chasfh

Ilitch has poured millions into team resources, infrastructure, and coaching improvements to make us a perennial winner. How would putting the kibosh on spending on players make any sense after that?

Please name some moves Avila made that led directly to the Tigers going to the playoffs in 2024 and 2025.

A million armed radicalized red hats are just itching for the call ...

His own party might well have impeached him at that point.

Bowman Hamel is exactly why I always say when it comes to Trump dying in office, or being Twenty-Fived out of office: careful what you wish for.

Everything I have been reading about this case has been making me wonder about the degree to which there was value Epstein was providing these people beyond being supplied underage girls for purposes. People referring to Epstein and a good, valued, trusted, etc., friend, a guy with connections that could make things happen outside of the trafficking part. Was he some kind of brilliant genius mind who could see things others couldn't making his advice indispensable in some way? Was it possible a powerful person could have a relationship with Epstein on some sort of advisory or professional level, that wouldn't have involved the trafficking of girls at any level? It at least seems possible that kind of praise could transcend the trafficking, and maybe even lead to a relationship with him that doesn't include the trafficking. If that's true, how effective could such a claim be in the court of public opinion, the court of professional standing, and just plain court? I don't know either way—I'm just spitballing here.

I really do think that the Al Avila tenure has done lasting damage to the psyche of this fan base. I believe the cynicism that so many have about Scott Harris—that he must be dishonest or stupid or conniving or a scaredy-cat or whatever other bad quality fans can ascribe to him—can really only have been borne from the disappointment of watching the franchise flop around like a fish on a boat for ten years due to the sheer incompetence and recalcitrance of the Avila regime, especially coming as it did on the heels of the successful tenure that preceded it. I can only conclude that many fans have simply come to expect that our favorite team’s front office will be ultimately terrible, regarding any intermittent success as a mask on the face of the arc of terribleness we must be fated to experience. And so some assume that Scott Harris will simply carry on that tradition in his own soul-crushing manner and turn us into the losers we're fated to become. We might as well hammer him now, because nobody wants to be that jerk who looks stupid for believing that what Harris is doing is the right approach, only to be disappointed by his inevitable failure. Plus, not for nothing, I find it just simply gobsmacking that there is so much disdain and derision for a PBO who gave us two LDS appearances in his first three years after we’d gone a decade wandering in the desert under you know who. The rueful nostalgia I see people have for Dave Dombrowski and Jim Leyland is sad enough, but the misplaced nostalgia for Al freaking Avila, for god's sake, is downright pathetic. I get how sad it is to feel abandoned, but it’s time for everyone to face facts: daddy ain’t never coming home after going out for cigarettes. The Kid is The Man now, he’s in charge, and he’s gonna be here well into his middle-age years. And we might as well get used to the idea, so why not give him at least one chance to implement the plan he says he’s working on? And if he fails at it and starts spinning his wheels a la Avila, that’s when I’ll jump on board the hatewagon along with everyone else.

Oooh, someone at Justice is so ****ing fired for this.

I remember this still being an open question last winter. I think probably more than half the posters here expected the team to fall on their face and finish below .500, and that most of the baseball media had us finishing out of the playoffs going into this past season. Either way, 20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, we fairly appeared to be more than one big trade or free agent signing from winning the division.

I've seen posts implying something close to this, but this post is as close to giving Avila 100% credit for the 2024 and 2025 Tiger teams as I have ever seen.

When you say you have "the app" set up "there", do you mean you have the T-Mobile app set up on the TV? Or the MLB.tv app? Also, I'm not in the Tigers' home market, so I use the package to follow them.

You may not have seen a history of the Harris admin making statements to influence markets yet because we have not been in a position to deal at a higher level of the market yet. Harris has had to spend the first three years of his tenure cleaning up Avila’s mess, the damage from which was substantial. We weren’t even supposed to be contending by 2025! But the combination of finding good talent that;’s basically freely available and Hinch’s management of the team on the field accelerated our contention timeline some. Either way, I would have expected they’d be in a position to made decent trades to improve by this winter anyway.

You can’t go wrong with Carroll Shelby straight up, right from the package. My dad became a chili connoisseur during his trip on the back nine, and would make it to the printed recipe. When my wife and I were driving Route 66, we were at the Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, TX and I had a cup of their chili, and it was almost a carbon copy of my dad’s Carroll Shelby’s. I told the cafe people this, and they seemed borderline offended by the idea! Whoops! There! Are there enough old man markers in that post for you? 😁

It was Jeff Greenberg who said that at the owners meetings last week, presumably reflecting the organization’s approach this winter. But it is very possible that we are very open to trading for an impact bat but want to look as though we could take it or leave it, in order to keep the price down. So we make the kind of statement Greenberg made to draw in teams interested in players in our system who might be more inclined to give in some during negotiations. Then, if we don’t get the deal we want, we just move along with what we already have in-house. For teams in a particular position, it’s a pretty common negotiating tactic that I don’t think is too sophisticated for Harris to grasp. As things stand, our particular position may be that we’re not that far away from being a top ten offense even with what we have in the system. I demonstrated in another post that during the performance pullback in September, with the increased strikeouts and decreased walks and whatnot, it was the Avila pickups that dropped off, and that the Harris pickups stayed steady, and there was practically no difference in production between the two groups.

Does anyone know, if you get MLB.tv free with T-Mobile, do you get to access it on devices other than your T-Mobile phone, like your laptop or TV streaming device?

I still don't understand why they don't just doctor the numbers to show bigly growth.

That's what you get when you appoint a person primarily for their ****able looks.

I am convinced that this administration never had a ghost of a chance to be competent because literally all the people appointed to it are unqualified and/or inexperienced and/or explicitly on the make.

"Null". Seems like a good name fit for the Republican Party.

They may end up doing so, but they may also be saying this in part to prime the market for an unexpected move on a bat. It's Negotiating 201 to make it look as though you're committed to zigging, so you can spring a zag on people if the price is right.

Sweeney's got three options left, and I'm betting we use one of them quite liberally this upcoming season.

I think there's a chance McGonigle spends most of the season in AAA, since he has never played at that level before. Then we bring him up in September for a pot of coffee, he maintains rookie eligibility into 2027 (or whenever the next season after this one is going to be), then we run him out there for a good shot at RoY and an extra first round pick in 2028 (or, you know, whenever ...).

Luis Robert is hurt all the time, so, pass.

I had a SLAP tear that I had surgery to repair in 2008, which isn't quite a rotator cuff tear, but it hurt plenty. I might have reinjured it a couple months ago—walking down carpeted stairs in my house while wearing socks, I slipped backwards and landed on the steps smack on the elbows, which jammed my arms upward against my shoulders. The right shoulder feels fine, but the left shoulder feels kind of how it did before my surgery back when.

I remember back on October 2, just before Game 3 of the ALWC, MLB radio talked to Jason Foley about the Tigers, the state of the team, how everyone was feeling, etc., and two things came to mind: (1) Odd choice—he didn't even pitch for us all year, so how would he know?; (2) He sounded like a dead man walking on the broadcast. No energy at all.