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Schoop still smacking the ball around, only now hits are starting to fall in.

There’s a reason Haase was rookie-eligible for four different seasons before he caught on last year.

Thinking a little more about this, some of us have tried to work out what a schedule would look like in a 32-team world. I think most of us have assumed two leagues, unbalanced schedule, the most teams would be against your division, second most against your league, and a smattering of inter league games against selected teams. But now that Baseball is going to a new thing next year in which everybody plays all 29 of the other teams, so that fans can see every player in the league play their team during the year, for marketability purposes, any new schedule would probably have to maintain that new system. So here is a radical proposal that i do not advocate, but which I think is certainly within the realm of possibility: create a single league of eight four-team division and shorten the season dramatically to expand playoffs. in this kind of system, each team would play the 28 teams not in their division three times apiece for 84 games, and then play each team in their division 18 times for 54 games, for a total of 138 regular season games. Season starts in late March and ends the day before Labor Day, after which playoffs starts. Sixteen teams makes the playoffs and all round are best of seven. Four sets of series: wild card round (16 teams whittled down to eight); quarter finals (eight to four); semifinals (four to two); and World Series (two to one). Playoffs start the day after Labor Day and end by the last Wednesday in October. No more November games. All Saturday and Sunday games will be night games to avoid the football buzzsaw, plus no Monday or Thursday games at all. Sure, this would be an execrable situation. But if the goal is to maximize playoff revenue and “excitement” while avoiding having your lunch eaten by football, this will probably look mighty fine to Baseball. The players wouldn’t mind it, either, as long as their current contract salaries are not cut by 15% because of the shortened season.

Not to worry—there’s no money in forcing ten MLB teams to play in a de facto minor league each year. Fan interest and broadcast/advertising revenue in those cities would crater.

lol “the MLB”. Go back to Russia.

There is no way Baseball is going to eight-team divisions over four-team divisions. They want sixteen teams either in first place or within shouting distance of it, which gooses fan interest in more places, and no billionaire owner of a team would ever brook the idea of being in eighth or seventh or even fifth or sixth place. They can’t sell that to the locals, and even though owning a team is a license to print money, these are still competitive alpha people we’re talking about. They would rather rig the system to give the illusion they have a winning team than compete fairly and take a chance on looking like losers, ten times out of ten. I do think geographical realignment (or even renaming) of the leagues is in the cards, although I posted an idea some time ago about structuring the divisions to make travel more equitable among the various teams, i.e., all teams come as close as possible to traveling the same number of miles in the same number of trips. Regardless of how many pounds those gorillas weigh, it wouldn’t be right to lump NYY, NYM, BOS and PHI into one division with its favorable travel situation for an unbalanced schedule while putting SEA, OAK, LAA and LVX in another division where they have to fly all over hell’s half acre for their division games. To even out the travel, assuming it’s even important enough for them to consider, I could see something like NYY/DET/PIT/ATL in one division, NYM/CHC/NSH/TOR in another division, etc. Something like that.

Candy’s been smacking it around pretty good lately, too. He keeps doing that and he’s gonna turn it around, too.

Disagree that race plays no part in this.

The case could be fairly made that Tim Anderson may be overreacting some to the comment, resulting in what some would call “playing the race card”, but by the same token, Donaldson was out of line by playing the “I-was-just-joking” card. That’s the kind of joke that works only among friends, and nobody would make the mistake of characterizing Donaldson and Anderson as being friends. That said, of course there’s a racial component here that can’t be dismissed by claiming there’s a race card being played. Other things being equal, a black player who has been Anderson’s friend might be able to get away with jokingly calling him “Jackie”, which would probably still make Anderson unhappy, whereas a white player who has been Anderson’s friend could not get away with it, and might even be jeopardizing the friendship by saying it. Is it fair that a black friend could get away with such a comment whereas a white friend could not? That’s a hypothetical question that doesn’t matter in the least. In the real world, especially in the real America, race matters, we have to be sensitive to that if we want people to think we’re cool, and we ignore all that at our peril.

Javy hitting .205/.244/.308 across 30 games does not mean he is broken, any more than when he inevitably hits .300/.350/.550 over a future 30-game stretch that will mean he is fixed. Both Javys are the fully-functioning Javy. It is technically possible that at age 29, Javy is done done, but that is super unlikely. We don’t know how long this terrible stretch will last—maybe another 10 games, maybe another 30 … we’ll see—but all we can do is wait it out and enjoy his otherworldly defense and base running as consolation prizes in the meantime.

Performance bonuses are presumably already in the budget.

We all know that Al Avila will never resign. And most of us also know that as long as Baby Doc Ilitch is in control of the team, he is never going to fire Avila. It’s a loyalty thing. Like they say in Goodfellas, it’s among the insiders, the front office lifers. It’s real greaseball shit.

You got it all backwards. With the team threatening to lose 100 games again, they need Jack Morris in the booth, and they need Kirk Gibson in the booth. Anything to take the focus off the current team and put it on the 1984 glory days instead. Remember when …

Not surprising, seeing as they both get all their information from the same sources.

This was the key to Mariano Riviera’s success, I believe: batters faced him so rarely that they could not get used to his funky pitches. Even David Ortiz usually didn’t see him more than three times in a season, and frequently less.

Buried lede: Franklin Perez finding his niche as a simulated game pitcher in Lakeland.

And the Tigers are proving that out with their hitting. 😁

We are in the top five in total days according to Spotrac.

I’ll be impressed when there are any consequences for this.

Really? I thought it was more like 20.

Just quit on him, already.

I do wonder whether one of the problems might be his moving to a new league. I’d done a research piece showing that it was much harder for a batter to move from the NL to the AL than the other way around. That would have been through 2016. Not sure how that conclusion holds up for the past five seasons. In any event, maybe part of it is that faced the best of one league’s pitchers for eight years, so he got familiar with a lot of them; now he’s facing the best of the other other league’s pitchers. There might be something to that. I think the least likely outcome is that he’s done done.

Scott Coolbaugh, you’re fired.

This isn’t even the worst two-week stretch he has had in his career. He had worse in 2016. You can give up on him if you like. I’m sticking around a bit longer.

He doesn't care if you're black or white.