I’m pleased to announce the winners of the Tigers World Series DVDs for the essay portion of the contest. Thanks to all those who entered.
Category Archives: Site News
DTW is blushing
Once again it is all about me. First, Kurt points out that a few Tiger blogs are mentioned in this week’s Sports Illustrated. Actually, there are blogs listed for all teams where you can vote online for your favorites. SI is really reaching out to team bloggers by featuring their sites and headlines on the team pages (scroll to the bottom of the Tigers page for an example). The tactic worked as I ran out and bought a copy today at lunch. Still I’m “tickled” (to quote Jim Leyland) to see the site mentioned in SI.
Then, I see that Gas Lamp Ball has compiled a listing of the top 10 baseball blogs. There are some pretty prominent baseball bloggers on that list including David Pinto, Matthew Cerrone, and Blez. DTW didn’t make the top 10, but it just missed. Considering the magnitude of the blogs on that list, I’m thrilled to even have the site in the conversation.
Of course none of this would happen without you, the readers who come here and the fellow bloggers who link here. Thanks so much for your support.
UPDATE: Just saw this press release (hat tip Baseball Musings) which talks a little more about the list and how it was assembled:
There are three criteria that Sports Media Challenge use to rank blogs for the top 10 – Influence, Fan Engagement and Quality. These criteria combine quantitative aspects, including the number of incoming links that connect to the blog, number of fan comments as well as qualitative measurement by Sports Media Challenge analysts.
So those of you who link and comment, and read here truly are the reason that DTW was in the mix. Thanks again.
DVD give away reminder
Just a quick reminder that your entries for the World Series memories portion of the Tigers World Series DVD giveaway need to be in by noon on Saturday.
As for the Final Cut portion, it sounds like we may have our winner announced on Monday. Jim Leyland anticipates whittling the roster down to 25 by Monday. There are still 39 players in camp. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, if all 14 cuts come on the same day that essentially means everybody who entered the contest is correct and it just turns into a random drawing. But them are the rules.
Catching up and cleaning up
Things have been lighter for the last week on the blog. Part of that is a lack of terribly interesting news coming out of Lakeland – which is a good thing. This offseason I’ve been trying to compensate for these lulls by cranking through some analysis. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing, I just have nothing to show for it yet. I hope the benefit will come once the season starts. All of this of course is irrelevant to you, but I still wanted to write it anyways. Mostly because I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time on the blog, but with very little actual content to show for it yet.
Also I want to apologize for some of the comments that came through this weekend. Late Saturday night and into Sunday a bunch of spam comments advertising the sorts of things you don’t expect to see on a Tiger website got through the spam filter. I took them down as quickly as I could, but I apologize if anyone was offended.
Moving on to all the stuff I haven’t been writing about…
The other LOOGY
Edward Campusano seemed to be gaining more and more of a lock on the job with each appearance. That is until he left with elbow tenderness. Never a good sign. While it seems that elbows are more fixable than shoulders, those fixes often require surgery after rest fails to clear up the problem. There’s been no further word so it’s hard to comment on the extent of it, but anecdotally speaking these things just never seem to go away on their own.
With that I was prepared to write how Bobby Seay probably had the best shot at that last bullpen spot. Seay has been quite good this spring allowing 1 run in 8 2/3 innings with a 7:2 strikeout to walk ratio.
But then Jason Beck writes that Leyland sounds likes he is comfortable going just with Ledezma – recognizing that Joel Zumaya, Fernando Rodney, and Todd Jones will be the guys called on to get the critical outs.
If Leyland truly is okay with one lefty, the best bet is probably an option-less Chad Durbin over Zach Miner who still has 2 options left.
Continue reading Catching up and cleaning up
Tigers Miscellaney
This, that, and the other…
- The big news in baseball is the impending exclusive deal for the Extra Innings package with DirecTV. Here is a roundup of what some columnists are saying. Living in Southeast Michigan this isn’t a big deal to me. But with the Tigers surge in popularity I’m sure there are many displaced Tiger fans who will be frustrated. I’ve put up a poll related to this in the sidebar. Let me know what you think.
