Monthly Archives: July 2009

2009 Season, Minors

Tigers Minor Leauge Wrap 7/4/09

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Columbus 3 Toledo 7
Jeff Larish 2 for 4, 2B, HR. Jeff Fraizer 3 for 4, 2B. Wilkin Ramirez 2 for 3, 2B, BB. Eddie Bonine 7 IP, 10 H, 3 R, 0 BB, 3 K, 2 HR.

Erie 0 Binghamton 4
Ryan Strieby 2 for 4. Shawn Roof 3 for 4. Luis Marte 6.2 IP, 4 R, 3 BB, 5 K, 1 HR.

Tampa 0 Lakeland 4
Justin Henry 2 for 4, 2B. Mauricio Robles 6.2 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 3 BB, 5 K.

Dayton 1 West Michigan 5
Jordan Lennerton 2 for 3, HR. Casey Crosby 5.2 IP, 5 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 2 K, 1 HR.

Aberdeen 2 Oneonta 7
Michael Rockett 2 for 4. Rawley Bishop 2 for 4, 2 HR, 5 RBI. Alexis Espinoza 2 for 4 3B. Nate Newman 5 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 3 K.

GCL Braves 0 GCL Tigers 2
Hernan Perez 2 for 4, 2 2B. Jose Diaz 6 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 5 K.

2009 Season, Game Post

Game 2009.080: Tigers at Twins

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PREGAME: Nothing like an afternoon game after a 16 inning bout, but the Tigers play at 4p on the 4th on Fox Saturday Baseball. Happy 4th of July to everyone as Edwin Jackson matches up with Francisco Liriano. Both managers will look to these gentleman to provide some innings with both bullpen’s taxed. The Tigers at least have everyone except Joel Zumaya and Freddy Dolsi available, not sure about the Twins situation.

Liriano still hasn’t put things together since his Tommy John surgery. He’s fanning 8 per 9 innings, but he has 42 walks and 12 homers in 89.2 innings. He faced the Tigers earlier in the year though and went 7.1 innings in his best start (Game Score 68) of the season.

Jackson had fought his control a little bit in June before turning in a 7 inning, no walk performance against Houston. Jackson has only gone past 100 pitches once in his last 4 starts so Jim might lean on him a bit today.

Detroit vs. Minnesota – July 4, 2009 | MLB.com: Gameday

POSTGAME: The first 2 games of this series have lived up to the hype. But the Tigers only came out on top once. Sadly I don’t know what was the bigger surprise yesterday, the offensive outburst of Magglio Ordonez or the offensive outburst of Nick Punto.

The Ordonez homer was particularly impressive, because unlike his homer against the Cubs on a hanger, he drilled a fastball over 400 feet to the pull field. Dumb luck or a reason to be encouraged? Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled for Maggs and hope it is a sign of things to come, but a little bit of skepticisim is warranted as well.

Edwin Jackson was bit by walks again, and too often he’d get ahead 0-2 and then nibble his way to a 6 pitch at-bat. Either he wasn’t as aggressive as he usually is, or he just flat out didn’t have the command.

Brandon Inge and Curtis Granderson both fanned 3 times today. Blech.

2009 Season, Minors

Tigers Minor League Wrap 7/3/09

Columbus 2 Toledo 8
Wilkin Ramirez and Brent Clevlen each tripled and singled. Jeff Frazier homered. Scott Sizemore, Mike Hessman, and Max St. Pierre all had 2 hits. Brooks Brown pitched around 4 walks and allowed just 2 runs in 6 innings with 3 K’s. Ryan Perry pitched 2 innings and fanned 3 with no walks.

Trenton 10 Erie 1
Brennan Boesch homered and singled. Thad Weber allowed 5 runs on 11 hits in 5 innings. Robbie Weinhardt allowed his first AA run on two hits and a walk with 2 K’s in an inning.

Lakeland 0 Tampa 1
Justin Henry and Devin Thomas doubled. Jordan Newton tripled. Andrew Hess allowed a run on a solo homer, but that was it for 6 innings.

