Lynn Henning updates the progress of Cody Ross, Ryan Rayburn, Brent Clevlen, and Kody Kirkland.

Wil Ledezma’s stint as a starteris over. Shane Loux will take his spot in the rotations. This follows fellow rule 5’er Matt Roney’s demotion to the bullpen. Nate Robertson, acquired in the Redman deal, was called up to take Roney’s spot. To make room for Robertson, Chris Mears was sent back to Toledo.

Well, I’m back up and online. However, I’m still out of the loop on the Tigers. Thursday night when I was sitting in the dark, I tuned in 1270 but they were off the air. Last night, I didn’t have the TV on trying to conserve electricity. And, my fantasy football draft is tomorrow which has cut into my Tiger time. So while I’m back, I’ve got nothing to say…Except…”Despite the fact the Tigers were on the west coast, they still remained a part of the Detroit community and voluntarily went powerless last night” I know, it was weak.

Stuff:
-Munson broke his thumb and is on the DL. Danny Klassen has taken his place on the roster. Eric showed quite a bit this season, and has to be considered one of the “brighter” spots this season. While his batting average is low, he still can draw a walk and hit for power. His first year at third was definitely a learning experience that wasn’t always smooth. However, he didn’t embarass himself either.
-Matt Roney has been removed from the starting rotation. Roney had two good starts, and a bunch of really bad ones. He struggled with his control on a regular basis (15 walks against 9 K’s in his last 6 starts). Three of his last 4 starts were only 2 innings. To the best of my knowledge a replacement hasn’t been named, but an AP story in the Detroit News speculates it will be Shane Loux or Steve Sparks.

Tigers first round pick Kyle Sleeth finally signed. He’ll start pitching in the instructional leage in the fall. Apparently he needed a break anyways.

Hmmm. I love hearing that our top draft pick had a heavy workload in college. Sounds like surgery waiting to happen.

I guess when you’re the manager, and you look at your options and see two players with an OBA above .330, and one player with a slugging percentage over .450, you can understand why he might want to get creative with the lineup. On Wednesday, DH/1B Kevin Witt started in left field because Dmitri Young’s achilles’ were hurting too much to play the field. I love the fact that Tram wanted to keep Witt’s bat in the lineup, even if it meant sacrificing some defense. On Thursday, Ben Petrick was playing center and leading off. I like that Tram put someone else in center besides Sanchez. The A’s showed Sanchez no respect whatsoever by taking an extra base whenever the ball was hit in the general direction of Sanchez. Sanchez plays too deep, gets poor jumps on the ball, won’t lay out to catch a ball, and has the arm of a first basemen. It was nice to see some non-traditional thinking, no matter what the motivation. I still don’t understand why the centerfielder has to lead off though.

Also surprising was the newly recalled Brandon Inge hitting second. Brandon has hit decent at Triple A with a new approach-“don’t think.” I can’t help but being a little doubtful, but even if Brandon can hit .240 with a little pop, it would be a huge step forward. I want Brandon to suceed, I really do. What I fear is that Brandon will play just well enough over the next 6-8 weeks to make people think he’s “figured it out.” If he has truly improved that’s great, but given his track record, I’d hate for the Tigers to not try and improve the catching position.

Other Stuff
-Work has been keeping me real busy, plus football season is starting. The result if fewer posts. Fortunately, there is another Tiger blog to read. Also, Brian’s been updating on a daily basis as well.
-Despite being the weakest division on the field, the AL Central has some excellent bloggers. Two of the best are Twins guys Aaron and Twins Geek.
-Munson is tied for the rookie lead in home runs with Mark Teixera at 17.

From the Detroit News:

Detroit’s revenue problems have nothing to do with being a small market club. Detroit’s revenue problems come from being really really bad. Illitch spent a whole bunch of his money (or borrowed money) on Comerica. Most nights, even when there is a game it sits vacant. Things won’t get any better for the Tigers if the money the Tigers get from revenue sharing goes into paying off stadium debt instead of improving the team.

Jim Caple gives Comerica high marks

Since my June month in review was pretty well received, I thought I’d do another one for July. Unfortunately, ESPN’s sortable stats don’t look like they include the July 31 games yet, so we’re actuallly looking at the month minus one day. And seeing as I’m off on a road trip to visit Great Amercian Ballpark and PNC this weekend, it was now or never for this column.

