Unbridled Pessimism: The Fall of the 2006 Tigers

[Linnwood]

Unbridled Pessimism: The Fall of the 2006 Tigers

They say you should never go to the grocery store while you’re hungry. When we’re famished we tend to lose objectivity, and when we find ourselves in a warehouse full of foodstuffs, all we can think about is how tasty and delicious it’s all going to be. Such is our mania that we make unreasonable purchases, and after the big hero sandwich we make ourselves once we get home, we gaze upon the once exciting bounty and wonder why we needed two jars of Fluff, one bag of each flavor of potato chips, and two extended-family-sized sacks of frozen boneless chicken thighs.

 

Maybe I shouldn’t write about the Tigers on a day like today, but I have an awful feeling the team is going to blow it. It’s not only a feeling. It was a feeling not too long ago, but then it became a notion. Now, I am promoting this notion to the position of prediction.

 

Going into the games on this, the trade deadline day, the Tigers were a Felliniesque 8 1/2 games up in the A.L. Central. I mean Felliniesque not just titularly, in reference to the brilliant 1963 film, but also in the broader sense. Felliniesque as in dream-like, fantastical, and ultimately surreal.

 

When my team started tearing through the AL in the first month of the season I thought, “Hey, neat! For once I get to watch meaningful baseball in May.”

 

When they went 19-9 in May I began looking for Allen Funt behind shrubberies in my neighborhood while walking the dog.

 

When they won 20 games in June I shook my fist at the sky, threatening a god in whom I don’t even believe, and said, “Fine, have it your way. I’ll start expecting this team to win, but so help me you, if the wheels come off I’ll spread the atheist message tirelessly until my dying day and never watch baseball again!”

 

It is just now August, and after a month of 15-10 baseball I’m forecasting doom. In the immortal words of Mike LaFontaine, “Whaa hhhappen?”

 

Well, not much. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it isn’t, and I’m doing hungry shopping. Today the Tigers traded for Sean Casey instead of making a move for an impact player. The White Sox and Twins won decisively. Kenny Rogers made the second worst run-scoring team look like Murderer’s Row, and the Tigers lineup make Casey Fossum look like Cy Young.

 

Times like these make me actually sort of envy White Sox fans. After listening to countless hours of Hawk Harrelson endlessly pontificating as to the many ways in which the current White Sox team is the greatest in world history, there’s a general feeling that it is only a matter of time before their boys come through and rise to the top. Instead of realizing that Scott Podsednik is not, in essence, a good ballplayer, and that Pablo Ozuna is not a .400 hitter, they sit back and faithfully wait for what they got last year, the key home run from a Geoff Blum or a Ross Gload.

 

To me, first place is precarious, almost by definition. It’s an untouchably beautiful, impossibly delicate, thin crystalline decorative egg mounted atop a 6-month long game of Jenga that I am forced to watch. This could say more about me than it says about the Tigers, but I’m certain this feeling doesn’t come entirely from within. I began to think about where this pessimism comes from, and I realized that the potential for collapse that isn’t in my head comes from a roster full of players who have, at the very least, a scary downside and, at the most, severe meltdown possibilities.

 

Let me count the ways:

 

Pudge Rodriguez

This is the same guy who drew 9 walks last year. Nine. He’s doing better this year, but he still rarely works a free pass, so his output is heavily dependent on his batting average. It’s been pretty good so far, but he’s getting on in years and has had a few nagging injuries lately. He doesn’t have as much power as he used to, so if he hits .260 he’ll be a serious drag on the already middling offense, especially hitting near the top of the order. He’s still among the best throwing catchers in the game, but no amount of those kind of heroics can make up for the type of “hitting” he did last season.

 

Sean Casey

A downgrade, probably. I do not understand this trade. Casey generally carries a high but very empty batting average padded with a ton of singles. Last year, in almost 600 plate appearances, he had 41 extra-base hits, including only 9 homers. His batting average carries about a .370 OBP, usually, and because he rarely walks or strikes out, he grounds into an assload of double plays. 27 last year (25 or more constitutes an “assload”).