West Michigan 10 South Bend 0
Billy Nowlin went 3 for 5. Ben Guez doubled and singled. Luke Putkonen went the distance allowing just 1 walks and 5 hits against 5 K’s.

Oneonta 1 Aberdeen 10
Alexis Espinoza doubled as a pinch hitter. Luis Angel Sanz fanned 6, but walked 5 in 4 innings. And pretty much everyone else struggled.

GCL Phillies 4 GCL Tigers 3
Elvin Soto doubled and walked. Pat McKenna singled and walked 3 times. Rayni Guichardo didn’t allow a run in 5.2 innings with 2 hits, 4 walks, and 3 K’s.

2009 Season, Game Post

Game 2009.079: Tigers at Twins

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PREGAME: Here we go, another series in the Metrodome. I don’t know if it is the dome itself or the way that the Tigers play there, but this games are rarely enjoyable. This time first place is at risk with the Twins just 3 games back (and the White Sox 2 back).

Lee has a detailed comparison of the two squads doing better tonight, and things are pretty but the Tigers are benefitting from some good fortune in close games. I have a feeling that good fortune doesn’t really apply to the Tigers when facing Joe Frickin Crede though.

Tonight’s match-up features Luke French making his first career start. Never a dominating force, French got by with location and moxie until he started fanning batters to the tune of 7.9 per game resulting in a 3.60 K/BB ratio for Toledo.

Ten game winner Kevin Slowey gets the ball for the Twins. He walks like no one, with only 15 free passes in his 87 innings of work. But he will give up the occasional homer with 14 on the year, but those even seem to come in bunches.

Random Factoid of the night: Slowey has only induced 6 double play grounders this year. And 2 of them came in his start against Detroit.

Your Magglio-less lineup is:

  1. Granderson, CF
  2. Polanco, 2B
  3. Cabrera, 1B
  4. Thames, DH
  5. Kelly, LF
  6. Inge, 3B
  7. Anderson, RF
  8. Laird, C
  9. Santiago, SS

Detroit vs. Minnesota – July 3, 2009 | MLB.com: Gameday

POSTGAME: Well, that certainly was a memorable game. I’m sleepy so only bullet points tonight:

  • The Tigers did get some offense, lots of it early in fact. But then there was the 9 innings of shutout ball between the 5th and the 14th.
  • French was okay and he held Justin Morneau in check. I am surprised that Leyland didn’t let him go the one additional out for the win with the big cushion. It is a little indicative that the team has been struggling because that is when he tends to over manage.
  • Two walks to Nick Punto. Really? The good news is that the Tigers only had 1 other unintentional walk.
  • But two intentional ones, and this I thought was a great move by Leyland. Zumaya had control tonight, and the risk of walking in a run is always present, but passing on Mauer and Morneau when their runs were meaningless was good strategy.
  • Despite the game going 16 innings only Freddy Dolsi and Joel Zumaya should be unavailable for the next 2 days. Rodney (6 up, 6 down) and Lyon were efficient in their multi-inning outings. Ni and Seay threw less than an inning and Miner was too ineffective to run up his pitch count.
  • The Tigers didn’t play great defense tonight. During Miner’s meltdown inning, I thought both triples should have been fielded. Neither play was easy, but both plays were makeable.
  • Eric Cooper was awful. I really think he’d ask the pitcher and catcher what number he was thinking of, whoever was closest got the call. One of the many egregious examples was a called 3rd strike against Polanco that Gameday tracked at 3 ft, 10 in off the ground. So at Polanco’s nipples essentially.
  • Magglio hit into kind of a tough luck double play, but then he finally had a ground ball not go at someone and through for an RBI single.
2009 Season

The Twins series is big, but far from critical

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It was July 19th, 2007. Things were looking great for the Tigers. Detroit was playing their second series after the All Star break. Heading into that break the Tigers had won 5 in a row, 2 against the Indians and a sweep of the Red Sox. After the break they split a 4 game set in Seattle  and then pulled off an improbable sweep of the the Twins in the Metrodome. They won 3 straight 1 run games against Minnesota and found themselves 21 games above .500. Talk about momentum. The big series was followed up with a 4-12 stretch.

