The Tigers’ Curious Roster
Victor Martinez – four years, $50 million. Joaquin Benoit – three years, $16.5 million. Brad Penny – one year, $3 million. It wasn’t Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez. But by bringing in a solid bat, a set-up man coming off a monster season, and a potential bargain of a back-end starter, the Tigers still made more shiny moves to upgrade their roster than many other teams this off-season.
Detroit, meanwhile, kept its core intact, led by one of the five best hitters in the game in Miguel Cabrera, and (arguably) one of the five best starting pitchers in Justin Verlander. In a division with two solid but still beatable rivals, you’d think Tigers fans should get excited for a possible 2011 playoff run. So why does this roster seem…not quite right?
The first problem is the composition of the lineup. The Tigers are short on left-handed hitters; projected starting catcher Alex Avila is the only lefty in the bunch, with switch-hitting Victor Martinez expected to start at DH and Carlos Guillen a possible option at second base if he ever gets healthy. The lack of left-handed hitters is not necessarily a fatal flaw, if you’ve got right-handed hitters who can handle righties. Cabrera posted a .436 wOBA vs. right-handed pitching in 2010, 4th-best in the majors among qualified batters. A line-up full of Cabreras would do just fine, of course. After that? Check out the Tigers’ other eight projected starters in 2011.
2010 wOBA vs. RHPs
Austin Jackson: .351 (thanks, .429 BABIP vs. RH!)
Magglio Ordonez: .340
Ryan Raburn: .332
Victor Martinez: .306
Alex Avila: .306
Brandon Inge: .303
Jhonny Peralta: .296
Carlos Guillen: .279
A couple of caveats apply. Martinez had never shown anything close to as big a split as he displayed in 2010, and he usually handles righties much better than he did last year (career .357 wOBA vs. RH/.370 wOBA vs. LH). Guillen has also been much better against righties in the past (career .363 wOBA against them) and battled injuries last year.
Still, this looks like a lineup that’s highly exploitable by any decent right-handed starting pitching, or even a manager with a bunch of ROOGYs waiting in the pen. There are no righty-mashers waiting anywhere on the bench or in the minors either.
The second problem is the makeup of Detroit’s defense. The Tigers ranked a solid 8th in MLB last season in team UZR. But the team’s top defenders were all outfielders, injury fill-ins, or Brandon Inge. Any groundball not hit to third base looms as a potential problem for the Tigers this season.
At short, the Tigers will run out Jhonny Peralta, who has cost his teams 28 runs defensively at the position over six-and-a-half seasons. Considering he’s probably the biggest player in the majors likely to start there this year, and was never known for his range even in his early-20s, it’s hard to imagine him not being one of the AL’s biggest defensive liabilities at the position.
At least Peralta has plenty of experience at his position, even if it is bad experience. Guillen appeared in just 47 games last year at second base, netting a -1.5 UZR in that limited sample. That marked the first time he’d manned the deuce in 11 years, several years before the Mariners traded him away for no good reason. Guillen’s also 35 years old, coming off a season-ending knee injury last August, and still banged up enough that Jim Leyland might be looking elsewhere for a second baseman, at least on Opening Day.
Twenty-seven-year-old Will Rhymes and 26-year-old Scott Sizemore could conceivably form a platoon that fares better than Guillen with the glove, and maybe even with the bat. But neither player has a long enough track record to make such improvement a good bet. Throw in Cabrera, whose defense is best described as, “Man, that guy can hit!”, and you’ve got a team that could run into trouble if it were to ever trot out a bunch of groundball pitchers.
Yeah…about that.
Pitcher, Career GB%:
Rick Porcello: 52.2%
Brad Penny: 45.7%
Max Scherzer: 41.1%
Justin Verlander: 40.0%
Phil Coke: 36.6%
So you’ve got one of the most extreme groundballers in the league in Rick Porcello. Then you’ve got Brad Penny, a pitcher who already had strong groundball tendencies, went to work with Dave Duncan in St. Louis, and (in an admittedly small sample size), radically altered his approach by throwing a lot fewer fastballs, a lot more splitters, and induced a lot more groundballs (52.8%) last season.