 

For reference, Chris Shelton had 35 extra-base hits, including 16 homers, in fewer than 400 plate appearances this year. Shelton is 26 years old, and Casey is 32. They like having another left-handed bat, but I don’t see how Casey is likely to be better than Shelton for the rest of the year.

 

Not enough downside for you? Casey is currently day-to-day with an oblique injury. Still not enough? The man broke his goddamn back earlier this year.

 

In two places.

 

Placido Polanco

I’ll pass. I think he’ll be fine, a solid contributor for the rest of the year. He relies on his batting average quite a bit, too, but it seems like he can flip singles into right-center at will. He slumped earlier this year, but I think that’s over.

 

Brandon Inge

He is playing Brooks Robinson-level defense at the hot corner, and that sort of thing isn’t typically subject to any kind of extended slump.

 

The bat is though. He has some pretty good pop (20 bombs so far this year), but Inge fairly regularly goes large chunks of time looking like he has no clue what he’s doing at the plate. He’s has put up a .246/.306/.486 so far this year, which is roughly what I expected of him, so what happens if he goes into a slump relative to these standards? It would kill dozens of rallies and cost the Tiger quite a few runs (up to 2 assloads).

 

Carlos Guillen

Guillen has been terrific this season, and I don’t see why he would slow down unless he has an injury.

 

And he always has an injury.

 

He has a bum knee, and even before the ACL repair two years ago, he was often hobbled by this or that. He usually misses at least a couple dozen games in a season, and so far this year he’s missed very few. He could go down any time.

 

Marcus Thames

He’s fine, and I think he’ll keep slugging because that’s all he’s done for the last few years. Oddly, he gets jerked around by the Tigers whenever possible, as though they’re unhappy with him. He strikes out a lot, which would be a big deal if he wasn’t drawing a decent number of walks and slugging .580.

 

Whenever he goes into a mini slump he gets benched, which probably only exacerbates the problem.

 

Craig Monroe

Monroe is Thames’ doppelganger. Whereas the Tigers look for every opportunity to bench Thames even though he has demonstrated that all he does is murder the ball, they look for every opportunity to play Craig Monroe, who has demonstrated, in 2000 major league plate appearances, that he is terrible. His SLG is 100 points lower than Thames’, and his OBP is 45 points lower. Monroe has been given 75 more plate appearances.

 

Meltdown potential: he might play too much, which is to say he might play at all. They love him.

 

Curtis Granderson

I love Curtis Granderson. I expect him to be his good old self, which of course means something will go horribly wrong because the galaxy hates me.

 

Magglio Ordonez

After having an abdominal muscle operated on last year and, in 2004, having to go to Austria to go through an experimental knee surgery that hasn’t been approved in the United States, what could go wrong?

 

He has 1 home run in his last 111 at bats.

 

Dmitri Young

Hasn’t had a good season in three years, just got out of the Betty Ford clinic after being arrested for choking his girlfriend, and swings at everything anywhere near the plate. Read into that what you will. He made three errors last night, and it would have been four if scorers used more common sense.

 

Kenny Rogers

His 1st half/2nd half ERAs, the last few years:

 

2006 3.85/10.97

2005 2.54/4.72

2004 4.21/5.46

 

I registered only a so-so score on the IQ test, but I can still find a pattern, and I have a theory:

 

He’s old.

 

Jeremy Bonderman

He’s fine. He’s a hothead prone to big meltdowns when he has one, but otherwise he’s damn good and should stay that way.

 

Nate Robertson

His 1st half/2nd half ERAs, the last few years:

 

2006 3.36/6.86

2005 3.35/5.70

2004 4.11/5.79

 

He isn’t so old, so here’s a different theory:

 

He’s not good in the second half.

 

Justin Verlander

He’s been sensational, but he’s never pitched this many innings before. Young pitchers in this situation tend to wear down. If that happens he could see his velocity dip down to a less unhittable 96 mph.

