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Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous, especially considering that everyone knows Scott Harris is going to do exactly what I believe is right for the team. 😉😁

That’s make sense if all they do after the game is go home and go to bed. Lot of guys like to go out to da club afterwards, and that’s a lot cooler experience for someone in NYC or LA than in Detroit. Another difference about playing in NYC or LA vs Detroit: a guy like Alex Bregman could move about a lot more inconspicuously in cities teeming with celebrities. If he were to sign up to come to Detroit or a similarly backwater town, he would be the biggest recognizable celebrity in town for several months out of the year. As for Alex Bregman himself: he is a native of Albuquerque, so I will put a five-spot up against the first person who accept that if he signs a long-term deal, it’ll be for a team west of the Mississippi.

Particularly for a guy making $30 million or more a year. The difference between playing in Michigan and playing in Texas would be north of a million a year all by itself.

His 110 PA in Comerica might be telling him a lot. And I don’t know anyone who can hit home runs who would want to go someplace that suppresses his home runs for the rest of his career. But hey, stranger things have happened, I guess.

And the only thing they want out of all of this is for you to cry. That's it. Nothing else. This whole thing is about nothing else but making liberals sad. EDIT: When I say "they", I mean the red hats, not the MAGA elite. The MAGA elite don’t care so much whether you cry so long as they get superpaid.

And they will never, ever, ever stop supporting him because at this point, their only objective is for you to never be able to hang "I told you so" over their heads. They will support the abject destruction of America and even themselves just to avoid ever admitting to you, me, and people like us that they could ever have been wrong.

He is one or two of these Fox interviews from blurting out, "Who's side are you on? You're supposed to be on my side." He is also one or two from shunning Fox and going only with overtly Russian-backed RWM.

Nothing is coming up, probably because it's a link to "share.google" rather than "share.google.com", although when I add the .com nothing comes up there, either. What does it say?

Oh, that’s right, now I remember—we were talking about this and I didn’t help close the loop on it. Of course I get that WAR is, at its core, a business metric: if we lose our current major leaguer to injury or gambling or whatever, how many wins would we lose on a season-adjusted basis if we have to replace him with a freely-available replacement player? That is what the acronym stands for, after all: Wins Above Replacement. (Remember when Prospectus call their similar statistic “WARP”? I wonder what the P stood for … ?) I thought I saw this in this here thread, although maybe not, but I do remember seeing somewhere that inherently, the first base position is worth something like -12 runs (or -1.2 wins) defensively, and shortstop is worth +9 defensive runs (or +0.9 wins), versus the average player regardless of position. The numbers I’m using are probably not right, but that’s the principle, anyway. So, to fill the position to some minimally acceptable standard such that an organization can field at least a replacement-level team, they would be willing to accept up to, but not exceeding, two wins less at the plate (i.e., 1.2 plus -0.9 = 2.1) from a shortstop than a first baseman to even them out. OK, makes sense. However, we fans also have evolved (or devolved, take your pick) to using WAR as a rule-of-thumb overall benchmark stat to estimate the value of a player on the field, and not as much economically. As such, we see WAR as roughly summing up a player’s oWAR and dWAR, so if he has 5.0 oWAR and -2.0 dWAR, his overall WAR is about 3.0. OK. And I can accept the idea that on average, the league’s first basemen combine to lose, on average, -1.2 games in defense for their respective teams, whereas the leagues shortstops combine to win, on average, +0.9 on defense for their teams, all when compared to a league’s average player regardless of position. I can wrap my head around this. The disconnect for me is how the league’s DHs could be considered to lose, on average, -1.7 games on defense for their teams, since that’s what their dWAR suggests. Again, I get that WAR is an economic metric for front offices to evaluate the acquisition or deployment of a player to DH versus the average positionless player. But if first basemen and shortstops can be reduced to an average defensive value for economic purposes based on how many games the average one of them wins or loses for their average teams on the field, how can DHs be evaluated defensively in such a way when their contribution to a team’s actual defense on the field is N/A? Maybe the answer is that we need a different bottomline metric to evaluate a player’s on-field performance, as opposed his economic value, such that DHs’ defensive value is properly regarded as zero, so DHs spend zero time on defense. Maybe that’s what it comes down to?

No, thank you. I like Tucker, maybe, for 7-or-8/sub-300 with team options, but definitely not 10+/400+ with player options. Too injured too recently for Sotobucks and Sotoyears.

I love this post except for the final sentence. Harris has not yet been able to establish the limits he will go to in the free agent market to bring top talent aboard. Sure, he didn’t get Soto or Ohtani. But remember, Detroit has never been a top destination for those guys during his tenure. He’s still working on building us up to being at that level, as much as he can. The time has not been right, either in the team he could field around a top tier guy, or in the perception among top tier guys of Detroit as a real destination. I think we’re closer than ever, and maybe Harris makes the move this winter that gets us firmly into that conversation. But we just haven’t been that yet.

I don’t think Bregman would want to have to hit in Comerica Park 81 games a year for the rest of his life. His career slash line here is .242/.309/.475, which runs 17% below his career average. If he has designs to get into the Hall of Fame—and I don’t see why he wouldn’t—he’ll probably want better back nine stats than that.

Murakami is not coming to Detroit anyway, so that works out fine.