The rest of the rotation consists of Max Scherzer, a pitcher who induces slightly more grounders than flyballs but struggles mightily with going deep into games and will need all the defensive help he can get; Justin Verlander who…well, he’s Justin Verlander, he’ll probably be fine; and Phil Coke, who induces quite a few more flyballs than grounders, but will also be asked to carry a starter’s workload all season, the first time he’ll assume that role since the first half of the 2008 season. In Double-A.
Again, these aren’t necessarily fatal flaws. But a lineup that looks somewhat promising from afar could underachieve, perhaps doubly so in high-leverage situations against tough righties. And the starting rotation, which on paper appears intriguing in its own right, could yield worse-than-expected results thanks to 3/4 of a leaky infield defense.
When the Tigers look back on the 2011 season, they might be happy with with the big things they did right — but regret the little things they did wrong.
“whose defense is best described as, “Man, that guy can hit!”,”
Awesome :D
Ignoring the issues with UZR, Cabrera’s UZR over the last three years wasn’t as bad as Ryan Howard’s, Paul Konerko’s, or Prince Fielder’s, none of whom seem to get the flak that Cabrera gets. Sure, he’s bad, but not historically bad.
He was actually in the positive in 2009 wasnt he?
And just slightly below average last year…
He is not as bad as people make out… Do not forget he was a 3B and a LF at one time…
The only year his defense was bad at 1B was 2008, his first year playing the position in his life…
ALSO, Guillen is not going to be ready to start the season, SO it will be Sizemore or Rhymes manning the keystone…
So, basically Peralta is the only bad infielder… And on days Porcello pitches, the Tigers can give him a day off and play Santiago or Worth at SS… Leyland has already mentioned this during last weekends Tigerfest…
Not sure why you chose 2010 wOBA against righties but career GB% for the starting pitchers. I think career wOBA would have provided a better picture for how the lineup will handle right handed pitching. You mention Martinez and Guillen having much better career numbers but so do Ordonez and Peralta.
Ordonez: .376
Peralta: .322
Defensively – Guillen wont play more than 50 games at second and Will Rhymes (if he gets the spot) is adequate. While Cabrera doesn’t have a great glove his UZR over three seasons since being moved to first is only -6.7 (not exactly cover your eyes bad) and was positive in 2009. The glaring hole is clearly Peralta at short. This move might haunt them but there weren’t alot of shortstop options in the market or on the farm. Also when Peralta was signed Gallaraga was slated as the fifth starter and he is more of a flyball pitcher.
Defense and left handed hitting are definitely the weaknesses on this team but if the team doesn’t succeed it will probably be because their strengths aren’t better than the strengths of the white sox or twins.
The splits against RHPs worry me as a Tigers fan but I don’t think the defense is going to be as big of issue as you make it out to be. Recent reports are that Guillen isn’t going to be ready by the start of the year, and more than likely wont be ready till May and with the injury problems he has had lately I would be shocked if he made it through the rest of the season without another trip to the DL. So I would be shocked if he ends up seeing considerable reps at 2B throughout the course of the season.
If he doesn’t then it will go to Sizemore, Rhymes or Worth. According to scouting reports on Sizemore when he was in the minors he was rated as an average defender.(he didn’t look that great last year but he was also coming off an ankle injury so that could have something to do with it) Rhymes didn’t look terrible in limited time last year and Worth is a plus defender and possibly plus plus at 2B.
Cabrera isn’t as bad with the glove as many people think either. He has a bad reputation because he was terrible at 3rd and he does make some errors but his range at first is passable. His UZR was bad last year but many people question the accuracy of it for first baseman. I don’t think he’s a plus defender there but I don’t think he will kill you there either.
Peralta is another guy that has a terrible rep defensively but if you’re going to go by UZR there he hasn’t been bad the last 3 years. He’s posted a -1.1 +2.6 and -.3 the past years. Again not great but not terrible either.
