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Jim Leyland picked up the BA Manager of the Year Award. He takes after his boss, Dave Dombrowski who picked up the [...]

When Sean Casey was resgined I indicated I didn’t like the deal, but never really elaborated. My issue is that as nice a guy as Sean Casey is, he just isn’t very good.
Offensively Casey is at best an average hitter. His OPS+ since 2002 looks like this (OPS+ indexes a players OPS against [...]

Jim Leyland has decided to move Lloyd McClendon in to the hitting coach vacancy that was created when Don Slaught resigned. McClendon of course served as bullpen coach last year and spent 4 years as the Pirates hitting coach.
Jeff Jones will be promoted from Toledo to assume the role of bullpen coach. [...]

Don Slaught today resigned as hitting coach citing family concerns. Judging hitting coaches seems to be particularly difficult. You can look at statistics, but it is hard to know how the coach actually impacts it.
In the Tigers case, the bulk of the players performed similar to their career marks. They added some [...]

A collection of observations, links, and items of note from the last week:
Ownership
How many times did we hear this year that the Tigers own the Twins, and the White Sox own the Tigers? Now a popular refrain is that the A’s are a more favorable first round opponent than the Yankees because the Yankees [...]

I had a great time with my fellow bloggers on Tuesday night despite the soggy losing-ness at Comerica Park. I’ll point you to Ian, Brian, and Samara who have done an excellent job wrapping up the night. But if you want one phrase to summarize the conversation it would have to be “What [...]

The Tigers offense was stymied once again for the bulk of the day. After the last 2 days the common mantra was that the Tigers are way to aggressive at the plate and don’t see enough pitches - especially compared to the Yankees. While the Yankees are much more patient - the [...]

He’s leading the team in homers with 23 despite having only 289 at-bats. He’s one of only three Tigers with slugging percentages north of .500 and the only one with an OPS above .900. And yet Marcus Thames can’t get regular playing time on a team that has been struggling to score runs [...]

Justin Verlander Thwarts Running Game
One of my favorite baseball columns is Dave Studemund’s “Ten Things I Didn’t Know Last Week” piece he writes for Hardball Times. This week’s column highlights just how hard it is to run on Justin Verlander. We know about his lightning quick pick-off move that has gunned down 5 [...]

Way back all of 18 days ago I took a look at Brandon Inge’s offensive contributions. Based on what he’d done so far in 2006, the conclusion was Inge had become focused on the flyball. His line drive percentage was only 10.8%, or nearly half of what a decent hitter should have. [...]

Prior to the season I did a series of posts on items or storylines that I thought could be key to the Tigers success. Here at the break, I thought I’d Keep and Eye on my Keeping an Eye on series
Chuck Hernandez and the Pitching Staff
With the best ERA in baseball, I think it [...]

Brandon Inge’s offensive contributions the last few years have supplied me a ton of material. Iin the early years he was very, very bad. But then after a demotion to Toledo in 2003 he came back as a different hitter. He sustained that for 2 years into mid 2005 and had me [...]