I understand the desire many fans have to want eight solid starters, always healthy and strong in every facet of the game for their positions, and five solid bench guys, good enough in all facets to spell the starters for a game or two, or maybe a couple weeks in case of injury. I would like that, too. I’m just not expecting anything like that. Practically no team in history has ever had that.* Players are human, which means they have flaws, including physical flaws that impact their professional careers. Also, baseball is an exceedingly complex game requiring many disparate talents and skills, and it will always be true that the majority of big leaguers will be good in one or a few of those areas and be suboptimal or even bad in the rest. The trick for a team’s general manager and field manager is to assemble a roster that covers well enough all the major facets of the game with enough talent and skills with the highest potential to win, and to deploy them properly and in a timely fashion during games to turn that potential into actual wins. That’s what George Weiss and Casey Stengel did with the Yankees, and what Harry Dalton and Earl Weaver did with the Orioles. Beyond the few Hall of Famers they had were flawed players really good in certain aspects of the game, who they cobbled together into teams that excelled in enough facets to make those franchises perennial winners. Those are the footsteps Harris and Hinch are striving to follow. All they need now are a couple future Hall of Famers to cobble that team of flawed players around. We have one in-house now, at least for the moment. * - I should look up which teams in history came closest to that eight really good regulars/five good bench guys ideal.

I'm not even talking about putting the guy on a pedestal. I'm talking about the top tier of worldwide fame. If Taylor Swift wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. If Tom Hanks wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. If Ronaldo wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. If Barack Obama wants to come onto your show for an interview, you don't say no. I could name dozens more, but you get the point. These are all among the most famous people in the world right now. They are better than ratings gold—they are ratings platinum. If you can manage to book them as guests on your show, you get to tout that, the eyeballs roll in, the ratings go up, you get to charge more for commercials—it's just too good for the business, and only a fool passes that up. The President of the United States is, de facto, in the same category. But even without the trappings of the office, Trump himself is in that same category. So if Trump says he wants to come onto your show, there is no way you are saying no. That would be derelict of your responsibility to the business at the very least.

Calling him "dude" is too kind. How is this not de facto evidence that America is not first for him?

That is pretty horrific and you are right to hold ESPN responsible by refusing to consume their streams. That said, I don't blame Pat McAfee at all, regardless of whether he is pro- or anti-Trump, which I have no idea about either way. The fact is, it's not up to a sports pundit to fact-check politicians live on air. But when the president of the united shaysh wants to be interviewed on your network, you simply don't say no. It's kind of no win as far as that goes, and again, I have no idea where McAfee stands on Trump anyway. But the responsibility falls 100% to ESPN for allowing it to go unchecked on their air. As for Trump, it's a huge win for MAGA to get this messaging out on previously virgin media territory. He probably converted thousands of guys to red hats with that interview. Huge customer acquisition win.

Houston is one of the highest payroll teams, and guys like to go where other players are getting paid because that means the team pays. They also have rings in their very recent history, and that's very attractive to players looking for rings of there own. As for Anaheim, like Detroit, they've had to overpay and overpromise to get top tier talent to sign there. They overpaid Rendon to go there (and, as it turns out, he doesn't even like baseball); and they were the only team on the west coast to promise Ohtani he could pitch. They also threw way too much money and years, probably unnecessarily, at Josh Hamilton and Albert Pujols. They also threw way too much money at Justin Upton, Jered Weaver, C.J. Wilson, and Mo Vaughn, and certainly didn't get their money's worth from any of them. If anything, I think they lucked out with Mike Trout already being there. I have long believed he is driven more by being in a comfortable situation toiling in relative quiet than he ever was in having a single-minded focus in winning. I think that deep down, he regarded winning a ring as nice to have, and not a necessity to cement his legacy, and if that's true, I'd bet as he's getting closer to the end, he's starting to rethink that approach. All this said, regardless of location, family atmosphere, and all that, I just don't regard the Angels as being a top destination for top tier free agents at this point in time, especially since none of the contracts I mentioned were signed even within the past decade. As for Detroit: I just don't think many guys, especially latin guys, would choose to come here for eight or ten years at a stretch just because we have decent suburbs, nice weather three months a year, and fishing and hunting up north. In addition to being a city with a decades-long reputation as being a dump, even despite the past couple of years, the organization has in their recent history the act of blowing it all up, and it's hard to get a guy to gamble on committing that many years to come here with that still in the rear-view mirror. Now, that said: I do believe that signing one guy, the right guy, could single-handedly do wonders to turn it around, at least for a little while. Twenty years ago it was the signing of Ivan Rodriguez that jump-started it. Signing Skubal to a long term deal next winter could very well serve the same purpose. If we put our money where our mouth is, then all of a sudden, top tier guys would see that we are serious about spending and contending, and that would instantly make us that much more attractive an option to commit to. But I would be surprised if we managed to do that this winter by signing someone like Kyle Tucker to break that seal. I put the odds against that as being at least 100 to 1.

No we don’t.

This should conclusively demonstrate to everyone once and for all that Trump cares not a whit about actual peace— he cares only about getting the credit for it. So he deliberately puts forward the directive to create peace without details on purpose, leaving those to others to figure out. That way, if the details don’t succeed—if peace doesn’t actually come—Trump can blame the others for it. But if the plan actually works and peace is achieved, Trump can take all the credit for it. You know, a lot like the way red hats view God. 😉 Pretty sweet deal for Trump, eh?

Also, I place "nothing burger" on the same level of argumentation trump card as "you do you".

Newsweek is not the MSM stalwart you remember it once being. Newsweek is to news as Sporting News is to sport.

Which they will blame Democrats for.

It's desperation. The world of explicit institutional preference for white men who profess to be Christias, a world in which everyone else lives to serve them, has just about faded out of view, and that generates a lot of resentment, because it's a world their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents enjoyed, but they don't get to. Trump is the last gasp for that world to make a comeback, and it has, although it doesn't have the kind of staying power red hats wish for. The older red hats may die before the comeback gets extinguished once and for all, and maybe their kids will live to see it linger for a little bit, but their grandkids will read about it and regard it on the same level we do when we read about Jim Crow America.