moon, which had a pow-wow scene from the time (1920s) during which a tribal elder used the word "genocide", which itself was not coined until the Nuremberg Trials. Another example from 25-ish years ago was from the TV show "Freaks and Geeks", which takes place at a Mount Clemens-adjacent high school in 1980 The Neil character was talking to the Sam character about Sam's crush, Cindy Sanders, and was trying to talk him out of pursuing her, something along the lines of, "she's a hot cheerleader, you're a nerd ... do the math". I promise you, no one in 1980 said "do the math" in a way that meant what it had come to mean by 2000.

Even sillier to portray a portray a Russian by speaking English in an English accent.

The bolder, aka the less careful, he gets with his rhetoric, the closer he believes he is to not needing voter or citizen approval anymore. EDIT: This meme and its quote may or may not have been fabricated, but my comment is intended as an overarching point, not a tailored response to a specific incident.

This, but also, more. There are the rest of us to deal with, too.

This is the only thing Trump promised that he ever even cared about. That whole affordability nonsense was to get votes from rubes who live in deep rural areas away from demographic groups they're are scared of, but who ultimately just live their lives out accepting whatever happens happens. He doesn't care about rubes like that. He cares about people who will take action and smash and grab things on his behalf. He's going to need those people back to help him later.

It's simply mind-bloggling that a public official, placed in office by voters, is allowed to elude access by the public for so long and without reasonable explanation or discovery.

We are less than a year out from “Chris Fetter is a genius”.

Only one of this top crop of prospects has graduated, and on that measure, it’s looking pretty good so far.

Brew-SKET-ta?

Best posts of May 2026, Back-to-Back Division.

Hard to gel with eleven of the 17 guys on your injured list would be on the active roster right now.

If you would choose to stop playing Tork, what would you do with him? Bench him and use him as a pinch-hitter like Jahmai? Exile him to the minors indefinitely? Trade him for whatever you could get? Release him outright?

I don’t think people give enough thought to the idea that the environment of a particular area might be a big contributing factor to the wide spread of certain diseases there. Seems like for a decade or more now, my wife would tell me about yet another person she grew up with who stayed in the area and who died of cancer in their 40s or 50s. She grew up in rural-ish Wisconsin half an hour east of Green Bay, where there has been a lot of industrial farming ever since she was a kid. I suspect the soil and ground water there have been polluted beyond belief. I think a lot of it has to do with the folks there being conditioned to be prejudiced against environmental action, which, I will just leave it there. But I suspect they don’t believe that’s a real factor.

I once read a critique of a critic (oooh, meta) who complained that Marlon Brando, playing Napoleon Bonaparte, had desecrated his performance by using his natural American accent instead of putting on the standard British accent. The critique did not miss the opportunity to point out that a British accent would not have been any more appropriate than an American accent, since Napoleon spoke French.

What, Walmart’s all out of solid major league starters? Bummer.

I totally remember that, and I still replay it in my head every once in a while!