So assuming Guillen doesn’t play much I think they’ll have a plus defender at 3rd, an average or plus defender at 2B depending on who it is, and 2 below average defenders at SS and 1B but neither I think are the statues that you are making them out to be. Nobody’s going to confuse them with a premier defensive infield but I don’t think there going to be bad enough to cost them many games.(Again though I’m assuming Guillen isn’t going to play much, if he does then all bets are off)
Plus as you pointed out they don’t have many groundball heavy pitchers. For Porcello’s starts they may even start the plus defenders Santiago and Worth at SS and 2B too. I believe Leyland went to the premium IF defensive lineup last year in a few of his starts and it worked out well so I wouldn’t be surprised if he did the same this year.
Oh and as far as Scherzer goes, I know it’s a small sample size but he was going deeper in games the last 4 months of the season so maybe he’ll continue that trend this season.
With all this said I still put them behind the Twins and White Sox but it wouldn’t surprise me if they won the division either. After all I believe they have spent more time in 1st place the past 5 years than any other team in the division despite majority of people picking them to finish 3rd or worse every time so just about every year they are right in the thick of things.(with the exception of 08 when they were the favorites according to most people and bombed)
Scherzer doesn’t struggle mightily going deep into games anymore. he averaged 6.7 innings per start after he came back up last year. Verlander averaged 6.8.
Good write-up, Jonah. The Tigers have been pretty severely right-handed for quite a while now, actually. That’s one reason I think we’ll see Brennan Boesch, he of the horrific second half last year, get a serious chance to stick around. I know he clobbered lefties as a left-hander last year, but you don’t see too many reverse-split lefties, so that’s probably going to change.
As for the starting staff, I think it’s fair to call Porcello and Penny the only likely groundballers. Is the GB% of the starting staff as a whole really that far above the league average? I honestly don’t know the average GB% in the majors to answer that. It certainly won’t hurt having two K machines at the top of the rotation, but, as you say, Porcello’s really not in an ideal situation with Peralta and the second baseman du jour behind him.
Oh, and are there any other teams in the league that project to play a right-hander a majority of the time at every position…. except catcher?!?! That seems pretty unusual.
Among the 92 pitchers who qualified for the ERA title last year, the median ground ball percentage was 45.4%. Using the numbers you provide, the Tigers rotation consists of 1 groundball pitcher, 3 flyball pitchers, and 1 guy (Penny) in the middle. The argument that poor infield defense would have an abnormally large impact on this team because of its groundball pitchers seems far-fetched.
Regarding the theorized poor infield defense, Leyland will almost definitely use Ramon Santiago or Danny Worth (both + defenders at 2B and SS) to protect late leads, mitigating the drawback of Peralta and Guillen’s poor defense. Inge is also enough of a plus defensively that the overall infield defense shouldn’t fall far below average.
Peralta is pretty clearly a poor defensive shortstop and the Tigers are far from a flawless team. However, given that the rotations gives up a slightly above average rate of flyballs, the bullpen appears to be a plus that should compensate for short outings by starters, and strong defensive replacements exist to protect late leads, it seems like you drew a conclusion before running the analysis as opposed to doing things the other way around.
I’m only critical because I’ve been a fan of your work in the past and have come to expect better. I’d greatly appreciate a response or an explanation if you think I’m off-base.
The average GB rate of the five starters you have listed above (43%) would have been almost exactly in the middle of the league last year.
And even if it weren’t, I think the pitch-to-your defense angle is always overblown, although I’d be happy if someone could point me to an article showing that it’s a big deal. This supposedly was the fatal flaw of the Twins last year (bad outfield D + fly-ball pitchers = !!!). But the seperation between the heaviest ground-ball generating starters and least is only about 10 percentage points, and therefore only about 5 percentage points from the mean. So even if you could somehow go from the most extreme fly-ball generating starting staff in baseball (~50% GB) to just average (~45%), your five-percentage-point reduction is only netting you a 10% reduction in the overall problem of having a bad infield.
