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I am falling out of love with the idea of running on every single ball that’s hit. We have to figure out how to be more judicious about that.

They will have sellout weekends as long as they have the best record in the majors and the Chicago Cubs come into town. All I can lean on at this point is my experience that tells me it's a bad look that may hurt perception and marketability for the team not on Friday night, or on Saturday night, or on Sunday night, and probably not for the rest of this year, but in the long run. Or maybe it won't. I don't know for a yet-to-be-verified fact. I can't predict the future of this specific issue. I'm just speaking experientially as a marketer who dealt with consumer perceptions in my profession. I have to admit that maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe it won't matter. Maybe the Tigers themselves don't even care how it looks. Hey, maybe it even looks better for them to be empty. Maybe the Tigers designed the whole situation to be that way and they're satisfied with how it looks. I don't work with them, or know anyone on the inside, so I can't know for a fact one way or the other. I am merely hypothesizing based on my experience, so count that toward whatever you think that's worth.

And, also, we need free and fair elections.

"You're very clean and articulate, and how dare you not thank me for giving you such a high and totally appropriate compliment."

He is if you don't mind not hitting.

OTOH, Marlins at Pirates in Pittsburgh on a weekday afternoon.

I would agree that the likelihood of someone deciding not to buy a game ticket only because they saw empty seats on the one TV game they happened to be watching is roughly the same as someone deciding to buy a car only because they happened to see a car commercial on TV.

All due respect, if you worked in marketing, you'd understand what I mean.

If you think improving his line drive rate is itself luck, then yes, his higher BABIP is also lucky. But if you believe he improved his line drive rate through work and earned that increase, then he also earned that higher BABIP, since xBA on line drives is over .700.

I honestly think Mark Fidrych might have had something to do with popularizing self-serve gas. I remember back in that magical year he had, there was a huge feature story on him in the Sunday Free Press, I think it was, and there was a picture of him happily pumping gas into his own car, and part of the story was how salt of the earth he was to want to have to do this for himself, like, look at this guy, this great big league pitcher, he's not putting on any airs. It looked so cool, at least to 15-year-old me.

He's our Devil We Know.

McKinstry is so interesting because I always thought of him in the vein of, say, Mike Fontenot: a fine guy to run out there for 250 or 300 ABs, but once you give him 500 or so, then you start to see all the things he can't do, and every day. Some guys are just made for the utility role. Of course, Fontenot had only the one really good year as a utility guy, and McStnky had a better year at 500 ABs for us in '23 than he did with 300 ABs for us last year, so, what the hell do I know.

Bregman is hurt now, so I'm not sure I would trust him to be healthy the rest of the season. If defense is your thing, Suarez is not your guy. Unless you're fine punting on defense for sure for the promise of better offense? That would be the Gleyber Plan at a different position. I'm starting to wonder whether the situation we have for third base isn't good enough to take us through this October.

This might be a close proxy to what you're looking for. They don't break out subs versus starters, but overall, Tigers are second in baseball for most different position players played during a season so far: This one they do measure. Not the most, but fifth out of 30 is a lot: Although this may be more a function of not having eight solid reliable starters we can run out there day after day, as the Cubs (29th) do.

Politico is not part of the mainstream media dedicated to speaking truth to power. Their mission is to report specifically on the mechanics of the political aspect of government, mainly Washington, and they can’t afford to risk losing sources in this particular government by being some sort of diogenean truth-teller. Which is fine, I guess—there’s room in the media landscape for all kinds of players, and it’s up to us to disparage those we hate or that are craven liars.

I wonder what the plan with Trey Sweeney is. Clearly Javy is the hot hand and Sweeney got in over his head lately, but Trey has played only four of the nine June games so far, and he was pinch-hit for early in two of those and was a sub in another. As a former first-rounder, the kid presumably has a lot of potential, so sitting him on the bench for the rest of the year won’t help either him or us. But, also, his long-term prospects with the Tigers was already limited given the shortstop depth we have in the system (which, hopefully, still includes Rainer at the top). I think the team would like to package him in a trade for a back-of-the-pen strikeout guy, but they’re going to have to get him some trigger time somewhere, whether it’s here or down I-75. I think they would rather he figure it out up here because he would be more valuable trade chip as a serviceable major leaguer who will be eventually squeezed out by circumstances than as a minor leaguer with an uncertain prognosis.

I think the manager and the coaching staff all have different jobs, as a necessary division of labor. At the major league level, coaches aren’t exactly teaching players anything about the game of baseball itself as much as they are spotting things players are doing wrong, or whether players have gone out of sync, or helping players work on a particular skill they’re trying to acquire, or preparing players specifically for this team/this pitcher/these hitters we are facing today—stuff like that. Coaches’ job is to guide players in these ways and provide feedback to them as they go. The manager, to your point, is focused more on managing the players’ expectations, state of mind, in-game trigger time, etc., but they also provide the coaching staff the guidance they need on what to work with the players, and what the expected successful outcomes should look like. In that sense, the manager is the executive and the coaches are his officers. In a cohesive organization, the front office and field manager work together on establishing goals, objectives, and strategies, and the manager distills all that to the coaching staff who distill it further to the player level. That’s the way a winning organization should probably behave, at least, and after years of not doing that in a way that was obvious even to outsiders like us, the Tigers apparently have finally figured out how to do it right. And look what’s happening.

Agreed, and the interesting part of this post is that I don’t think anyone would have accused us of having a solid and deep roster before the season started. I do wonder how much of the depth of roster has to do with guys simply becoming the best players they could possibly be; with the coaching and development staff guiding the players to make the most of their abilities; and the manager deploying the players in just the right way that leads to optimum outcomes. What’s the mix at hand?

That’s true of the June 1 1-0 over the Royals because of the inexplicable orthodoxy that the win must be awarded to a relief pitcher if the start doesn’t go at least five, even if the starter was far and away the most effective pitcher of the game. That’s where awarding the win is completely within the scorer’s discretion. That’s one of the crazier scoring rules in baseball, right up there with walks don’t matter in batting averages. Last night was different in that there was no discretion at hand. MLB rule 9.17(a) stipulates that “The Official Scorer shall credit as the winning pitcher that pitcher whose team assumes a lead while such pitcher is in the game, or during the inning on offense in which such pitcher is removed from the game, and does not relinquish such lead, unless (1) such pitcher is a starting pitcher and Rule 9.17(b) applies; or (2) Rule 9.17(c) applies (i.e., the effective pitcher discretion ruling).”

Remember the game-winning RBI, which was supposed to reward the most valuable run batter in for the game? They used the same principle for that. If a team took a first inning lead on a home run, scored eight more to lead 9-0, then gave up eight but held on for the 9-8 win, that first home run was granted the GWRBI for the game. Yeah, it didn’t make any actual sense for that, either.

Quick, call in the National Guard. Sounds suspect.

No problem, just use prison labor.

Speaking as someone who’s on the same side here, Terry Moran’s tweet was well out of bounds, and his journalistic integrity and objectivity could be fairly questioned in the aftermath. ABC could not afford to keep him around after that. It’s just a shame he couldn’t restrain himself, because who knows what kind of character he’s going to be replaced with.

“Soldiers are to be fit and not look fat.” This is something you’d expect from a middle schooler, which is where I think the guy’s development got arrested.

Adam Engel. Remember him well. Saw a couple homer robbers from him.