Yearly Archives: 2008

2008 Season, Front Office, Minors

News from the front office

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While other teams are hanging on to World Series dreams, the Tigers are beginning to retool for next season. The last couple days have already seen a little action, but more on the front office side of things.

The Tigers today named Kevin Hooker as the Pacific Rim coordinator. Hooker comes from the Phillies where he had responsibility for Australia the last 6 years and Taiwan, Korea and Japan for the last two.

They also cut ties with Victor Trasoff-Jilg who was the minor league medical coordinator. That appears to be the only minor league staff move though as all the managers and coaches were invited to return. In the same article Jon Paul Morosi notes that the Tigers will interview 4 candidates for the pitching coach position this week. No names were revealed.

Finally, it looks like Al Avila will be back as assistant GM. The Mariners asked permission to interview Avila for their GM vacancy, and were denied. It wouldn’t surprise me if Dombrowski held the GM reigns for only another year or two before handing that job to Avila. Of course after this past season, his grip on the position probably isn’t as solid as it once was.

2008 Season

Suggestions

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I know things have been quiet around here lately, well at least from me. I’m working on gathering data and building databases for my offseason projects. I now have my pitch f/x database built and I’m starting to delve into that. Some things I plan to look at are:

  • Nate Robertson – what the hell happened to him
  • Justin Verlander – what the hell happened to him
  • Plate discipline for the hitters
  • Pitch selection by catcher

Do you have other things you’d like me to look at with this data?  For those who aren’t familiar with pitch f/x, itis the system that displays pitch trajectories in the MLB Gameday application.  So we can examine pitch movement, velocity, location, selection, etc.  I can’t make guarantees about turning around every suggestion, but if it’s something that a)I think is interesting, b)I can do it, then there’s a good chance it will get done.

2008 Season, Minors

Tigers have nice fall debut

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The Arizona Fall League kicked off and the Tigers representatives represented the Tigers well (how’s that for a sentence?). Wil Rhymes, Casper Wells,and Jeff Larish hit 2-3-4 and each picked up a hit. Wells was the only homer of the game and he knocked in 2. On the pitching side, Rudy Darrow pitched a perfect inning with 2 K’s and Casey Fien allowed 2 hits with 4 K’s in 2 innings of work.

Things are off to a decent start for the Tigers Hawaiian contingent. Andrew Hess has made 3 outings in relief has fanned 8 with only 1 walk in 8 innings with only one walk allowed. James Skelton is posting his customary high OBP at .500 in his first 6 games. Kyle Peter has struggled somewhat posting just a .579 OPS while still looking for his first extra base hit.

Alex Avila - cr Roger DeWitt
Alex Avila - cr Roger DeWitt

Things are also busy in Tigertown. Mark Anderson of Tigstown.com was on hand to take in some of the Instructional League action and filed daily reports. It’s premium content, but today he looked at the catchers and first baseman and the report on Alex Avila was glowing.

The good news is the daily reports don’t appear to be premium content, so you can read some of it for yourself. And if you want to see for yourself, our friend Roger DeWitt has captured quite a few images of the action.

2008 Season

2008 Offseason Preamble

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With a disastrous season completed it is time to head into the offseason. Given the gravity of the collapse, you know with the high payroll and the last place-edness, there is probably a tendency to overreact and second-guess. While a deep dive analysis is definitely called for, there is also some inaccuracy being bandied about. With that in mind, some thoughts as we head into what will likely be a tumultuous winter.

Dave Dombrowski did not abandon his philosophy

I’ve heard this one frequently. The common thread is that Dombrowski abandoned his pitching first philosophy in favor of “buiding a slow pitch softball team.” Dombrowski has always believed in stock piling young pitching and using it as the building blocks of a team. Whether that entails using the pitchers on his own team, or trading it to fill needs, he’s always used young pitching.

The Renteria trade was made in large part for defense, not to build a slow pitch slugging softball team. The benefit of Renteria was that he was to be a 2 way player. The problem was that while Renteria was a defensive upgrade, it was a small upgrade (Guillen was -12 in 1074 innings at short in ’07, Renteria was -9 in 1173 innings in ’08 according to Fielding Bible +/-) and his offense was beyond absent the first half of the season. The trade failed, there’s no question, but it wasn’t a change of philosophy.

As for Cabrera, defense was never a part of the issue. It was entirely an offensive move. But it was also an opportunity that doesn’t come along that often. Players like Cabrera don’t grow on trees and to add an elite player at age 25 is largely unheard of. It is the kind of big splash move that Dombrowski has been known for throughout his career.