To illustrate, the worst infield in baseball is going to be about a -50 UZR (loss of about 5 wins). So even if you have the extremely unlikely duel extremes of the very worst infield and the most ground-ball-generating staff, you only save yourself about half a win by somehow reworking your staff to include an average amount of ground-ball pitchers and giving your infield 10% fewer chances to screw up. If you’re not working from the absolute extremes, e.g., if you’re Detroit, the impact is basically negligible, and certainly not worth making personnel decisions over.
It concerns me re: Penny (who may now be a different pitcher if he carries forth his 2010 approach) and Porcello. Verlander is Verlander. And Coke has problems of his own.
I’m not saying the Tigers are the biggest GB-chucking team ever. I’m saying that of the pitchers who aren’t either aces no matter what, or big, big question marks no matter what, it worries me. Bringing in a backup in the 8th inning does not cancel out the potential problems faced in the first 7 innings.
Again, no fatal flaw. Just enough to give me a little pause if I’m a Tigers fan. And the lineup issues are a bigger problem, which is why I listed them first.
I do appreciate the very stringent peer review, though, and will keep working to tighten up the language I use in every article to say exactly, unambiguously, what I want to say. (I.e. “The lineup might struggle vs. some right-handers. And Porcello and Penny could be a bit worse than expected. Which could cost the Tigers 2-3-4 games in the standings. So they very well could be good, but still just miss making the playoffs as a result.”)
The real issue is that, as a team, their players just aren’t as good as the players on the Twins and ChiSox.
Doesn’t really matter if they hit right or left handed. The Tigers could have all 9 starters with wOBA’s that are equal in regards to vLHP & vRHP … and their roster would still have concerns. The Tigers 2011 lineup is going to look like the Cards lineup before Holliday and after Edmonds (in other words, one dominant hitter and nothing else scary).
The subpar defense is a concern basically no matter who is pitching, unless it’s a high K guy (Verlander).
Simply put, the Tigers just are not as talented as MIN and CWS, and there’s not really a sneaky platoon way to overcome that. But, that makes a pretty short and obvious article. *grin*
I am glad you’re writing here (heard ya on the podcast the other day), and I look forward to reading the book. I also understand that you guys are expected to do advanced statistical analysis regardless of topic. I’m not criticizing, just wanted to point out that DET’s #1 problem is they are simply not as talented as the other 2 teams they are trying to pass.
I’d say their RHB and RHP staff is a problem in that they have 18 games against the Twins. The Twins finished 2010 with the 2nd best wRC+ against RHP and may have 4 RHP in their rotation. The Twins/White Sox/Tigers are all tightly bunched in the 85-88 win range based on Cairo projections. So head to head matchups may very well decide the division.
Scherzer is a high K guy too
If DET had the same quality hitters, just evenly divided into LHBs and RHBs, their offense would still have the same overall problem. If MIN was running 3 Lefty Starters out there, their offense would still have the same problem. They lack overall talent. That’s my point.
I don’t expect DET to bust up Liriano, Buehrle, Danks, and Thornton … and I don’t expect DET to be overwhelmed by MIN starting RHPs.
I don’t expect that because of the difference in the overall quality of talent.
MIN is very good against RHPs because their best hitters are LHBs. However, if a team is throwing average to below lefties against them, they likely are not bad against those lefties.
In 2010, DET was 10-8 vMIN and 9-9 vCWS.
You would thought that MIN would have owned DET last year due to MIN featuring a righty-dominant rotation and DET not having a single LH starter and the Twins’ best hitters being LHPs.
The ALC is going to be the same ol Central, the 3 teams are basically going to be even, and injuries will determine who wins the division. At this point, I hope it’s someone other than MIN, so I can have some intrigue into the wild card round of the playoffs.
It’s tempting to think ‘flexibility’ is a euphemism for ‘a lot of bad players,’ but Detroit actually does have some. Peralta will never see time at short if there’s a 1-run lead to protect, for example. I think it’s easy to get cynical about Detroit’s chances because, like Jonah kind of alluded to, you can’t look at their roster and find a complete player. There’s no Tulos, Longos or Hamiltons to be found. But Leyland does actually have some flexibility with the roster — Rhymes/Worth/Santiago are all + defenders, and aside from the three-ring Raburn circus in left, the outfield will be adequately patrolled.
