In short, he’s that rare high school pitcher that you want to take a flyer on early on in his pro career. It’ll be four or five years before he’ll get to the chalk board to erase Jeff Weaver’s name, but he’s an outstanding pickup.
The A’s sent righthander Jeremy Bonderman to the Tigers to complete the Jeff Weaver-Ted Lilly-Carlos Pena trade. Bonderman was 9-8 with a 3.61 ERA over 144 2/3 innings and he struck out a whopping 160 batters while walking 55. That’s an impressive performance for a 19 year-old in the hitter-friendly high Class A California League.
Tigers president and GM Dave Dombrowski now realizes he inherited one of the worst messes in all of the major leagues. That one player flew from Oakland to Las Vegas and back on the Saturday night between day games is still the move of the year in that visiting clubhouse.
Whatever happened to that happy clubhouse from spring training? Now Weaver is ripping Luis Pujols and saying that nobody respects him. Then this past weekend Bobby Higginson ripped into Randall Simon for some baserunning mistakes. Then Bobby and Pujols get in an argument on the field. Also let’s not forget the whole Dave Dombrowski-season ticket holder fiasco. Ah, happy days are here again.
Rumors also circulated this week about an Angels deal that would have brought Juan Acevedo and possibly also Robert Fick. But Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski has reportedly been telling other clubs he doesn’t want to trade Acevedo right now.
It’s also reported that Seattle is interested in Mark Redman.
Brandon Inge continues to struggle throwing out base runners. The Tigers catcher has thrown out only 13.9 percent (5-of-36) of runners attempting to steal on the year. That mark would rank second lowest of all AL catchers if Inge had enough attempts to qualify.
One prospect that has gone largely unnoticed this season is Tigers outfielder Cody Ross. He’s batting .289 with 16 home runs, 58 RBIs, 15 steals and an .893 OPS (on-base plus slugging) in the Eastern League. He should get some attention from a team in search of offensive production.
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