The Detroit Tiger Weblog

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  • Previews and Predictions

    As we’re entering the final stretch of spring training, the 2007 predictions are starting to come with increasing regularity. Here’s what today revealed.

    Simulatin’

    The Replacement Level Yankee Weblog ran a series of Diamond Mind Simulations. He ran 1000 seasons using each of PECOTA, Marcel, Chone, Diamond Mind and ZiPS. I summarized how the tigers fared below:

    I think it is safe to say that the ZiPS projections look to be the most realistic – kidding of course. The truth of the matter is, and I’ve been thinking this as I read all sorts of projections, all teams in the Central not from Kansas City have a legitimate shot at taking the division.

    The composite of all 4 simulations have the Tigers 3rd in the division with 87.4 wins behind Cleveland with 88.3 and Minnesota 89.2. The sims weren’t quite as favorable to the White Sox with a projected 75.9 wins.

    Sports Illustrated

    A less stat/computer/geeky preview from the folks at SI have the Tigers coming in 2nd in the Central and ranked as the 5th best team in the American League. The scouting report is pretty standard citing the Tigers balance as a strength, and injury & last year’s pitcher workload as concerns.

    Cranking Win Shares

    While not a prediction system per se, the Baseball Crank takes a look at Established Win Share Levels for the AL Central. EWSL attempts to quantify the talent level on a team by looking at past performance and adjusting for age. The Tigers rank favorably because they are pretty solid top to bottom. The downside is that because of the age of the key players, the age adjustments are most unfavorable.

  • Catching up and cleaning up

    Things have been lighter for the last week on the blog. Part of that is a lack of terribly interesting news coming out of Lakeland – which is a good thing. This offseason I’ve been trying to compensate for these lulls by cranking through some analysis. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing, I just have nothing to show for it yet. I hope the benefit will come once the season starts. All of this of course is irrelevant to you, but I still wanted to write it anyways. Mostly because I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time on the blog, but with very little actual content to show for it yet.

    Also I want to apologize for some of the comments that came through this weekend. Late Saturday night and into Sunday a bunch of spam comments advertising the sorts of things you don’t expect to see on a Tiger website got through the spam filter. I took them down as quickly as I could, but I apologize if anyone was offended.

    Moving on to all the stuff I haven’t been writing about…

    The other LOOGY

    Edward Campusano seemed to be gaining more and more of a lock on the job with each appearance. That is until he left with elbow tenderness. Never a good sign. While it seems that elbows are more fixable than shoulders, those fixes often require surgery after rest fails to clear up the problem. There’s been no further word so it’s hard to comment on the extent of it, but anecdotally speaking these things just never seem to go away on their own.

    With that I was prepared to write how Bobby Seay probably had the best shot at that last bullpen spot. Seay has been quite good this spring allowing 1 run in 8 2/3 innings with a 7:2 strikeout to walk ratio.

    But then Jason Beck writes that Leyland sounds likes he is comfortable going just with Ledezma – recognizing that Joel Zumaya, Fernando Rodney, and Todd Jones will be the guys called on to get the critical outs.

    If Leyland truly is okay with one lefty, the best bet is probably an option-less Chad Durbin over Zach Miner who still has 2 options left.
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  • Tigers announce 10 more cuts

    The Tigers optioned Mike Rabelo and Brent Clevlen to AAA Toledo. There was some question (at least in my mind) whether they would have Clevlen repeat AA given his struggles last year. I wonder if this is any indication that they may be moving Cameron Maybin to Erie to start the year.

    The Tigers assigned Craig Dingman, Dennis Tankersley, Joey Eischen, Brent Dlugach, Mike Hessman, Kevin Hooper, Cameron Maybin and Brandon Watson to minor league camp.

    Don’t read too much into Maybin. He wasn’t going to make the team, and it’s about getting him more playing time at this point.

