The Tigers moved to 2-0 during grapefruit league action after outslugging Cincinnati 17-10. Danny Knobler reports that Justin Verlander was shaky at first, but managed to pitch his way out of it. And he did it without a visit from Jim Leyland or pitching coach Chuck Hernandez.
Leyland isn’t against mound visits, but he’s also big on individual responsibility. He wants players to think for themselves, and he wants to see how they react in tough situations.
“Get out of your own jam sometime,” he said this morning, before Verlander even took the mound. “Figure out how to do it.”
Former Tiger pitching coach Bob Cluck has found a job. He’ll be a minior league pitching consultant for the San Diego Padres.
USA Today previewed the Tigers, and according to Jim Leyland the rebuilding is over. And for even more Jim Leyland, Jayson Stark has a pretty extensive piece.
“With the big stuff, he tells us the way it’s going to be,” Jones says. “But on some of the not-so-big stuff, he gives players a little control so we have some input. It’s like: ‘Here’s an olive branch. Let’s see what you do with it.’ He makes you feel like it’s not a totalitarian dictatorship.”
They’re quite a match, this team and this manager. In 14 seasons as a manager, Leyland has never been given a team capable of winning — and not won. Go back and take a look some time. The Tigers, meanwhile, haven’t had a winning season — with any manager — since 1993, under Sparky Anderson. That was seven managers ago.
Greg Eno has been taking a look back at Tiger days of yore. Today he details the ridiculously powerful team from 1991 and earlier in the week he took a look back at Sparky Anderson. Samela takes an extensive look at Craig Dingman’s artery graft surgery, and Lee has aggregated the projections for the Tiger starters.
SamARA. I think Ian calls me Samela as a joke. I think.
See, this is why I just started telling University profs and the like to call me Sam. 😛 And lord knows if that’s exactly what Dingman’s going to have done… we still have so little info on the exact nature of the injury. But when they said ‘leg vein to artery’, I couldn’t see how it was anything other than a saphenous vein graft for arterial reconstruction. Maybe it’s something new I don’t know about.
Sam-ara/ela, I know that you actually are Samara. However I like the Samela moniker, and I’m going to do my best to make it stick:-)
What have I done?
(On the other hand, the people are speaking. The nickname is sticking…)
Thanks for the plug, Bill!
You people, honestly. I guess if I have all these nicknames for the Tigers it’s only fair I get one too.