Tiger Geist

My father, brother-in-law & I officially accepted the Phillies as our National League team to root for last spring;  we went to see Detroit play an ‘away’ spring training game at the Phillies beautiful stadium and decided they were the team to root for.  Their facility was awesome, the fans were great, and the restaurant across the street had outfits that put hooters to shame.  That was of course the infamous ‘broken hand’ game for Curtis Granderson, that helped kill the season.  Go Phillies!

On some other notes, I’ve been trying to get over a nasty bout of “Tigers suck”-ness, which i’m slowly recovering for.  Remember that as a season ticket holder to UM Football, this is not the best Fall I’ve ever had.  But I’ll slowly recover for more Tiger talk.

Baseball thoughts:

• MLBPA thinks the league is against Barry Bonds.  Honestly.. hard to argue with them.  Who knows, but they say they have ‘evidence’.  Thats not a good sign.
• Jake Peavey is on the market.  I imagine Detroit is out of the running for this type of trade, or any other big name free agent signee.
• I’m sure Detroit will pursue Derrick Lowe, or maybe even AJ Burnett.  Dombrowski had Burnett in Florida, but i’m sure he’ll get more money then Detroit wants to spend.  It would be interesting if Lowe wants to ‘return home’… whatever that means.  If I get a call from a company in the Detroit area right now offering me a job, i’d probably turn it down too.  I also would worry about pitchers going from the NL to the AL — the NL is a much much much easier league to pitch in (See Sabathia, C.C.)
• Starting to think 2009 is a good year to try Zumaya out as a starter.  He’s having some control problems and it would give him more time in spring training, etc to work it out.  Maybe he can return to the closer role in 2010 when he proves he’s healthy.  Right now it might be easier to just let him get healthy.
• If we’re looking for a stop-gap solution at short stop, I imagine a platoon of Omar Vizquel with Ramon Santiago is preferred to dealing with Edgar Renteria again.  Unless Renteria wants to play on a one-year contract worth $2million.  That would def. be a defensive upgrade, though Omar can’t hit.
• Sf Chronicle speculates that Detroit might be interested in Huston Street as a closer (or even a reliever).  I imagine they’ll want prospects that we won’t be very interested in giving up, but Oakland will need to shed payroll for a guy they probably don’t need.  Another thought — if we took Eric Chavez and his contract off of his hands, much less would be needed.  Don’t know what will happen on that front, but a healthy Chavez is a gold glove third basemen and hits better then Inge.  Who knows if he’ll ever be healthy again, but its not like Oakland’s medical staff is top notch. Then again, the same could be said about the Tigers.  Its going to be hard to say what Illitch will allow going into next year in terms of payroll, and paying for a player who’s been hurt each of the last three years (who makes $11 million /year) probably isn’t in the cards.