Today the Tigers are once again heading into Minnesota for a 3 game set. It is a big, exciting, mid summer series. But the season is too long and it is too early for this series to mean that much – even if it results in a sweep for either team.

If things go poorly they could find themselves a half game out of first place, a perch they’ve held since May 9th. It would be a disappointing result to be sure, but being within a half game of the division lead before the All Star Break isn’t that bad of a worst-case scenario.

We’ve seen the Tigers in past years surging early in the season only to later collapse. We’ve seen it this year where the team had “serious issues” only to reel off 7 wins in a row, and then 2 drop back to back series. Two weeks ago the White Sox were done and playing “must-win” games against the Tigers. Now they are in 2nd place. This is the type of rollercoastering that happens over the span of a couple weeks, let alone over the course of a season.

If the Tigers were on the brink of contention a week before the trade deadline (like  when they went to Seattle in 2005) maybe it takes on more importance. If it is September and there is limited time to make up ground it becomes huge. Yes, every game is important because you can look back at the end of the season when your team is a game short and say “see, if we’d just won one more game…” But there are are typically at least a dozen games that are given away during a season and a dozen more that are “stolen". These are just 3 of 162.

Games against division rivals always take on more importance, it’s your team’s only chance to directly put L’s in their standings. With both teams involved in the hunt for the division and it falling on a holiday weekend, the games should be exciting and it should provide for a great “playoff like” atmosphere. But it ain’t the playoffs because both the winner and loser still have 90 more games to go.

2009 Season, Minors

Tigers Minor League Wrap 7/2/09

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Toledo 3 Columbus 16
Clete Thomas and Brent Clevlen each had 2 hits. Ruddy Lugo didn’t make it out of the first inning before allowing 8 runs. This wasn’t good and it saw Jeff Frazier pitch the last 2 innings, and not well.

Trenton6 Erie 9
Ryan Strievy is back int he lineup and he homered and singled. Andy Dirks doubled twice. Ronnie Bourquin, Alex Avila, and Brennan Boesch all had 2 hits apiece. Jonah Nickerson allowed 5 runs in 5 innings on 11 hits, 3 of which were homers. Cody Satterwhite fanned 2 and allowed 2 hits and a walk but no runs in 2.1 innings.

Fort Myers 3 Lakeland 1
Jordan Newton doubled twice. Audy Ciriaco went 2 for 2 with a walk and seems to love him some doubleheaders. Lauren Gagnier allowed 3 runs in 2.2 innings. Jared Gayhart has adapted well to the next level with 3.1 scoreless innings and just 1 hit allowed with against 2 K’s.

Fort Myers 4 Lakeland 1Justin Henry and Devin Thomas each had 2 hits. Trevor Feeney started and allowed 1 run on 3 hits in 4 innings. Brett Jacobson allowed 2 runs on 3 hits including a homer in 2 innings.

West Michigan 4 South Bend 5
Gustavo Nunez, Brent Wyatt, and Bill Nowlin all had 2 hits. Bryan Pounds walked 3 times and doubled. Mark Sorensen went 6 innings and allowed just 2 runs on 5 hits, 1 walk and 2 K’s.

Oneonta 8 Aberdeen 2
Rawley Bishop doubled twice, walked, and drove in 3. Keith Hernandez doubled twice and singled. Gary Perinar fanned 7 in 5 innings of 2 hit and 1 run ball. Jose Ortega struck out the side in his inning of work.

GCL Tigers 7 GCL Phillies 4
Luis Castillo and Elvin Soto each had 2 hits. Bruce Rondon struck out 6 in 4 innings. Giovanni Soto fanned 2 in a scoreless inning.

Links

links for 2009-07-02

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