A few links and items that you may not have seen but might find interesting:

The Ray Lankford Wing

Beyond the Boxscore has created the Ray Lankford wing of the Hall of Fame for players with “no real shot at the Hall of Fame, but a great career nonetheless.” Unfortunately, or fortunately I guess, the Hall is populated by many ex Tigers. Trammell, Whitaker, Morris, Parrish, Freehan, and Lolich are among the 246 inductees.

Monroe negotiations

Okay, you probably saw this but I was in California when this came out, and I happened to miss it. Craig Monroe is the Tigers last unsigned arbitration eligible player. The teams have exchanged figures and are $600,000 apart. Detroit offered $2.45 million and Monroe is looking for $3.05. I imagine that the two sides will reach an agreement pretty much in the middle and Monroe will get a salary close to his buddy Carlos Pena, despite having double the win shares.

AL Central talk

Remember 12 months ago, heck even 8 months ago when the AL Central was generally regarded as an exceptionally weak division. Now it seems you can’t read an article that doesn’t it declare it the best division in baseball. A recent post about the AL-C generated nearly 200 comments on John Sickels blog (although it is a pretty boring discussion for Tigers and Royals fans).

Is the Central really that good? How was everybody so wrong going to the season? What changed to make it better? Will it be as strong this year?

Okay so there wasn’t that much interesting stuff. That’s the problem with being on the road, I get thrown off my game.