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The Tigers’ Dmitri Young noticed the sparse crowd Thursday. “Nobody was in the stands behind us,” Young told the Associated Press. “These people don’t care about us. I’d rather be on the road.” The Tigers announced they sold 16,177 tickets for Thursday, when one ticket was good for both games. The first game appeared to have several thousand no-shows. For the second game, no more than 1,000 fans appeared to remain.

“This one bothered me. I just had a little chat (with the players),” Trammell said. “One thing that really bothers me, and I’ll be consistent with this, is sloppy baseball. I’ll always be a little bitter when we play sloppy.”

Paquette says he likes and respects Trammell, whose operation he says is much more structured than that of interim Luis Pujols last year. But, asked if he wanted out, Paquette said, “In a heartbeat. And they know that. I thought something was going to happen at the end of the spring, but it got shot down.”

As I said, I don’t know what the performance record of someone who had successfully pitched to the score would look like. I am certain, though, that for a pitcher to build his Hall of Fame case on the notion that he did such a thing, he couldn’t have put his team behind in nearly two-thirds of his career starts, and he couldn’t have blown leads once a month throughout his career.

Wednesday night, Bonderman shut down the A’s with eight brilliant innings and this line: 8 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 0 BB, 5 K. He threw in the 90’s with a dominating curveball and when Matt Anderson escaped the ninth, the Tigers had their second win of the season, 4-1. “It was a tremendous feeling,” Bonderman said. “It was especially meaningful because the first call I got in the clubhouse was from Billy Beane, who congratulated me and told me how proud he is to have had me in the organization.”

That said, what I didn’t discover until later is that the Tigers, who lost 106 games last season, were significantly worse than their terrible record. Given their runs scored (575) and allowed (864), we’d have expected the Tigers rack up 112 losses rather than 106. And if you’re trying to predict this year going off last year, you’ll do better if you consider the 2002 Tigers a 112-loss team. And is it really such a stretch to assume that a team with three Rule 5 pitchers and a starting rotation completely populated by question marks might lose eight more games than it did a year ago?

Speaking of (John) Santana, one AL scout said Wilfredo Ledezma, the lefty taken by the Tigers in the Rule V draft from Boston, “is the next Santana. His stuff is really something.” Boston had only 28 players on its 40-man roster when Ledezma was left unprotected.

Manager Alan Trammell and president and general manager Dave Dombrowski can’t completely remake this team three weeks into the season. It’s not possible.
But they have to realize that 1-16 is ridiculous. Something has to be done. Something significant has to be done.

Francona alludes to how Trammell remains the upbeat realist, the same as when he played. Trammell makes no attempt to downplay the Tigers’ record or that they’ve embarked on a new rebuilding project in his first year as manager. But, as when he played, he prepares for every game thoroughly, expecting success.