As for the rest of the staff, they were far worse than could have reasonably been expected. While Willis struggled last year and was trending down, to get nothing from him was unexpected to everyone. Robertson was never a top of the rotation starter, but was the epitome of a solid back of the rotation guy. To compete, along with Kenny Rogers, for worst starter in the league wasn’t part of any reasonable plan. And then there was Verlander adding a run and a half to his ERA. That your entire starting rotation would be injured or significantly underperforming wasn’t part of any plan or strategy and more than could have been mitigated.

The window isn’t closed

I should adjust that and say “the window isn’t closed if Ilitch doesn’t want it to be.” The boss could go all Huizenga and say “cut-cut-cut” but I don’t see that happening. This team was positioned to go for it in both 2008 and 2009. Because 08 was crap doesn’t mean you need to abandon 09 as well. The offense should be good again next year, and it isn’t unreasonable to think that the pitching staff will see some return to non-crapitude next year.

In terms of trading, they’d be selling low on most of the players that fans want to see traded. They could probably get a nice return for Armando Galarraga, Curtis Granderson, and Miguel Cabrera, but who really wants to see them shopped?

Don’t overreact

Everybody wants speed, defense, and starters, and bullpen arms. Some better defense would be nice, but don’t sacrifice offense completely. The Tigers are ready to make that move at third with the Inge pronouncement. It means they can’t afford to do it at both catcher and shortstop.

The bullpen was awful, but 5 years and $75 million to fix it will be money poorly spent. As for starters, is it worth a second round draft pick to sign a Derek Lowe type starter? (it might be if the Tigers can get the draft pick compensation for Renteria)

I’m not saying do nothing. Clearly this team has holes at multiple positions and another starter and a 2-3 new bullpen arms are clearly needed. But I still think, and perhaps this is naive, but good teams can have bad seasons. This team wasn’t as good as we thought going in, and it isn’t as bad as we think right now. I’ll borrow this conclusion from Nate Silver’s piece in Baseball Prospectus ($) and quote sparingly because it is premium content.

Bad years happen to good clubs. The key for the Tigers will simply be not to panic, nor to try and save face with guys like Renteria and Willis whose projections don’t really warrant it. The Tigers need to budget somewhere between $15-$20 million for perhaps three pitchers next year, but with the contracts of Renteria, Todd Jones, Kenny Rogers, and Ivan Rodriguez all coming off the books, they can easily afford to do so without increasing payroll.
…
This has been a frustrating season in Detroit, but hardly a disastrous one in terms of the club’s long-term fortunes. There have been several pleasant surprises this year in Galarraga, Joyce, and Brandon Inge’s smooth transition back to the catcher position*. From top to bottom, the Tigers still rank somewhere in the top ten in the major leagues in terms of their overall talent pool, and they should be on track to return to contention with some relatively common-sense fixes.

*The Inge part was written on August 14th before Inge completely collapsed down the stretch offensively and started allowing a PB per game.

Uncategorized

Plugs for a friends-of-the-blog

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Jamie Samuelsen

Jamie Samuelsen, long time WDFN’r and more recently blogger for the Freep, starts his new gig on Monday.  He’ll be joining the morning show on WRIF.  Jamie has been a great supporter of this blog with numerous mentions on his former morning show on WDFN.  Plus he’s one of the most reasonable voices in sports talk.  So if you’re not already a WRIF listener, tune in Monday when Jamie makes his debut.  You can listen in online.

Kurt Mensching

You may know Kurt from his occasional comments here, or probably for his work at Mack Avenue Tigers. You may not know he’s a sports columnist for the Marquette Mining Journal. Via BYB we find out that Kurt has been named top sports columnist in the state for his paper’s class. Super congrats to Kurt.

Links

links for 2008-10-03

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2008 Season, Managing & Strategy

More candid talk from the top, Leyland speaks

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Manager Jim Leyland was on Mitch Albom’s show and the Free Press has the transcript in 3 parts. The links to all follow, but here are some highlights and my comments.

If I was looking at the two major culprits and without pointing fingers and necessarily individuals, the two major culprits were the pitching and the defense there’s no question about that, it’s a no brainer for me. We didn’t catch the ball very good, we had mediocre pitching with a mediocre defense and that’s a brutal combination, and that’s basically what happened to us in my opinion.

Mediocre is being generous, but I think that is a matter of semantics. He gets it was bad.

Well, I don’t think it will be correct to discuss what Dave and I talked about. I’m sure Dave knows that I’m very disappointed, which I am. I make no bones about that because I want to manage this team. If you’re saying if I have any defense for this year, no I don’t, but I think the overall picture I think it’s pretty fair on my part. But I’m a big boy and I think Dave has tough decisions to make and for whatever reason he chose to go this direction and I respect that. I’m not afraid of anything. I think if I do a good job next year I think I’ll be extended. If I don’t I’ll be fired. If I would have been on the last year of my contract this year I would have been fired instead of the coaches because those guys were the scapegoats for people not doing their jobs, it’s that simple. There is no secret to this stuff. I’m not going to lie to anybody or beat around the bush. Chuck Hernandez and Jeff Jones were basically fired because the pitching was terrible.