 

Zach Miner

With this guy there’s always a risk that he remembers he’s a rookie and isn’t supposed to be any good yet. He could turn into Mike Maroth when Maroth returns from the DL, which would be great unless Maroth becomes Mike Maroth again.

 

Todd Jones

He just isn’t good. The Tigers are going to have to learn this the hard way eventually, which means blown saves, which in turn mean losses. Count on it.

 

Joel Zumaya

Has started to walk all kinds of batters. I don’t know where this is going.

 

Fernando Rodney

See above.

 

Also, he has a BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) of .238. That’s not sustainable.

 

Well, there are a couple of other guys, but they’re not really worth mentioning here because they either already aren’t very good (and are therefore already “melted down”), or they have very specific roles at which they’ll probably be successful enough in the near future.

—————————————————————————————————-

 

I don’t think it makes any sense, but I’ve started to melt down before the players have. All I can think of are the classic late season tumbles, the ‘64 Phillies blowing their 6 1/2-game lead in the final two weeks of the season, the ‘69 Cubs coughing up their 9 1/2-game lead starting in August, and the ‘51 Dodgers taking only 7 weeks to surrender 13 1/2 games to the New York Giants.

 

Those teams have become icons of baseball pathos, their hapless slumps remembered forever while countless ball clubs that were awful for entire seasons and even entire decades have been forgotten. I’ll stop short of saying that life in the losers bracket is better, but I can attest that it’s less complicated. Those seasons, the ones I’ve had for 20 straight years now, are formalities, and even in the absence of drama there are always little things to enjoy. It’s like checking things off on a list and sticking to the basics instead of frantically reaching for all of the glorious, sweet things that await me if I can just make it home.

 

http://www.walkoffbalk.com/blog/index.php?id=121

 

Just thought it was interesting from a Tiger's fan view.

[Heads22]

Moved to the Diamond Club....and Linnwood, can you make your sig smaller? It stretches everything out.

[whitesoxfan101]

Your not a die hard unless you expect the worst thing possible to happen. Heartbreak is so much more common than joy for 99.9 percent of sports fans, so that's what most fans tend to expect, even during the best of times.

[jackie hayes]

Hasn’t had a good season in three years, just got out of the Betty Ford clinic after being arrested for choking his girlfriend, and swings at everything anywhere near the plate. Read into that what you will.

 

Well done.

 

Actually, the player assessments are pretty fair. He's just going too far in the conclusions he draws from them. It would take a lot of those negative scenarios happening all at once to derail the Tigers, and although that's possible, it just doesn't look likely.

[fathom]

I like this guy.

[Balta1701]

I like this guy.

Did you have a twin who was separated from you at birth and moved to Detroit?

[loltrain]

Most of the team had a poor July, and yet we came out of it farther ahead than we entered. I've said many times that I expect the division to be close and go down to the wire, but I think this is a traditional case of:

 

"I'll post everything possibly bad, so that either I can say I told you so, or I can say that I'm glad I was wrong because it means the team did well...either way I win!!!"

 

A very popular style on any sports message board

Edited August 1, 2006 by loltrain

[RME JICO]

If the pitching drops off this team is in trouble.

 

This is going to be an exciting finish to say the least.

[southsider2k5]

Glad to see its not only White Sox fans who are manic...

[The Ginger Kid]

That was a good read. I'd tell him to take a xanax and enjoy the rest of the season cause detroit's not going to fade and if anything, they'll probably increase their lead in the next few weeks. And I was convinced all season that they would fade. No more. My hat is off to them. They just play solid, fundamental baseball. Best story of the year by far. I don't know how far they'll go in the playoffs, but they won't go quietly.

[Bonderman38]

The guy is part right and part wrong. The reason for the trade was because more than half of Shelton's stats came in early April, and sense then, he has majorly slumped. (Even though he had picked it up a bit before the Casey Pick-up) And, the Thames reason is obvious. Pitchers have learned how to pitch him. He can't hit the outside pitch worth a crack. He has like 50 hits to right field and 10 combined to center and left.

 

And Todd Jones has been fine.

[Jake]

Glad to see another Detroit starter get shelled tonight.