Who’da figured that the 119 loss Tigers could generate this much local interest in the offseason. Granted, most of the buzz is surrounding the guy they haven’t gotten yet, but believe it or not people give a damn about this team. Attendance at Tigerfest was 11,235 which is pretty incredible considering they failed to draw that many to 14 of their home games last year.

Also surreal is the amount of support that Brandon Inge and his .198 career average has garnered. It all started when Brandon said he was as good defensively as Pudge. Inge received a lot of flack for this, which is to be expected. However, I’ll devote a couple sentences defending him. First, I’m happy to see a player speak his mind. I’m sure it was an uncomfortable situation, and Inge didn’t go looking for reporters to talk about this. Second, he may have a point. He actually threw out runner at a .364 rate last year compared to Pudge’s .333 and that was withh an extremely young and inexperienced staff holding runners on. Also, he had half as many passed balls as Pudge while catching three-quarters as many innings. Third, is that Inge has grown up with this pitching staff and knows the staffs capabilities as well as anyone, so I don’t think Pudge would have an advantage calling pitches and handling pitchers. Fourth, I don’t see anything wrong with a player that has confidence in his abilities, and notice he didn’t try to defend his offensive performance. Now what hurts Inge is that Pudge has 10 more Gold Gloves than Inge does, so his credibility in making those statements isn’t all that great. Since then, his teammates and coaches have been very vocal in support of Inge. (Just to be clear, I’m not implying that Inge is better than Pudge, or that Pudge wouldn’t be a significant upgrade. I just wanted to illuminate the fact that his comments weren’t as crazy as they first appeared. )

Meanwhile, on the Pudge front Boras and his client submitted a counterproposal on Friday, and the rumor is the contract length is still 4 years with the disparity being money.

Unfortunately there’s not any more to report on this situation.

Comerica Changes
I’ve been informed, from a reliable source in the organization that the Tigers do in fact plan to move the bull pens to the left field wasteland and fill in the current right field bullpen area with seats. The plan is to have this completed before the All-Star game. I wasn’t at Tigerfest, so I don’t know if this was talked about there as well, but I haven’t seen it published anywhere. I also don’t know any other details about how things will be layed out exactly, or more detail on the timeline.