This was in response to a question of why Leyland’s contract isn’t being extended. I actually don’t see the need for an extension. I hear it all the time about the lame duck coach/manager, but this isn’t some young manager. It’s a guy that’s been around forever and who the player’s respected the crap out of not that long ago. I can’t imagine players buying into him more with or without an extension. Plus keep in mind, Leyland was offered a longer contract after 2007 but didn’t want to extend it that far and go on a more year to year basis.

I think if you put us all on the dartboard, you know, you can put several people on a dart board and if you threw a dart you would probably hit the right guy with the dart because we were all guilty.

and

I would extend tomorrow — I would extend in June — I would extend in July — I would extend in August — I want to manage the Tigers. I can’t make it anymore simple than that to everybody and I think I deserve to manage the Tigers, but if you’re not wanted, you’re not wanted. I don’t want to be anywhere I’m not wanted.

I’m sensing tension between Leyland and Dombrowski, and not the good kind like between Sam and Diane.

Some guys I really believe can’t handle making the money. I don’t think they can live up to expectations of it. It all sounds good when the agent is talking and they want the contract and they get the money, but truthfully, I believe that there are some players that can’t handle that. They almost go into a little bit of a shell, you know – like ‘Oh my god, so much is expected of me.’ They’re better players probably when they’re not making quite as much.

He was later asked if the Tigers have anybody like that to which he responded “I think so.” Don’t really know how to fix this. It gets to be a point where players have reached the service time marks to get their paydays. Of course you can let them walk, but how do you know who can and can’t handle it prior to giving them the contract. And he has to be talking about Robertson and Inge (and maybe Willis) right?

I think the one thing and this is going to sound crazy, but the one thing that I might do different, looking back at it now and I’m not sure it would have made a difference — but the one thing I might have done different — I would have not started him opening day. I definitely think that he felt he had to be the horse. When Bonderman went down he felt he had to be an even bigger horse. I just don’t he think he was ready for that yet and in defense of him, he’s not supposed to be ready that yet. I mean he’s still a young kid, he’s a young pitcher and maybe I put a little undo pressure on him by naming him opening day and people talking about, well, he’ll have to step it up now.

This is in response to a question about Verlander’s struggles against the Central. Leyland went down this tangent. Leyland also had him start the first game of the World Series as a rookie which didn’t turn out that well. Maybe he’s not a big game pitcher, or maybe it is a part of the maturation process.
Leyland: ‘The two major culprits were the pitching and the defense’ | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press
Leyland: ‘I think I deserve to manage the Tigers, but if you’re not wanted, you’re not wanted’ | Freep.com | Detroit Free PressLeyland: ‘Maybe naming him the opening day pitcher was a mistake’ | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press

2008 Season, Free Agents, Front Office

Dombrowski speaks – a lot more than usual.

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Dave Dombrowski held court with reporters today and he revealed a glimpse into this winter’s agenda.

The main points:

  • Edgar Renteria’s option will not be picked up
  • The Tigers are looking outside the organization to fill the closer role
  • The Tigers don’t expect to be a major player in the free agent market
  • Detroit does not expect to cut payroll significantly
  • Dombrowski likes Cale Iorg thinking he’s going to be an All Star very soon.

My thoughts:

  • Declining the Renteria option was pretty much a no brainer. The Tigers can try and sign him for less and offer him arbitration.  If he declines and is signed somewhere else the Tigers get two draft picks.  If he accepts it probably is a decent stopgap.  Renteria is a decent bet to bounce back somewhat and not be a void in the lineup.  While there is a desire to upgrade the defense at short, with Inge and mystery catcher in the fold the Tigers can’t afford to go with a total defensive specialist at short.  They have that at third already now.  Renteria sounds like he’d like to be back.
  • Dombrowski’s comments about Iorg were quite enthusiastic.  It could be he’s trying to up the trade value, or diminish the Tigers needs, but the remarks came on the same day that Iorg made the BA Top 20 list for the FSL. (Rick Porcello was number 1).  It makes one think the Tigers aren’t looking for a long term fix for 2009.
  • Rodney got a lukewarm treatment from Dombrowski saying that he’d be the leading candidate on the current club, but he wanted more consistency.  But with the Tigers not making a splash that probably means no K-Rod or Fuentes which is fine.  The new closer will likely be an established set-up man who can be had for a cheaper price.  It might not satisfy the fan base, but is probably the best and only way to go given the payroll constraints and ridiculous sum that closers get.

In the end Dombrowski is looking for answers like the rest of us…

“Most years, when we go into spring training, I have a good feel for where we’ll finish,” he said.

