Good news: Pitchers and catchers report to Lakeland a week from today, and it’s going to be so warm this weekend it will almost feel like baseball season. So now that Brandon Lyon is on board and Justin Verlander kept Dave Dombrowski’s arbitration-avoidance streak intact, let’s look at the Tigers.
The purpose of this post is to challenge the conventional wisdom. Right now everyone is pessimistic, right? After all, we all got burned last year. I remember driving to the post office sometime in February and wondering if the Tigers had assembled the best lineup of all time. Then the same team that was supposed to win the World Series finished in last place.
So now the Tigers are bums. And because of last year, obviously there’s plenty of justification for pessimism. But the question here is, isn’t it also plausible that the Tigers could re-emerge as World Series contenders in 2009?
Looking back, the 2008 Tigers had some serious structural flaws. I’m defining a structural flaw as something that could reasonably be expected to go wrong. Two of the flaws were with the hitters: the Tigers were weak defensively and their abundance of slow power hitters made them prone to cold streaks at the plate. The other flaw law with the bullpen, which had too many question marks (namely the injuries and control problems of Joel Zumaya and Fernando Rodney) combined with a sketchy backup plan (namely Francisco Cruceta, an unproven reliever who missed a large chunk of Spring Training with visa issues).
The structural flaws turned into catastrophic problems: the Tigers played terrible defense; the lineup surrendered way too many shutout losses; the bullpen was terrible.
But the biggest problem, the team’s starting pitching, wasn’t flawed on paper, just in hindsight. Neither we nor Dave Dombrowksi could reasonably have expected that all five projected starters — Justin Verlander, Jeremy Bonderman, Dontrelle Willis, Nate Robertson, Kenny Rogers — would have disastrous seasons.
Okay, fast forward to this offseason. The roster is more or less intact, but the Tigers have also addressed their flaws.
First, I feel much better about the defense. The Tigers are significantly improved at the critical positions of catcher, shortstop and third base by adding Adam Everett and Gerald Laird and moving Brandon Inge back to third. All three are elite fielders, and at short and third the switch should be dramatic because Everett and Inge will replace the below-average tandem of Edgar Renteria and Carlos Guillen.
I’m not sure the shut-out problem has been solved, but it should be somewhat mitigated. Laird is less prone to strikeouts than Pudge Rodriguez and Guillen less so than Jacques Jones. Also, two of the hitters who are best at grinding out runs small-ball style, Placido Polanco and Gary Sheffield, had down years in 2008 and should rebound at least somewhat. And remember that the 2006 World Series team wasn’t real speedy either.
As for the bullpen, the Tigers added Brandon Lyon, but because Todd Jones retired, the signing doesn’t address the issues with Rodney and Zumaya. But the Tigers also signed a couple of other high-ceiling question marks, Juan Rincon and Scott Williamson, both veteran relievers who’ve had a lot of success in the not-too-distant past but struggled recently. Additionally, there are so many qualified guys competing for starting roles that one or more of them could move to the bullpen or serve as trade bait to acquire a reliever. If the same questions surround Rodney and Zumaya this season as last, I far prefer a backup plan of hoping someone emerges from a group of Williamson, Rincon and Robertson to banking on Cruceta. It seems fair to hope that at least two of those guys will emerge, and a back-end of, say, Lyon, Rodney and Williamson would be a significant improvement over last season. Add an effective, healthy Zumaya and it starts to look like a great pen. Again, I’m not saying it’s likely, but if the Tigers were unlucky last season in terms of injuries, what’s to say they won’t get lucky this year?
To sum up, the Tigers have dramatically addressed one of the three fatal flaws (defense) and at least marginally improved the other two, with the potential for a much better bullpen. So why are fans so sure they won’t contend?
I think the real key is starting pitching. If you felt the same way about Justin Verlander, Jeremy Bonderman, Nate Robertson and Dontrelle Willis that you did last winter, you’d be much, much more optimistic about the 2009 Tigers. From last offseason, the Tigers have lost one core member of the staff, Kenny Rogers, and added two other guys, Armando Gallaraga and Edwin Jackson. Gallaraga, of course, surprised as the singular bright spot of the Tigers’ staff last season. There’s plenty of debate about Jackson, but he at least looks like a solid back-of-the-rotation guy.
Obviously, the potential is there for another rough year from our starters. After all, they just gave us one. But it’s not ludicrous to think they’ll bounce back in a big way, either. For that to happen, all we’d need is for a group of guys still physically in their primes to return to their previous levels of performance, so it’s not exactly pie-in-the-sky thinking.
I don’t think we should get our hopes up like last year, but I’m not writing off the Tigers, either.
