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JD was a moment in time that might not be replicated. He was one of the first, almost ten years ago now, to seek out a data-driven personal hitting coach during the offseason to help him either augment or overcome what the Astros were teaching him. In the parlance of sabermetrics, JD exploited a market inefficiency before his opponents, i.e. other hitters, caught on. And we were the lucky beneficiaries of that, although too late to help us during our division-winning run. He was easing into his best stretch run of his career, and fucking Al Avila couldn’t get rid of him for a bag of used batting practice baseballs fast enough.

“First of all, I don’t love that you use two hands …” It was such an instant classic that Colin Jost had a callback to it during Update.

Victim culture run amok.

What have you done for me lately

I didn’t realize until I looked him up just now just what a sneaky good career Travis Fryman had. He was a 34-win player across 13 seasons, and he could pick it at third. Five-time All-Star who cleared some $45 million in salaries. Not bad for a guy with a 104 career OPS+.

I actually use the 40-game rule in my OOTP league: I set a starting lineup/rotation/bullpen for the season and let it go forty games without changing it (too much), just to give all the slow starters time to prove to me that I shouldn’t DFA them.

Is it too early for thoughts and prayers? I got a busy day today so if we can just do that now and get it out of the way, that would be great.

Tork was not close enough to the bag to take the throw and just step on it. He had to take the throw while backpedaling toward the bag and then lunge for the bag with his foot. That should be considered unacceptable. He should have been standing on the bag already and come off it only to retrieve an errant throw, which this throw was not. Moving to first in anticipation of a catch and a throw to him should be automatic as soon as he determines it's a pop-up on the infield. He needs to work on that.

A major league first baseman should always position himself for the double play, every time.

Well, that sucked.

Fly out not a sac fly. Almost as bad. This is it, Akil. You want to prove you belong once and for all, this is it.

Schoop with the walk! Oh god, please, McKinstry, don’t hit into a double play to end the game …

Can’t lose 110 without losing 100 first. 😉

Just noticing for the first time that Wingenter has a face that resembles Engleberg the catcher from the original Bad News Bears.

Oh, jesus, TORK!, really??

And we opened against the Rays, Astros, and Red Sox, and will face the Blue Jays, Giants, Guardians, Orioles, Brewers, and then Orioles again to wind up the month. No rest for the weary.

I wish all the best to Austin Meadows and his family as he continues to deal with this difficult problem. As Tigers fans, we should probably get used to the idea that this will be a recurring situation as long as he's here. That's merely a basebal concern, though. The life concern is that he continues to improve and have success in overcoming the debilitating parts of his disorder.

I am not at all apologizing. I’m pushing back on someone conveniently putting words in my mouth.

That’s a bit reductive—but only just a bit. Home runs is the main driver of the highlights marketing machine. So yes, I think Baseball routinely makes decisions with maintaining a certain level of home runs in mind, and that level is probably 2000. (The year, not the homer total.) Strikeouts is a secondary driver, which I believe is why they are OK with strikeouts as the by-product of high homer totals. For these reasons, I believe Baseball may never deaden the ball to encourage more balls in play. And hey, fun fact: there are fewer balls in play per game in 2023 so far than in 2022.

That’s close to one of my standard lines—I typically tell people that Chicago is the best summer city in North America.

I believe they’re getting hurt because they are trying to twist their arms and elbows into unnatural contortions to try to get swing-and-miss because any of the nine batters in any batting order can take pitchers out of the ballpark because the ball is juiced.

Remember when it used to be kind of fun to see a position player pitch? Now it just makes me walk out of the ballpark.

This from the front office team that put their eggs in the rebuild-through-pitching basket.

That’s a fine tweet.