“I’m so far off on this,” he said, shaking his head, his voice trailing off.

2008 Season, Managing & Strategy

Position roulette, Inge and Guillen edition

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I was hoping to have a chance to run some numbers, but until I do I figured it was worth posting that Inge will play third and Guillen left field next season. I won’t completely pass judgment until I can do the math on this, but for the moment I’m thinking this doesn’t actually help much of anything except defense at third base. And why announce this news, at this point anyways? And of all players, why guarantee Brandon Inge a job going into next year (177/279/287 line since the Pudge trade!)? Odd. Very odd. Feel free to discuss.

2008 Season, Pitching

Chuck Hernandez fired

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The Tigers announced after today’s game that pitching coach Chuck Hernandez and bullpen coach Jeff Jones have been let go.

The Tigers pitching was dreadful this year and someone was going to take the hit. I don’t know that firing Hernandez is going to instantly make the staff better, but keeping him around this season certainly didn’t seem to help.

The coach relationship is always kind of a fuzzy thing to evaluate because as fans we really don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. So the best we can do is judge based on the results on the field, and outside of Armando Galarraga and to a lesser extent Bobby Seay, there wasn’t a lot of stuff to put in the positive column this year.

To be fair, Hernandez was the pitching coach over that wonderful 2006 staff that saw career years for Jeremy Bonderman and Nate Robertson and a dominant bullpen. But things have gone down hill, and rapidly so, ever since.

In addition to a 3rd worst league ERA, there were some other things that at the very least go into the questionable column. Chief among them was Justin Verlander dismal year. There was much tweaking of mechanics but it never led to results. Also, there was the matter of Jeremy Bonderman’s elbow last year. An injury he pitched poorly with, and yet managed to hide from the coaching and medical staffs.

To Hernandez’s credit, he didn’t seem to be a believer in abusing the young arms that he had and there wasn’t a clear case of injury due to abuse.

One thing I won’t miss however is when pitchers hold a runner on with that whole, snap the ball out of the glove and hold it over your head thing.

Jeff Jones presided over a bullpen that continually struggled. Jones was the pitching coach at Toledo before getting the promotion when Don Slaught left the staff after the 2006 season. He’s been up and down within the organization in the past, and I could see him continuing to be in the employ of the Tigers.

I’m sure we’ll hear quotes from the pitchers about how Hernandez was great, and how it wasn’t his fault. That’s all well and good, but it became clear that changes need to be made in the pitching staff, and with 5 starters with favorable club control contract status or under long term contracts, it is obvious that the change is going to come at the top.

2008 Season, Game Post

Game 161: Rays at Tigers

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PREGAME: It’s shirts off their backs day as the Tigers will disrobe at the completion of the game and give their uni’s to some lucky fans. They won’t really need them with this being the last home game and all (sad face).

It may be their last game period depending on the outcomes in Chicago and Minnesota. If the White Sox win, the Tigers will be playing in Chicago tomorrow. If the Twins win and the White Sox lose, they won’t be.

As for things in the D, it will be Zach Miner and James Shields. Shields has kind of owned Detroit. But he’s not the same pitcher at home as on the road. He allows more baserunners, more homers, and strikes out significantly less away from the Dome.

Zach Miner has been a little up and down since becoming a starter, but mostly up. In his last outing he allowed 10 baserunners and 4 runs in 6 innings.

Game Time 1:05

TBR @ DET, Sunday, September 28, 2008 Game Preview – Baseball-Reference.com

POSTGAME: It was strange at the park today. The weather was gorgeous. The fans were more into the game than at any I’ve attended since July. They chanted Gary. They roared for Granderson’s homer. They marveled at Zach Miner retiring 12 straight to start the game, with only 2 balls leaving the infield. Even after a typical bullpen meltdown, Magglio Ordonez added some drama by tying the game in the 9th.

Even the loss didn’t necessarily seem to dampen spirits. It was odd, I don’t quite get it.

Maybe it was the fan appreciation or the weather, but people seemed really happy. And the fan appreciation, with was appreciated. My kids each scored autographed balls, my daughter got Magglio and my son got Inge. They promptly traded and were thrilled.

The organization thanked the fans, all 3.2 million with an announcement on the scoreboard late in the game. And when they did that a number of players went up on to the top steps of the dugout to say thank you.

There’s something about that last day of the season, where you don’t know which guys are going to be back and which you’re cheering for the last time. One of those guys in limbo, but most likely gone is Vance Wilson. My kids were just finishing running the bases when Wilson came out of the dugout with his kids. As he walked past, I didn’t really know what to say given his situation. So I just said “Good luck with everything Vance.” He then circled the bases with his kids, and everyone else’s, surprisingly without creating too much of a commotion.