Overall
Heading into the All-Star break, the Tigers were looking not bad. The Tigers picked up their first home sweep of the season against the White Sox, and then limited the Red Sox to 9 runs in 3 games. For the first half of the month the Tigers were 6-6. Even the first game after the All-Star break was impressive as the Tigers broke their string of <10 run scoring outputs with a 10-9 win against Chicago. After that it was down hill. The Tigers closed out the month winning just 2 of the next 13, and the games weren't even close. Only 3 of those 11 losses were by fewer than 4 runs. Unfortunately the Tigers weren’t able to pull and trading deadline deals, due to a lack of valuable talent. Transactions
The biggest move was the trade of Adam Bernero for Ben Petrick. The Tigers traded from one of their strengths pitching, without even giving up a strong pitcher. Bernero has given up one run in 8 relief appearances for Colorado, while Petrick has struggled offensively for the Tigers.

There was also quite a bit of disabled list shuffling. Cody Ross was the beneficiary of Higginson’s DL stint. Unfortunately, he looked less than impressive in 4 games and was sent back to Toledo to make room for Danny Patterson. Also, in adding Patterson to the 40 man roster, they DFA’d David Espinosa (acquired in Mohler trade). When Higginson was ready to come off the disabled list, AJ Hinch took his place. Hinch has a groin injury and will eligible to come of the DL on August 3rd.

In the bullpen, Fernando Rodney and Steve Avery were demoted in favor Shane Loux and Eric Eckenstahler.

Offense
July was far and away the Tigers best offensive month. While they were still in the lower half of the league in most offensive categories, at least they weren’t dead last by a large margin. Most surprising was that the Tigers were tied for 5th in the in home runs with 28. Now granted, 15 of the Tigers 26 games were away from Comerica Park, but for a team struggling the Tigers have, it’s impressive. Part of this surge may be attributable to the the fact that Omar Infante and Brandon Inge had no at-bats in July, and part of it was just some better hitting. Kevin Witt was the month’s leading hitter at .329/.372/.517. Dmitri’ Young’s batting average dipped and was .262, but his power numbers were still strong with 7 homers and a .565 slugging percentage. Young also led the team in RBI for the month with 14. Alex Sanchez produced well at the top of the order hitting .319/.343/.447 and driving in 10 runs. Despite his decent hitting, he only scored 9 runs due to 6 caught stealings and some base running faux pas. Eric Munson struggled to get hits with a .206 batting average, but his plate discipline resulted in a team high 11 walks and a .313 OBA. He also contributed 5 home runs. Bobby Higginson has hit .500/.550/.813 in 5 games since coming off the disabled list. Even Ramon Santiago has managed to drive in 5 runs this month.

Pitching
The young pitching staff is struggling as the season progresses. Despite an impressive string of 6 games in which they allowed only 12 runs heading into the all-star break, the ERA for the month was 5.42. July saw the debut of Wil Ledezma as a starting pitcher. He didn’t allow a run in his first two starts, but then was hit hard. Matt Roney continues to pitch well at home, and struggle on the road. Nate Cornejo had a couple of very impressive outings against the White Sox. In one start he pitched 8 innings of shut out ball, and in another he took a no-hitter into the seventh (only to get the loss). The bright spot in the rotation was Jeremy Bonderman. While his ERA was 5.16 for the month, 7 of the 13 runs he allowed during the month came in one disastrous start against Boston. He rebounded his next time out and scattered 3 hits over 8 innings. The starter who struggled the most however was Mike Maroth. He had a 6.96 ERA and added 3 losses in his march towards 20 (he did also pick up 2 wins). Most disturbing are the following numbers: 9,11,12. Those are his home runs allowed, walks allowed, and strike outs. That’s an awful combination of “balls not in play.” In the bullpen Chris Mears had several strong outings closing games and July saw the return of Danny Patterson. Two of the Tigers potential trade candidates, Sparks and Walker, both struggled in July which limited their value.

Danny Knobler thinks the Tigers need to make one of those trades that seems meaningless at the time (Greg Gohr for Damion Easley) that turn out to be incredibly fortunate for the Tigers. He’s not sure that Illitch has intentions of spending the money that they will save in expired contracts next year, so the Tigers better hope to get lucky.

Knobler also mentions the Willie Blair/Joey Eischen trade as an example. I think a more convincing one would be the Todd Jones/Mark Redman trade. Redman was damaged goods at the time, and Jones was a lame duck. I think that trade turned out a lot better than most fans expected. Especially if the Tigers get lucky with Knotts/Henkel/Robertson.

