Tom Brookens is the Tigers’ new first base coach!

(Is this a step toward a line-of-succession for after Uncle Smokey retires?)

I, too, am sad to see Marcus go. I’m not saying it’s a move I don’t agree with, but sad none the less. Best of luck to him!

Also, I take no pleasure in the Yankees winning, I hate the Yankees! lol

Haven’t seen the article but will pull it up right now and take a look…

Hmm, yeah an interesting article indeed. One thing too that he didn’t mention is that MLB does a GREAT job of facilitating parity in the league, which the NFL does not do. For example, teams like the Lions that have the #1 overall pick have to pay a ridiculous fortune for that pick, whereas that money penalty doesn’t exist in baseball. When you have a salary cap it makes it even worse for the Lions, cause not only do we pay out an unfair amount for a prospect, but a % of the funds left remaining is then unfavorably lower. That’s not an excuse for the Lions and the other terrible teams to be awful year in and year out, but it’s still a different dynamic. If the NFL wanted to have stronger parity, they really should give the worst teams some more help by having a rookie pay scale and thus allowing the salary cap concept and benefits to the worst teams to coincide properly to keep more balance.

But of course he is right on his perspective about the dominance of the Yankees not being fully appreciated because of the nature of the game and the design of the probabilities of events that are required to win. These are very different sports, in football if you are the better player, you can will yourself to consistently win if you keep your focus and utilize your talents correctly. In baseball you have less control. As good as ARod may be, he can’t automatically make a play at will to the same degree a RB or QB can. He’s stuck at gambling on a low-odds chance of succeeding.

I would say one way to look at it is to compare it to poker. Take the World Series for example. You have 8,000 players, yet TONS of people who are regarded as the greatest players in the world get knocked off. If you were to rank the top 100 or 500 players in the world on poker skill, well you wouldn’t see them finishing in those respective spots, you see them dropping out all over the place, because they can’t control their own destiny just on skill alone. No matter how ingeniously they decide to invest their chips, they are always facing pretty sizable percentages of having bad luck to destroy their investment. But now if this is the WS of tennis, the top 100 and 500 players in an 8,000 man tournament would make it much farther than the poker players would, because there’s not so much statistical chance outside of your control and you can hone your skill to victory with greater consistency.
(I was in the WS of poker this year by the way, but left on an early exit because a person called a huge bet I made w/o proper pot odds and lucked out and pulled his straight to win. He actually even admitted that he realized the mistake in his calculation and spoke too quickly when he called the bet, but nevertheless I no longer had the chips and he doubled his chance, that’s just poker for ya)

Another thing I would like to personally know which I will never truly know, is how smart are the Yankees with tactical decisions? I wonder if they are highly efficient there or not. Cause with the money they spend and the amount of talent they have, they could still produce the win totals that they have even if they used what I consider to be bad tactical decisions. In other words, it is possible that Leyland could manage the Yankees to similar accolades. I watch just about every Tigers game there is, but I’m not watching every Yankees game, so I can’t assess the quality of the tactical decisions of any team as well as I can for the Tigers, thus I don’t know if the Yankees should have won even more games than they did or not. If they were making countless errors, it is conceivable that they could have 5 or so extra wins on top of what they had. I guestimated that the Tigers gaffed about 10 games this year, which is unusually high even for a bad managed team, but since the Yankees have a smaller portion of losses overall, any mismanagement to the same degree would cost them fewer losses as their excessive talent will protect them from a portion of those mistakes.

I also like how this writer periodically capitalizes certain words for EMPHASIS just like I do. LOL