  • Tigers DVD Giveaway

    detroit-tigers-ae-dvd.jpg

    On Friday I wrote about a new DVD featuring the Tigers World Championship teams from 1945, 1968, and 1984. The folks from A & E have provided me with 3 copies that I in turn get to give to you. To do this I’m running 2 contests. You are eligible to enter both contests, so you have a couple chances to win.

    1. Final cut

    I will be giving away one DVD to the reader who guesses who the Tigers last cut of spring training will be. Just pick one Tiger and if he is the last to leave the big team, you could win. Now a couple notes:

    • If there are multiple people who correctly select the last cut, the winner will be determined via a random drawing
    • If there are multiple players cut on the same day, which represent the final cuts, each player will be considered a correct player. If this results in multiple correct entries, again we’ll go the drawing route
    • Being placed on the disabled list does not constitute being cut.

    Use the Contact Form to submit your best guess. Because there is a time implication on this one, all entries must be received by noon ET on Tuesday March 20th. One entry per person please. The winner will be announced when the roster is trimmed to 25.

    2. Tiger Memories

    In this contest I will select 2 winners. This one will require a little more effort and I want you to write about your memories from a Tigers World Series victory. Pick one of the World Series’ featured in the DVD (45/68/84) and tell me about your experience. What I want to know are things like me how old you were, where you were, what you were doing at the time and why it was special to you.

    The judging of this will be completely subjective and done primarily by me (but I reserve the right to consult some other judges). I’ll be looking for stories that are interesting, touching, well written, etc.

    All entries should be less than 300 words. Again, use the contact form to submit your entry. Entries for contest 2 need to be submitted by noon ET on Saturday March 24th. I do plan on posting the winners, so you expect that your entry could end up here. The winners will be announced on March 27th.

    Please enter a valid email address on the form, otherwise I won’t be able to contact you if you win.

    Now if you just want to go ahead and buy one, you can find them at A & E’s online store. If you order before March 28th you will receive a bonus DVD – Modern Marvels Baseball Parks.

  • Game Thread: Devil Rays at Tigers & Tigers at Braves

    It’s is split squad action today. It also marks the first telecast of the year on FSN which will have the D-rays and Tigers. Meanwhile, WXYT will have the radio of the Tigers and Braves game.

    Nate Robertson will be the starter in the Devil Rays game and Zach Miner will start against the Braves.

    Unfortunately, I’ll be unable to watch this afternoon but feel free to comment here.

    Game Times 1:05pm

  • Rotation set – Bondo on Opening Day

    Finally, some real news! Jason Beck reports that Jeremy Bonderman will be the Opening Day starter. He’ll be followed by Kenny Rogers, Justin Verlander, Nate Robertson, and Mike Maroth. While I don’t think the rotation will matter a great deal, this is the same order I would have picked (not that Leyland consulted me). I like the alternating, not only of the handedness, but the styles as well.

  • Review: Detroit Tigers Vintage Films DVD from A & E

    detroit-tigers-ae-dvd.jpg

    A & E television has been building quite the library of baseball DVDs over the last couple years. Looking to continue this trend and capitalize on the resurgence of the Detroit Tigers, they recently released a DVD featuring footage from the Tigers 3 post WWII World Series victories.

    Now none of the content is actually “new.” This isn’t a comphrehensive look at the Tigers World Series victories. What it is is a compilation of the World Series specials that are produced each year. However, good luck trying to find them anywhere else, and now they are all available on on DVD.
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  • Making their own luck

    In my last post I pointed out that Kenny Rogers, Nate Robertson, and Justin Verlander were the beneficiaries of some combination of good defense and good luck. Basically I was trying to point out that while all 3 had solid seasons, there were some breaks that were beyond their control that went their way. But I as thought a little more, specifically about gold glover Rogers, how much did the pitchers help their own cause?

    Fortunately, Pinto has already published the individual PMR numbers for pitchers. By subtracting the pitcher’s contribution from the total team’s defense when he was on the mound, we can see who was leaning on the guys behind him the most.

    The order of the list gets shuffled. Kenny Rogers accounted for a third of the plays above expected. And Justin Verlander had pretty much neutral defense behind him. Meanwhile, Nate Robertson got the most help.