- The Tigers signed Joey Eischen to a minor league deal. He’ll get an invite to the big league camp, as will catcher Dusty Ryan.
- When I mentioned being surprised that the Tigers were positioning Eulogio de la Cruz as a starter, Matt sent info showing how much better de la Cruz performed as a starter last year. Matt also has a blog where he recently did a deep dive of the Tigers drafting of college players and their progressions through the system
- Jason Beck has a couple of TV notes. Beck notes that the Tigers have 6 televised spring training games. Also, the Tigers have eight 3:55pm Saturday games which is the start time for Fox Saturday Baseball.
- Cameron Maybin has a webpage. (hat tip The Surge)
- Carlos Pena is following in the tradition of Greg Norton, Alex Sanchez, and Eric Munson. He’s signing with the Devil Rays.
- For my feed subscribers, it seems like I just went full feed and now I’m back to partial. But it’s not my fault (entirely). I recently upgraded to the new version of WordPress (2.1) which supports full feeds differently than the old version. I’m hoping this gets corrected in the short term or that a work around is created. In any case I hope to be all the way back to full feed by the end of the weekend, even if it means uninstalling the new version.
Link fiesta
- The Alexis Gomez era is over. He signs with Denver.
- I’m remiss on this one, but Lee has a new stat called RPE (Run Preventing Event). It is simply a rate at which pitchers do the things that typically are favorable for the pitcher (K’s, ground balls, infield flies). I really like the stat for it’s simplicity. While DIPS and FIP are more analytical and provide more information, this seems to be more readily digested by the general public.
- Cameron Maybin will get a Spring Training invite to hang out with the big club. This isn’t a big surprise. Everything I’ve heard has him starting at Lakeland and moving to Erie this summer.
- The Wayne Fontes Experience turns 1 year old today.
- The Replacement Level Yankee Weblog ran a Diamond Mind simulation using CHONE projections. It has the Twins as the favorites in the Central and the Tigers making the playoffs 21% of the time. The projections have the Tigers pitching staff regressing from awesome to decent. THT has more on regression to the mean.
- Retrosheet has the files for 2006 available now. I’ve downloaded them and just begun to poke around. Hopefully I can come up with some interesting stuff in the next couple weeks. If you have anything you’d like me to check into, let me know. I won’t make promises, but if it is interesting and easy enough to do, and I have the time, I’ll give it a shot.
- If you subscribe to the RSS feed, or get the email updates, you may have noticed something new the last few days. I’ve incorporated del.icio.us links. I find that often times I come across interesting stuff on the web, and I want to share it with you. If I can, I’ll usually include it in a post like this one. Often times though, that won’t happen for a couple days, and many times they never make it in. But now, each day you’ll get all the stuff I bookmarked from the previous day. Some days there wont’ be anything, other days there’ll be a lot. I’m able to do this conveniently through Feedburner, which is why it will only appear in the feed and not on the site. It won’t change what I post here, but it is just another way to give subscribers some fresh and interesting content.
- The 2007 Bloggies are taking nominations. This year there is a sports blog category. If you feel so inclined you could nominate your favorite sports blogs.
Make a Tiger Connection
I received a request a couple days ago from a Tiger fan who was moving to San Francisco. He was looking to meet some fellow Tiger fans in the area to enjoy the rest of the season and hopefully the post season.
I know from my hit trackers and commentors that there are people all over the world who read this site (that still is hard for me to comprehend). I figured I’d help him out.
So if you are a displaced Tiger fan and are looking for other in the same region of the country, here is the place to identify yourself. Also, I set up one of them Frappr maps to aid in this.
I hope this will be helpful to you guys, and the benefit for me is that I learn a little bit more about the people visiting the site.