Bunt Singles: Dec 15
posted in 2007-08 offseason, bunt singles |As we try to return to some baseball normalcy….
- Jim Price will only do color commentary on the radio
Tom Gage reported that in today’s News. Price previously did play-by-play on the middle three innings. No reason was given for the change. If you ask Tigers fans, however, I think you’d receive a few reasons pretty quick. Price wasn’t very good at PBP. His descriptions lacked, er, description. And they weren’t timely. And he would breathe into the microphone. I like him fine for color. The former Tigers player says “we” too much though. Dan Dickerson will do all the PBP. That’s fantastic news, because I really enjoy his calling of games. He does everything right that Price did wrong, so it was a jarring switch in the middle of the game.
- The Tigers contacted the agent of Miguel Olivo, former catcher for the Florida Marlins.
Ian at BYB wonders if he could be talked into backup money (he earned $2M last season) for this season and given the chance to become the Tigers starting catcher in 2009. Ian points out he threw out a similar percentage of runners as Pudge did, but he also had the worst WP/PB numbers in the National League. So I’m not really certain that’s a direction I’d want to go fulltime, especially if his NL OBP was only .262, though he had some pop in his bat.
- Ian says: reliever available. Should Tigers act?
Texas did not retain the services of Akinori Otsuka. His ERA was 2.51. The Tigers may have been interested in him at the trading deadline last season. Yes, their payroll is high. But their weakness is the bullpen. Do they have any change left in the piggybank to help shore up that problem? I agree that Otsuka would make a fine solution if they can find a way. Apparently he wants a longer-term contract though. And apparently he may have an elbow problem, making him sorta risky. Still. He could definitely help if that risk drives the price down. I’m not sure it will, a lot of teams are desperate for relief. I don’t really expect the Tigers to pursue any more higher priced free agents.
The topics include the value of Brandon Inge on the trade market (not much), Lynn’s views on the rotation (it’s good, don’t look at 2007’s numbers alone), the bullpen (still scary) and other things.
- A glance at Rick Porcello by Take 75 North.
- Prospect lists: good or bad? Matt at T75N isn’t a fan.
If you aren’t reading T75N, you should be. Especially now with needing to figure out who is still left in the Tigers’ farm system. Porcello hasn’t had a whole lot of words written about him since the draft, but it’s a good primer with a lot of nice links.
The prospect list post is interesting with a great analogy. Lists are fine, but how much can you really rank prospects and list them top to bottom? Is it more useful to group them together and talk about traits? Matt says yes. I am apt to agree. I really don’t see how you can say “This guy is No. 7, this guy is No. 8.” After No. 1 or 2, does it really matter much? I don’t think so.
- Finally today, a Spartans basketball blog.
I have meant to tout this thing for weeks and I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned it. Maybe I have. Two mentions is OK, I’m sure. For us MSU faithful, it’s nice to have a team to root for during the winter months and that’s a great new blog about it. And when college basketball season comes to and end, the Tigers are just getting ready to go north, and then we have baseball season to enjoy (especially this year!)
One addition
- Lee posted the Tigers Fielding Independent Pitching numbers
… After I did my roundup but I would be remiss if that wasn’t on the required reading list. I love FIP! It’s a nice way to see if the pitcher was helped or hurt by his defense and luck. For that reason, it’s useful in finding out if any pitcher had a particularly lucky or unlucky year, so you can figure out if he may return to earth or bounce back. It shows up Dontrelle Willis probably was that bad in 07, but he was also pitching injured, he wrote in a Yardbarker comment (scroll down to 28).
OK, so two additions
- Dontrelle has a new post up at Yardbarker about being called up to The Show.
I like DTrain’s blogs there, but even more fun for me is reading the comments. He responds to fans all the time over there. For a guy coming off a bad season personally and with a team that piled up losses, his excitement with becoming a Tiger really comes through. Which is awesome, because it matches our excitement as Tigers fans; we have experience in such matters ourselves, from the seats anyway.
Sphere It
I think you may have already given me one shout out, but I appreciate another.
Go Green and Go Tigers!
Can never give enough shoutouts to fellow SpartanTigers!
Thanks for the link and kind words, Kurt. As for the features, I like the SportsSpyder thing the best because it helps me keep an eye on whether I missed something interesting from the local papers. I wish it was above the ads, but I realize if the ads weren’t prominent there wouldn’t be much point to them.
How often do you use the blogroll? One move I’m considering is switching sportspyder (most useful to me, besides recent comments) to the left and the blogroll to the right.
Dontrelle has an interesting blog. However, it would be better if he and sports bloggers in general would learn to use spell check and how to construct sentences. I see this problem on the sports pages of many newspapers as well. It’s just a little annoying.
Yeah, that is a common problem with blogs. I catch myself doing silly little things on the blog that I don’t think I’d do in the newspaper, it’s sorta weird like that. I will smetimes sneak in and fix the grammar later when I re-read the post. That’s probably where it comes from, not paying enough attention to the second or third readthrough before pushing the “publish” button.