    In the comments to the other post Brian questioned why some pitchers consistently exceed or lag their fielding independent stats. The pitcher’s ability to help his own cause may – emphasis on may – in some cases be a part of the reason.

  • Luck of the Pitcher

    I think it is pretty common knowledge at this point, that in large part the Tigers pitchers results exceeded their performance last year. If you subscribe to the DiPS theory, that pitchers have limited ability to control whether balls in play turn into hits, then in general the Tigers pitchers got by without striking out a lot of guys because the defense was so good behind them. Part of me wondered it the pitchers still deserved some of the credit. That perhaps they were allowing more “fieldable” balls, thus having better defense behind them.

    Well David Pinto at Baseball Musings has answered the question.
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  • Blog Grandy Blog

    I’m really enjoying Curtis Granderson’s new blog.

    I particularly enjoyed yesterday’s post where after talking about his NCAA bracket, he wrote about the refinements to his swing:

    Even with all the March Madness going on with college hoops we are still working very hard on the field, and I’m still trying to iron out my new swing and approach this spring training. Basically what I’m trying to do is make my swing as simple as possible and eliminate as much wasted movement as possible. Since college I’ve always been different than most hitters in terms of my stance, but it worked for me. Over time I started running into problems when timing issues and consistency from day to day. So working with Lloyd McClendon (new hitting coach), we’ve tried to simplify my swing and make it as normal to a major league swing as possible. The idea behind it is that on good or bad days, if I can keep it simple, it’s easier to correct mistakes. It will hopefully also help my approach with two strikes and hopefully make it easier to not only put the ball in play, but hit the ball hard with two strikes.

    And really, it’s worth clicking through to the post to see the picture alone.

    I didn’t know at first if he was the one actually updating it (not that he isn’t capabable, just that it takes time doing this blogging thing), but after the last few posts it definitely seems to be his voice. With a little more downtime this spring, he’s been updating every few days with rather lengthy posts. The fact that the updates coincide with days he doesn’t travel to away games lends even more credence to the fact that it is his voice.

    Other Stuff

    • If you haven’t seen it mentioned on the other Tigers blogs, Ian of Sweaty Men Endeavors, is the new chief blogger at the Tigers SB Nation site Bless You Boys. Ian is awesomely funny and writes the best news aggregation posts in the business. Stop by and say hi at his new gig.
    • Good luck if you entered into the drawing for Opening Day tickets. You’re one of 158,000 who will be hoping to snag one of the thousand or so tickets (including SRO) being made available. The Tigers season ticket sales are up to 18,300 full season equivalents – from 9500 last year – and they’ve sold out of the 27 game packages. You’ll hear by Friday if you won. Tickets are still available for the second game of the year on April 4th when the ring ceremony will take place. That might not be a bad consolation prize. But if you really want to get to Opening Day, tickets are up to $157.50 on StubHub.

  • Tigers make first cuts

    The Tigers trimmed 8 players from big league camp: righthanded pitchers Jordan Tata and Virgil Vasquez to Triple A Toledo, righthanded pitchers Eulogio De La Cruz and Kyle Sleeth to Double A Erie and lefthanded pitcher Andrew Miller to Single A Lakeland. Additionally, the club assigned righthanded pitcher Jair Jurrjens and catchers Gabe Johnson and Dusty Ryan to minor league camp.

    And as expected, Miller will be starting the year in Lakeland and will likely head to Erie when the weather warms up.

  • Spring stats of note – pitching

    Similar to yesterdays look at interesting offensive stats, now we’ll look at the pitchers. Also like yesterday, I’m not drawing real conclusions or deriving meaning, just making observation.

    Beginning at the end

    The big 3 at the back end of the Tigers bullpen are off to a good start. Joel Zumaya, Fernando Rodney, and Todd Jones have combined to allow one run (a solo homer allowed by Rodney) in 10 2/3 innings. Most impressive is the 13:2 strikeout to walk ratio.
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