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I want to believe this, because it passes the smell test with flying colors, but I do want to see a more credible source than a tweet of a tweet of a TikTok.

Pretty amazing he hasn't glitched more in public. I don't mean saying nonsense like this, I mean glitching like Mitch did and Joe did. Although I do kind of wonder how much glitching we never see as mainstream media ****cans that footage due to fear of regime lawsuits. Maybe that's why he's almost never on live lately.

Christ Almighty, the red hats who believe this **** are so ****ing stupid.

They said variations were due to inbreeding? Wouldn't the variations they're referring to be, by definition, due to outbreeding?

McKinstry's bat was already over the cliff when he got here, and he did so uncommonly well in just two discrete months (April and June) that it lifted his whole season up above average. His second half OPS+ was 81, which I think is about what we can expect from him for the whole of 2026. I think it would be best to find a way to limit him to 300 at bats tops next season, if at all possible. Make him the true utility player where he can eat.

I don't think I would like to pay 2/20 for a guy who will take one year at single digits.

You don't say!

Yankees. Duhhh. 😉

I can be talked into parting with Carpenter. His skill set is fairly narrow, and is not about to get substantially better. In fact, at age 28, it's all but certain to get worse. We might be able to trade the guy to a perennial second division team who could use his pop and aw shucks media demeanor as a way to goose interest in their flagging teams. I'm thinking Angels, Pirates, Nats, and especially Colorado. Might get a halfway decent under-utilized or close-to-big-league-ready asset in return, although not a numbered prospect. And trading Kerry does not necessarily leave us uncovered in right—between Jahmai, Wenceel, and Zach, plus now Vierling presumably coming back, we should be OK in right for another year, and most depth charts have Kerry at DH anyway. (This is all predicated on Harris not bringing in a RF asset from outside.) The one thing I will push back on is the implication that Hinch actually likes extreme platoon splits. I can't imagine there is a manager alive who prefers a roster of platoon guys over a roster of as many regulars at as many positions as possible. It's just that Hinch is playing the hand of the imperfect roster he's been dealt, and he's very good at leaning into deploying their strengths judiciously, as opposed to trying to shoehorn eight big-platoon-split guys into everyday jobs they are ill-suited for.

Around Trump, crazy is a feature and not a bug.

****able Lawyer strategy is falling apart.

I get the depth argument, especially for this upcoming year, although I wouldn't characterize the strategy as being the same as that for the Rule 4 draft, where you simply get the best available player regardless of position or what you have in your system now, then deal with sorting them out another day. I don't think we can pretend that if we were to sign Bregman and Bichette for multiple years—as some would like to—that there wouldn't be some sort of reckoning when it comes to McGonigle and Rainer. There have been plans in the works for these guys for a couple years now, and I don't think we can just disregard those plans in favor of whatever here and now pops up in front of us at any given moment. If we were to lock down those two guys, we would have to do something with the other two guys, which would probably mean selling off at least one of them for cheap because there's no room for them anymore, and any guy on the other side of a trade would know that. My point being that, while people simply like to disparage College Boy Harris in general, they like to do so in particular for his apparent planning for top prospects to make their way up through our system and into our starting lineups, because after all, prospects fail all the time, or something. And sure, there's always a chance any prospect will flop. But you can't effectively plan for the future if you're always setting aside any and all prospects in favor of whatever major leaguer comes available. I know that's how Dombrowski did it, and we won some divisions with him and a ****ton of payroll, but that's not the only way to skin the cat, and Dombrowski is, as Ernie would intone were he still here, "looooong gone." I might be on an island here, but I have not concluded that College Boy is a flop. I'm willing to give him the chance to make his plan work, and I'll jump onto the mainland with the rest of you if he ends up spinning his wheels instead of building winners.

What else are you talking about? What level of 2 or 3 position players and a couple of very good arms for the bullpen do you think we could get for $40 million? You don't really think we could get four or five All Stars for that spend, do you? Talk about party like it's 1999 ... 😉 Also, I would be shocked if Harris signed Suarez whether any of us like it or not. This sounds like preemptive resignation on your part.

Related to this, when I ride on the Bloomingdale trail here, people frequently go three or four abreast, which they have a right to. But I really dislike how some of them bleed over into the other way lane, the directions being clearly marked with yellow stripe down the middle. I also dislike single walkers/runners who walk smack down the middle of the lane, right on the yellow dividing line. I tend to pass them on the right, staying in my way lane, which feels wrong, but keeps me from veering way over into the other lane.

lol the idea any of those charlatans ever actually read the Bible

Again, why are you making this about me and continuing to avoid the topic of the meaning of Matthew 24:24? You’re avoiding it for a reason.

I also don’t see Bichette taking just a little more money to leave the defending American League champs. That’s the only home he’s ever known, and they are on the championship upswing, so it would have to be more years than anyone else plus the most money by a fair amount to get him to leave.

It would surprise me, a lot, and disappoint me, a lot, to see Harris make us purposely worse this year by trading away Skubal just so we can, maybe, get back to the same position in three years.

I will bet that’s will Harris will do, and I will double bet that you will whine about how Harris cheaped out on free agents yet again. 😉

Are we seriously still debating the value of pitchers because they don't pitch every game? Pitchers don't have to play every game like position players have to because a pitcher has five times the impact on winning or losing a game as a position player does. That's why a pitcher can be just as valuable starting 30 games in a season as a position player is starting 150 games. Top-of-the-line pitchers are worth every penny that top-of-the-line position players are. I would like to sign Skubal to a number of years, although preferably not ten, and if it takes $40 million a year to do that, it's worth it. I mean, it's worth it just for the idea that if Skubal commits to Detroit long-term, that's going to signal to the rest of the market that Detroit is committing to winning, and that's going to make us a lot more attractive a destination than we are now.

I will be mad at Scott Harris after he fails to retain Tarik Skubal without putting an acceptable replacement rotation in place, and not before.

Oh, they’ll get pitching all right. There are several top quality candidates out there, although the $64 question is, would any of them commit to Detroit—a team with a recent history of blowing it up and starting it all over—for the next four or five or six years?

They didn’t give him a day off there because who else were they going to put there? Tork was their guy there, especially after his first half. But his second half was very meh—107 wRC+ with a 0.6 WAR in 64 games. That’s not close to first overall pick quality. That’s why I say: first base could be considered a hole, depending on which Tork shows up.

I don’t care as much about the money as I do the years. They can pay him $30 or $40 or $50 million for all I care as long as they don’t go on the hook for him for the next nine or more years. I have no interest in how black their 2026 profit statement is.

I still don’t see Harris forcing the team to take a step back from contending for a pennant by trading their two-time-defending Cy Young pitcher for the possibility that they might be this good again three years from now.