What’s really gonna hurt this team is Austin Jackson’s gradual float back down to Earth. Pretty much everyone in the Tigers’ organization thinks he’s Jesus.
“What’s really gonna hurt this team is Austin Jackson’s gradual float back down to Earth. Pretty much everyone in the Tigers’ organization thinks he’s Jesus.” *Citation needed.
“What’s really gonna hurt this team is Austin Jackson’s gradual float back down to Earth. Pretty much everyone in the Tigers’ organization thinks he’s Jesus.”
Why is he going to come back down to Earth? I know he had a lofty BABIP last year so everybody is assuming that’s going to go down but who’s to say that his K% isn’t going to go down in his 2nd year or his BB% up? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a guy improved in those aspects his 2nd year.
Now I’m not saying that’s going to happen but the people that are saying that Jackson is going to collapse are just assuming that his BABIP plummets but he doesn’t get any better in any other area. I don’t think that’s particularly fair. I can’t find any other projections for him except Bill James but he projects him to have a higher woBA next year than he did last year.
I agree with Matt – everyone is in such a hurry to regress his BABiP but then ignore regressing hit K%… its very frustrating as a Tigers fan. We understand Jackson may have been lucky on balls in play last year but I would love to see an article on Fangraphs mention his name without BABiP being mentioned in the next sentence.
I’m not afraid to admit that I’m assuming those BABIP chickens are going to come home to roost. I think he’ll probably improve as a player, as most younger players do, but it’s hard to ignore those kinds of percentages on balls in play.
The Fielding Bible has Rhymes as a +8 in only 412 defensive innings last year. I know it’s a small sample size, but extrapolated over an entire season this would put him right near the top of the second base leaderboard.
The team’s starting pitching is probably going to suck, bad defense or not. Everything I’ve read on their rotation talks about Scherzer as some sort of established All-Star, even though he’s never put together a complete, solid season. Yes, he looked really good during the last half of 2010, but how many teams are relying on a guy who had to be sent to the minors last year as their #2 man in the rotation?
Okay, let’s say Scherzer works out. Porcello doesn’t miss bats, and as yet he doesn’t have a pitch with which to put batters away.
Okay, though it’s unlikely, let’s say Porcello starts to put it together. Phil Coke has been a reliever for a while now, and the Tigers are relying on that transition to go better than it almost always does. He’ll likely falter, and then his replacement is a 20-year old A-Ball pitcher or some guy having a lucky year in Toledo. Adam Dunn and Joe Mauer will crush that guy.
But let’s say Coke doesn’t falter, and he’s 2011′s C.J. Wilson. Then we’ve got Penny, who’s spotty-at-best and very ugly. Okay, I guess his ugliness has nothing to do with his pitching, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
So yeah, it all of that stuff works out, or 4/5 of it anyway, you might have yourself a pretty good roatation. Now all we need to do is leave it to our star first baseman, our shiny new catcher (actually, he’s 31, but he’s still pretty good), our 37-year old, immobile right-fielder, and our probably-vastly-overacheiving center-fielder a bunch of very problematic starters to victory. If most of all of that goes well, this tea has a chance to win 88 games and lose to the Red Sox in the first round of the playoffs.
This happens with the Tigers almost every year now. “They’re going to be really good if 9 out of these 10 things work out!” It’s ridiculous. Meanwhile, the White Sox and the Twins, who everyone sees as having relatively mediocre rosters, get by and make adjustments because none of their problems are huge and unworkable. They make adjustments. Kenny Williams makes moves, and the Twins have a seemingly endless supply of serviceable replacements for just about everything, due to their excellence with player development.
Just like last year, the Tigers are a .500 team. Maybe a little better, maybe a little worse, but this is not how you win a baseball season. A couple of stars and then a crapload of window dressing. It’s getting boring.
Go Tigers!
