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I just rewatched My Cousin Vinny for the first time in maybe five or six years and was reminded why it is one of my top ten movies ever. First of all, this particular fish out of water concept is just gold. New Yorkers cluelessly making their way around Alabama is ripe with comic possibilities that the movie mines terrifically, if not exactly flawlessly. The courtroom scenes constitute a master class of just how criminal trials work. My understanding is that some beginning law classes actually assign the movie to students to closely watch for how such concepts as discovery and voir dire and cross-examination operate in practice. It’s pure genius how seamlessly and entertainingly they weave these concepts into the story, never bogging the story down with them. Marisa Tomei, as Mona Lisa Vito, just oozes sex in every scene of the movie, but especially in the hotel room scenes, when she’s dressed down, and in the final courtroom scene, when she is on the stand showing off her smarts. To me, hers is the single sexiest performance of any actress I have ever seen in any movie in my life. I simply cannot take my eyes off her whenever she’s on the screen. Lastly, and not leastly, they never ruined it all by making some terrible My Cousin Vinny 2. The movie caught lightning in a bottle in the most unexpected and delightful way.

I saw Alice at Joe Louis in the late 1980s. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised by how energetic they were. I remember their guitarist looked like Rambo, long hair and headband and muscles and everything. I also remember watching two girls who had been a few rows ahead of us approach the mixing board after the show and chat up the sound guy for a minute, the guy pointed them toward the stage, they walked over where they were helped up by a roadie, they all disappeared backstage, and then I left. Rock and roll, man.

Harold is a career sub-replacement player. Hard pass. Man, are expectations ever low among Tiger fans. Thanks, Al.

Expectations of Best Buy clearly too high …

Speaking only for myself, I became a big fan of Alice Cooper in seventh grade, based only on hearing the songs on the radio. TV almost never played any hard rock back then, so there was no way I would have seen the schtick. I probably saw a couple of pictures in Creem or Circus, but I’ve always hated scary movies, so that wouldn’t have attracted me anyway.

Robert Plant sure gave it his best shot here …

“Well what he said was true! What was he supposed to say! This is cancel culture to the extreme! What about the First Amendment! Our country is so divided it will not be resolved peacefully and I stand fully ready to defend the Constitution! Hunter Biden’s laptop!”

The clip is weird because it makes it sound like Hahn is calling the Sun Bowl between UCLA and Pittsburgh, and I’m thinking, why is the guy who calls North Carolina State football on radio calling the bowl game between UCLA and Pittsburgh? But one news story I saw spooled out the whole sentence as, “One other bowl game involving an ACC team going on, that's the Sun Bowl, and amongst all the illegal aliens down in El Paso, it's UCLA 14 and Pittsburgh 6 …”

But her emails!!

That’s my hypothesis based in part on my reading of the articles I’ve posted. I accept that no one here is with me on that.

I think Baez and Rodriguez didn't get offers from anyone else even close to what they got from us.

Sure, there are players who are not driven to win or else—I think Mike Trout is one of those guys. If it's not about winning, then it has to be about something else: team culture, the city, close to offseason home, more money than anywhere else, even backed into a corner to make the decision (like Pudge in 2004). Different people have different reasons. But I do believe that a high percentage of players, probably the majority, would rather play for a winner in a nice climate and/or an amazing city, for even a little less money, than to play for a organization that's perceived to be going nowhere in a city that's perceived as dying or even dead. As for whether the Tigers have a rep for treating their players well, what do you base that on? We may not be thinking of the same thing.

Major league free agents are a key part of any winning team. Sure, you can't free agent your way to a consistent winner, but you can't rely only on guys coming out of your system, either. Good teams need both players who are there by choice and players who are there by team control. Even the Rays have at least half a dozen or so free agents on their roster in any given season. So while it would not have made sense to go into the market this winter with both wallets blazing and overpay for an entire starting lineup, at some point we will have to be ready to go in and make smart signings, and to do that, we have to reasonably have our pick of talent, which we don't have now, and may not next winter, either. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the plan is to be in that position by 2025, after word has gotten out that things in Detroit have changed, the Tigers are serious about putting good teams on the field consistently, and perhaps most importantly, current Tigers are eager to evangelize to players on other teams about what a great organization this has become to play for—like night and day, man. When that happens, then we should be able to sign all the first division regulars we're gonna need to round out our roster and starting playing baseball on October instead of golf.