Maybe Bernero/Petrick will end up being that trade, or maybe there is another one out there.

Baseball Primer has an article about how scouts grade pitchers. It’s an interesting read and has a report card for Shane Loux at the end.

Last Friday we looked at the Tigers offensive Run Efficiency Average. Today we’ll look at how efficient or inefficient their defense has been. Before I go any farther, if you want more information on REA or TBW, or converting TBW to runs, check out this article by Tom Tippett. Now onto the defense.

Below is a table with TBW (total bases + walks), runs allowed, REA (Run Efficienicy Average which is runs/TBW) and Dif which is the difference between a team’s REA and the league average.

The Tigers defensive REA is .283, or 11 points worse than the league average. Converting this to runs means that the Tigers have given up 21 more runs than they would have had they been as efficient as the league average. Given the fact the Tigers have induced the second most double plays in the league, the Tigers could have easily fared worse on this measure.

To translate all this into Wins and Losses take the difference in runs scored/allowed and divide by 9 (again, I got this from the Tippett article) because that is what the pythagorean method tells us is the number of runs to add a win in a league with an average offense of 750 runs. That means that the ineffieincy of the Tigers defense has cost them about 2 games this year. This is actually an improvement over last year, when the Tigers inefficient defense had a 6 game deficit. This could get worse because the season isn’t over yet, but they are ahead of last year.

I updated the offensive stats to find that the Tigers offense has scored 70 fewer runs than an offense performing at the league average for efficiency. This translates roughly into an additional 8 losses.

Now is this to say that the Tigers should have an additional 10 wins under their belts? Of course not. This just shows what to expect had the Tigers offense been as efficient as the rest of the league. The fact of the matter is that bad teams are just plain bad, and good teams are just plain good. On the offensive side, for the Tigers to be league average in efficiency, they would have to significantly outperform their own inherent badness when there are runners on base. The fact of the matter is the Tigers are not a home run hitting team. They play in a non-homer run hitters partk. And they have hitters who, despite a lack of power, strike out a whole bunch. And while there is the art of manufacturing runs, there is still a basic offensive level that must be achieved that the Tigers can’t seem to muster. Kansas City leads the league in offensive REA despite not being a “great” hitting team. They are second in the league in stolen bases and sacrifice bunts. However, they aren’t a bad hitting team to begin with.

The defensive side is a little bit harder to explain. My guess is that while the Tigers are 7th in home runs allowed, they are 10th in walks allowed. While that’s not good, it’s not horrendous either. What does hurt is that they are dead last by a large margin in strike outs. They have 60 fewer than the next closest team. I’d say that the combination of the 3 stats is what leads to their inefficiency.

So to wrap this thing up, let’s take a look at everything together. The Tigers have 28 wins this season. The Tigers have 10 fewer wins (8 offensive and 2 defensive) than a team that was as efficient as the league average based on run differential. Going by pythagorean, the Tigers would have 30 wins on the season. So summing it all up, based on their actual runs scored, and runs allowed, and average efficiency on both sides of the ball, the Tigers would have 40 wins already. I wish.

The Tigers have been busy this weekend, with a roster move on each of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On Friday, Bobby Higginson came off the disabled list, and AJ Hinch took his place. Higginson went 6 for 12 with two doubles this weekend. On Saturday, the Tigers demoted Steve Avery and called up Eric Eckenstahler from Toledo. Eric had a 2.66 ERA in 40.2 innings and a 38/22 K/BB. Avery had been struggling since his first several scoreless outings. Today, Shane Loux finally got the call and he will take Fernando Rodney’s sport in the bullpen. While Rodney didn’t pitch particularly well, he didn’t pitch as bad as his stats would indicate. He allowed a number of soft hits, but could never recover from them. Shane Loux has gone 11-6 with a 3.06 ERA for Toledo this year. He’s a soft tosser that doesn’t strike out a lot of guys, but he doesn’t walk a lot of guys either (58/30 BB/K in 128 innings). Even though Loux is being called up to pitch from the bullpen, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him make spot starts to spell the Roney/Ledezma/Bonderman rotation.

Other Stuff
-Lynn Henning had another good column today. He weighs in on mid level free agents, Alex Sanchez, and the lack of talent at high levels of the organization.
-Ramon Santiago picked up two RBI in the same game. Those were numbers 8 and 9 on the season.