bobrob2004

Sure, any of them. Why have the guy with the lowest on-base percentage lead off when his #1 job is to get on base?

Can we stop the Nick Maton leading off experiment? He went 0-4 tonight and is now batting .140. Are there really no other options?

I think you can just tell by the moves that were made (or didn't get made). 2002 was also a really bad year for the Tigers, 55-106, and they did nothing to improve during the off-season. They had 4 rookies in their regular starting lineup (Ramon Santiago, Eric Munson, Craig Monroe, and Alex Sanchez) and 2 rookies in their starting rotation (Nate Cornejo and Jeremy Bonderman). The other pitchers in the rotation, Mike Maroth, Adam Bernero, and Gary Knotts had very little ML experience with very little success. They may not have been actively trying to lose, but they sure weren't built to win.

That's right, I had forgotten about the off-field issues with Weaver and Fick. This was only Dombrowski's 2nd year with the Tigers, so I think he wanted address the off-field issues first before getting the players that were ultimately get for winning (although Pena and Bonderman were big names at the time that didn't really pan out. And Bonderman was rushed to the Majors). The Weaver deal was a mid-season trade, so it only happened a few months into the Dombrowski era as opposed to the off-season. 2004 was the first year that Dombrowski made a few splashes with Rondell White, Carlos Guillén, and Ivan Rodriguez.

Were they though? Their big acquisitions were Ernie Young, Steve Avery, and (strangely) A.J. Hinch. They let go of their best starter, Jeff Weaver, and starting players, Damion Easley, Robert Fick, and Randall Simon. They hired Alan Trammell as a gimmick more so than his managerial abilities. The 2003 team was set up to fail.

Comerica used to be very Detroit. It started out as the Detroit Savings Fund Institute and then The Detroit Savings Bank, The Detroit Bank, and then The Detroit Bank & Trust Company. They didn't change to Comerica until the 1980s. In 2007 they decided to move their headquarters out of Detroit and to Dallas.

Same thing with Great American Ballpark. Doesn't feel like it's a corporate sponsored name, but it is.

#TigersThreatenButDoNotScore

I see no reason why they couldn't call it Tiger Stadium. They call it Yankee Stadium, even though it's not the original one.

I don't think it overrates durability. WAR doesn't say which player is more talented. It states who contributed more to the team winning. The guy who plays 150 games is going to contribute more than the guy who only plays 75 games. But that doesn't mean that the second guy isn't a better overall talent. Fielding, sure. I agree with @Tiger337. There can be a lot of discrepancy between fielding stats. I haven't really heard anyone say that baserunning is overrated before. It's pretty straight forward. Steals are a positive and caught stealing is a negative. A guy that has more net steals is going to contribute more than the guy that doesn't steal. Of course it also covers things like tagging up and taking an extra base and getting thrown out on base. But again, pretty straight forward stuff.

I understand this thinking, even though I don't agree with it. The Tigers don't have the type of team where they'll have a lead in the 9th inning very often, so I'd like to see Hinch try to win the game at hand instead of trying to predict what'll happen tomorrow. I think Hinch got very lucky in this case and isn't indictive of how much of a genius he is. And even if the Tigers had a good bullpen, they would have probably won both games regardless of who pitched when.

Which is why there's no reason to act now. Someone will get fired midseason (someone always does) and maybe that person will have the qualities to justify replacing Hinch. In the meantime, just wait until the off-season and go through the interview process like normal. This time with Harris' input.

Aside from the fact that I said I'd wait until the off-season, the most likely candidate right now would be the bench coach. In the Tigers case that's George Lombard. Of course they could also grab a manager that was fired last year and couldn't find a job in the off-season, such as Joe Girardi or Joe Maddon.

So we keep Hinch because that's who we are stuck with? Leftovers from the previous regime? Why not let Harris have a say in who he wants to manage the team? He's taking over the rebuild, why not clean the whole slate and start over from scratch? No, I'm not suggesting we fire Hinch right this minute. Let him ride out the year and see who is available in the off-season. Is there really no one else that will be able to take the Tigers to the playoffs, assuming they are able to get the right players? Sparky Anderson was before my time, so I do not know what the overall consensus was when he was hired. He was hired in the middle of the season, when the Tigers actually had a winning season, and they decided to fire Les Moss and replace him with Sparky Anderson. Of course Sparky had great success with the Reds, so maybe this was a fluke thing and there really are no managers now that are available or will become available that could justify replacing Hinch.

I think it's time for this discussion again: What makes A.J. Hinch so special? He wins when he has great players in Houston, but loses when he has terrible players in Detroit, just like every other manager. When he loses, he can't be blamed because...just look at the players he has to work with. Brad Ausmus won the division in 2014, just like many other managers would have, given the players. A more experienced manager would have gone further, so it's great to have a good manager in the playoffs. But the Tigers are not expected to go to the playoffs any time in the near future, so why have Hinch on the Tigers? What exactly does he bring to the table that any other mediocre manager would not be able to bring? Why is he cherished so much that the thought of Harris bringing in someone else is so beyond absurd that we cannot even discuss it?

He rolled over when his players were cheating in Houston. It's par for the course.

Lange should have pitched the 8th and the 9th. The restricted one inning only reliever pitching is an old school strategy that managers like Hinch should have evolved from. He was smart enough to use his closer in the 8th inning, but too dumb to leave him in. Lange only threw 12 pitches, what is Hinch protecting him from? The thing that isn't being discussed enough is the blown umpire call of interference on Kreidler that cost the Tigers a run. Why didn't Hinch argue the call more? I know he was upset by it, but he didn't show any fire on the field. I said it a few weeks ago, these are the things that are going to get Hinch fired.

As soon as Hinch has a bunch of players who cheat, they win.

In 2019 the Tigers started 12-10 and finished with 114 losses.

Despite the outcome, I stayed the whole game. And I plan on torturing myself again and seeing them later on this year. I'll let you know when so you can place your bets on another blowout game.

I'm going to the game today. First time going to Comerica in about 5 years. Exciting to see a game in person again.

There's basically four factors for WAR that get added together: offense, baserunning, defense, and positional adjustment. On FanGraphs, they basically take wOBA and adjust it to batting runs for that section of the calculation. wOBA factors in walks, HBP, singles, doubles, triples, home runs, etc. The exact situation of when these hits occur doesn't matter. A home run in the first inning in a 0-0 game is worth exactly the same as a home run in the bottom of the ninth with the score of 5-5 or 10-0. Win Probability (WPA and RE24) factors in specific situations, and the result gets added/subtracted, but this stat is not used in the calculation of WAR. I have seen arguments that this stat should be heavily weighted when determining MVP because it directly shows who has affected the team's winning, as opposed to WAR.

Since he's my Tiger, I'm going to have to defend Lange there. Meadows should've caught that.

Glad to know Hinch can manage a bullpen.

It's not the number of games that he loses, it's how he loses them that will determine it.