I wouldn't be mad if they ended up winning only 70 games, although truth be told, I'd be a little disappointed, because I think as currently constructed, they're probably a 75-win team. But, like you, I did not expect any major free agent signings, although it's a little sad to see we can't even get any one-year guys beyond Boyd and Lorenzen. I can see why most players want nothing to do with coming to the Tigers, though. We're not going to win anytime soon, and I do believe our reputation among players in general is that we're messy to play for (TenaciousD, I will continue to agree to disagree with you on this), so who among the better players who are ready to win would want to come here? We have to show and prove first before that happens.

Did you ask them why? I'd be interested. The only businesses I know that take cash only are dispensaries.

My '98 booming with a trunk of funk ...

I know how the prevailing idea here for months now has been how A.J. Hinch should bear harsh culpability for the hiring of Scott Coolbaugh and for holding onto him for the entire disastrous second year, but I'm coming around to the idea that hiring Scott Coolbaugh and Jose Cruz, Jr. as hitting coaches may not have been Hinch's idea. When Hinch was interviewed by MLB Network shortly after the hire, he said "didn’t know Coolbaugh personally aside from as opponents on the field", and he then talked mostly about the topline resume things he knew about Coolbaugh. The article also touted how Coolbaugh was hired for his experience, something Al Avila is known to have valued highly. By contrast, Hinch said he'd known George Lombard for a long time, and had a great deal of personal experiential details he could relate about George in the interview. This contrast in tone when discussing the two strikes me as a clue. I have even stronger conviction that Jose Cruz, Jr. was also imposed on Hinch by Al Avila. In this Free press article, Hinch's reaction to the hire came in a statement released by the Tigers that was very bland and not too specific. Al Avila, on the other hand, was interviewed live about the hire, saying very directly, “we identified Jose as someone who would be a great fit for AJ and his coaching staff ... over the years I’ve watched (Cruz) as a player and know him to be a leader both on the field and in the clubhouse." All this sure doesn't make the hire sound anything like A.J.'s idea. Both Coolbaugh and Cruz are now gone—in fact, Cruz bolted two months into the 2021 season for the head baseball coaching job at Rice, which he led to a 17-39 record in 2022 and a ranking of #204 out of 301 schools by the NCAA. George Lombard is still around. So, my new working hypothesis is that A.J. Hinch probably wasn't the guy who hired Scott Coolbaugh as hitting coach of the Tigers. If that's true—if Coolbaugh was hired by Al Avila instead—then no wonder Coolbaugh didn't get fired early in the season when it would have made sense. By the time Avila was shit-canned, shoving Coolbaugh out the door right after him wouldn't have mattered to the team's season, and I think the organization realized it would have looked chaotic if they were to start firing people up and down the line within days of firing Al.

Has any team ever traded a 1/1 pick for MLB-ready players while the 1/1 was still marinating? Honest question, I don't know.

If the legislation passes and the retailer fee goes away, will you reduce your prices across the board by the 2% or 3% or 4% you’re currently paying for the fees on the card transactions?

I use Chase Freedom which has a standing 1% cash back deal, plus a special 5% cash back situation for certain categories on a rotating list that changes every quarter, e.g., groceries, gas, Amazon, etc. I built up six figures in spend over the past few years and used a good chunk of the reward dollars to pay for aftermarket speakers and installation for my new car, for which the automaker degraded the factory speakers to be worse than what I got in my 2013. The total cost had a comma in it, but since it all came out of rewards money, I look at the purchase as being free. I’ll miss the cash back program if Chase dumps it.

I don’t remember that about Billy Martin. But then again, that was probably a thing with a lot a lot of players, especially in the 70s.

If you weren’t completely sure whether the beat writers are there to sell tickets for the team, you can be sure now.

You do you, but I think it's better for us to baselessly speculate about what happened on a freewheeling online forum. 😉

I thought that went without saying, so …

Sounds good on paper, anyway.