Ah, Spring Training!
The turtle has finished its song, and retired to his turtle-nook, quietly shaking his head. What’s all the fuss about some groundhog anyway? When the turtle says it is spring, it is spring, and the boys of summer grab their gloves and take the field under the Florida sun and in the Arizona desert.
It is actually baseball weather in the midwest at the moment, but that will come and go, like the prevailing opinion of who the Tiger centerfielder will be. Florida is where it is at in Tigerland right now, albeit with the absence of Mr. Illitch clouding the skies a bit.
Still, spring is for hope, and hope and spring pair like wine and cheese. Hope isn’t really a plan though, and it seems like most of what happened in the offseason for the Tigers was a bunch of hoping that the pieces they already have will grow to fit in their many-gapped puzzle. Well, we shall see.
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Miguel Cabrera, at least, isn’t writing this season off. He is focusing on hitting in addition to hitting: he has added boxing to his offseason workout.
The Donkey is back! The illustrious Don Kelly has been hired as a pro scout for Detroit.
Who will play center? This is one of the burning questions of the season, and we can hope at least someone will. Well, I guess that’s inevitable. The Tigers are hoping Gose will miraculously be good. They are rooting hard! Umm, OK. They are also hoping Tyler “Fingers” Collins will be good. Or maybe Mikie Mahtook, who they are hoping is better than he was on Tampa Bay. Then there is Jacoby Jones, who one hopes will mature into the position. I will save the Most Hopeful award though for Omar Infante, who hopes he can be the centerfielder, since he played center a little bit almost a decade ago. Hey, if not here, then where?
Also destined to spend some time roaming center is Andrew Romine, who showed up to camp with eight different gloves, and wins the Don Kelly award by a landslide.
Also there is a lot of talk about who will bat second, and I will refrain from posting links from that one, because, well, Justin Upton is batting second. Justin Upton is definitely not batting second. Could Miggy bat 2nd? Miggy is definitely not batting second. Castellenos might bat second! (That’s the latest one).
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I would be remiss if I left out the doings of Major League Baseball, which has implemented the new fabulous time-saving automatic intentional walk rule. The intentional walk is now automatic, and is signaled by a gesture from the dugout (much fun was had on twitter with suggested gestures). Intentional walks totaled 1410 minutes in 2016, so the new rule will make games an average of 35 seconds shorter. Whee!!! Hold on to your seatbelts, these games will fly by now!. I’m not a fan of the rule. It could, and may soon be worse: they are testing a new extra-inning rule in the low minors, where teams start out with a runner on second base. Each out that nobody scores, everyone has to do shots (OK, I made up the second part). Obviously I am less than enamored of these changes.
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Finally, a note about the website. It seems that commenting on past posts is not possible. I know no more about this than you do. Perhaps Kevin can shed some light on it.