This post made me cry. I’ve been screaming this general point all off-season and most Tigers fans have come to be annoyed by me for it. I love my team, but you’ve absolutely identified the problem. Somewhere along the road (starting with the 2009 season) Dave Dombrowski embraced “Hope and prayer” style general management”
* – IF Carlos Guillen comes back healthy and IF Adam Everett can post a .600 OPS and IF bringing up Rick Porcello from SINGLE A AFTER ONE YEAR IN THE PROS works out, well then we’ll be dominant!
^ Words heard in 2009.
Every team has questions. Every single team. As a supporter of a single team it is easy to get lost in that. However, it surely does seem that the last three years the Tigers have constructed their roster in such a way that, as Oakland Dan suggests, they always have a roster that one can easily construct a narrative for that would make them contenders. Yet that narrative always involves faith that a number of either unlikely things will happen, or that they won’t have anything abnormally unlucky happen (i.e. freak injury).
This year’s version of this game is:
* – Hey, if Scott Sizemore bounces back and hits like he did in the minors, and…..
…..If Alex Avila finally puts it together and……
…..If 37 year old Magglio Ordonez, whose power has been declining for two years, doesn’t finally completely fall apart this year and……
…..34 year old Brandon Inge, who has recently had knee surgeries (that possibly could sap athleticism) and who has declined from an otherworldly defender to a merely above average one and who has always been a below average offensive player, can make himself a 2 win player at 3B and……
……30 year old Jhonny Peralta somehow plays passable SS defense, and…..
…….The Phil Coke experiment works out and……
…….Austin Jackson doesn’t have a BABIP regression and……..
………Brad Penny stays healthy for half the season and…….
……..Rick Porcello actually pitches well for a complete season — Or even decently, then hey, this team looks like it can win a low 90s total of games.
If roughly 75% of these things don’t happen, they’ll be a .500 team again. This is how it has been for three years in a row now. As Oakland Dan said, it’s getting old. He also is accurate in nailing down the fact that the Tigers don’t have any complete two-way players, though Austin Jackson could potentially be one and I’m not as down on Cabrera’s defense as others, so I’d probably make him one too. As an outfielder, MAYBE Raburn. For these last three years the Tigers have been full of players who can hit but not field (Damon, Thames, Ordonez) or who can field but not hit (Inge, Everett, Laird, Worth). Here we are again, on the dawn of a new season, and another team with 99 problems (but a #1 starter ain’t one).
‘Here we are again, on the dawn of a new season, and another team with 99 problems (but a #1 starter ain’t one).’
This was awesome.
“…the Tigers don’t have any complete two-way players…”
This is really the crux of the issue (in my head anyway), on the everyday-player side of things anyway. Every team has some holes in their rotation or bullpen that they’ll need to contend with, but I don’t see a whole lot of teams who fancy themselves as contenders who have as many problems on offense or in the field as the Tigers.
Outside of Cabrera, every other position has a serious question-mark, including Jackson.
If even one thing goes wrong (in any of eight different places on the field), their lineup is going to be held together by duct tape and AAAA players. Guillen never gets back to 100%, VMart is too big a liability to catch even 25% of the time, Rhymes/Sizemore can’t manage to hold down 2B, Inge’s knees don’t hold out, Peralta’s glove becomes too costly, Boesch/Raburn can’t manage a platoon in LF, Magglio’s age catches up with him, etc, etc, etc…. in my head at least three of these things are going to happen during the season, either all at once or spread out across the entire calendar. The chances of them all being avoided for 6 months is next to nil, and when any two of them happen at once it’s going to be a HUGE problem.
As a Tiger fan, I think the team is flawed in too many ways to win 90+ games, and while the Twins/White Sox aren’t great, I think one of them is likely to win 90+ in 2011.
The thing I won’t understand about the offseason is that they make the moves for Martinez and Benoit, which were “these are going to hurt us in a couple years, but we’re going for it now moves”, and then never backed them up with that one other big splash move that said “I see!!!! This is a division championship caliber team now.”
