sabretooth

friend only to the UNDERTAKER!

Yep

And Artie

You want a war you can't win? Are you telling me that 200 of our men against your boy is a no win situation for us? If you send that many, don't forget one thing... What's that? A good supply of body bags.

I don't think I've ever seen anybody get offended by Liston before...so clearly Liston has upped his game. D+L is a proven motivator.

The reality is that most good teams have bullpens made up mostly of spare parts, prospects, and would-be/has-been starters. Successful managers are able make that work most of the time.

For the sake of argument, I propose to take as givens: - as you suggested, there is not a great deal of variation between the in-game decisions of managers (I don't disagree FWIW, but I really don't have a strong opinion on this particular point). - I claim that decisions about who to use in the bullpen is impacted by roster decisions regarding the bullpen (many Managers exercise decisive influence on some particular bullpen roster decisions). - I claim that decisions made regarding the bullpen have a disproportionate impact on high-leverage situations and thus have significant (that is, at least not insignificant) impact on game outcomes. If the above assumptions are correct, I think managers influence on bullpens would have a significant (again, at least not insignificant) impact on game outcomes. I think the *best* managers in terms of managing bullpens (again, including marginal roster/health selection/management as well as in-game decisions) can influence 5+ wins a season, I would not be surprised at 10, versus the *worst* managers. This is a hypothesis that I have stated for years that some strongly disagree with. If anybody has stumbled across relevant research on the above, I would appreciate seeing it.

Yeah, Coles was a good 3bman for one year, 1986, the answers to our prayers, then just like that, he sucked again in 1987, had a nice second half in 1988, then disappeared.

Some good news: the Tigers bullpen is middle of the pack.

You just did

Yeah, I agree with this.

I'm guessing that Gardenhire is a garden-variety traditional manager who will have to use enough advanced stats to be decent/competitive with most of the paint-by-numbers managers out there. I am **hoping** that he has a "way" with handling pitchers, in concert with the new PC, Bosio, where he could do fairly well with the rotation and bullpen....that is to say, maybe pitching will be below average to bad instead of completely horrible. I realize that the organization is focused on tanking, but I believe that they upgraded the Manager position. That's not saying much, I realize.

MLive 'o town sports

There you go, giving impressionable kids bad ideas.