About a week or so ago, I received an email about a San Diego Padres Family Tree that he created. He was inspired by Will Young who had compiled one for the Twins. Thinking this idea was cool, I decided to try and do one for the Tigers which you can find here.

The tree aims to identify how each member of the 40 man roster came to be with the Tigers, be it through free agency, the draft, Rule 5, or trades. In the case of trades, it traces back to find out how the players involved in the trade were acquired. In some instances this was pretty easy, like when the Tigers traded for Carlos Guillen they gave up 2 players (Juan Gonzalez and Ramon Santiago) who were signed as free agents out of Latin America. In other cases, like when the Tigers acquired Nate Robertson it can be traced back to Brad Ausmus and CJ Nitkowski.

A couple things are noticeable when looking at the tree. The Tigers 2002 and 2003 drafts are bearing fruit. Nine members of the 40 man roster were either members of those classes, or can be traced back to players that were acquired via players drafted in those years. Dave Dombrowski’s first draft was in 2002. Draw your own conclusions here.

But Randy Smith does still have fingerprints on this team and the roster. Omar Infante, Fernando Rodney, Humberto Sanchez, Brandon Inge, Ramon Santiago were all Smith signings. Also, Smith did draft Jeff Weaver in 1998 who of course brought in Jeremy Bonderman. Still, the lack of talent on the roster that was drafted in the late 90’s, while not surprising, is very evident.

To compile this I used The Baseball Cube and Baseball Reference extensively. In the coming weeks (and in all honesty it will probably be during the offseason) I’ll work to include links to player pages as well.