This season in many ways now rests (outside of the obvious “Verlander and Cabrera can’t get hurt stuff) on how the young players progress this year. They need Avila to make a huge jump as a LH bat at the bottom of the order. They need Sizemore to grab the 2b job, catch the ball, and hit to his capabilities. They need Jackson to figure out a way to improve at the plate, even if his numbers won’t be better because of it, since his BABIP made him look better than he was last year. And they badly need Porcello to break out with a better K rate because of improved secondary stuff.
All of those things are possible individually. The chances of all of them happening in 2011 are not good, though, which is why I just don’t see the Tigers being better than Minnesota in particular.
They still won 81 games last year, with Willis and Bonderman staring ??% of their games…
They still won 81 games last year, with Laird, Everett, and a floundering Boesch getting ??% of the teams AB’s…
Do not forget these things…
and for all the questions in their rotation, what about Blackburn, Slowey, Perkins, Floyd, E. Jackson, Peavy??? Are these guys no ???marks themselves???
Yes, those bad things happened to the Tigers. However, they also got insane production out of Scherzer the last four months that he’s not a sure bet to repeat, better than expected production out of Maggs while he was healthy, and a performance from Austin Jackson that he’s going to have to really improve just to be able to repeat.
The Tigers also won some of Willis’ starts despite how poorly he pitched, and got two months out of Boesch that were MVP caliber with the bat that balanced out the horrendous performance of the final 2-3 months.
The reality with the Tigers is that they’re going to need a ton of improvement from the young guys to go from the 81-85 win range to get to the 87-92 win range. I don’t think Martinez alone (especially if he’s going to DH 80-100 games instead of catching) does that. If you told me Detroit would win 87 games in 2011, I’d say that’s not improbable. If you told me they’d win 92 games, I’d say you’re being very optimistic. It’s possible, but I just don’t think you can predict them to be that good until we see guys like Avila, Sizemore, Jackson and Porcello show it consistently.
Precisely Mike, you’ve hit the nail on the head. 100% agreement.
The Tigers need a farm system that doesn’t suck. It produced the magic beans necessary to get Miggy, but that’s about the only nice thing I can say for the last few years. Go back for enough and you have Granderson and Verlander, I suppose.
I think Dombrowski is a relatively shrewd trader and generally makes good free agent decisions (his penchant for overpaying relievers is the exception), but he clearly has drafted poorly. You need reasonable quality from your 20th to 25th players, and the team hasn’t had that for quite a while now.
All that said, fingers crossed for a surprising 2011. Although losing it in August and September due to depth issues is annoying, it’s better than being out of it by June.
Yeah there drafting hasn’t been great. I believe Granderson is the only position player that has really amounted to anything in the majors that Dombrowski has drafted since he’s been with the Tigers, and that includes players that he traded away.(If I’m forgetting anybody let me know but I can’t think of any one)
Despite this though, and the fact that they haven’t signed many FA’s(I believe Martinez was the first multi year contract to a position player since Ordonez in 04) they have remained competitive which is kinda crazy. You would think a team that routinely has a bad farm system according to the experts, and doesn’t spend alot in free agency would completely suck but that hasn’t been the case with the Tigers. They must have gotten more out of trades than any team in baseball.
The Tigers haven’t signed too many FA position players to big deals. First Pudge in 2004, then Ordonez and Polanco in 2005 (while stealing Guillen via trade the same year), and then, unless my memory is off, Sheffield in 2007.
They actually traded for Polanco and Sheffield(Gave up Urbina for Polanco and prospects headlined by Humberto Sanchez for Sheffield). Since the Pudge signing in 03 they’ve signed him, Ordonez, Kenny Rogers, Valverde and now Benoit and Martinez to multi year deals. That’s not very many especially considering 3 of those came from 05 and prior.
Forgot about Urbina for Polanco. That was kinda nice.
“Man the deuce” may be the best new expression for playing second base. It also manages to sound somewhat vulgar.
Funny how Dave Duncan is given credit for Penny throwing his splitter, when Russell Martin was saying Penny is more successful when throwing his split years ago.