Saturday, March 05, 2011

Who Are the Missing Locks In The Tiger's Line Up? LF, 2B, DH, and C?

IF you asked me I think that the best line up would feature V-Mart as the regular catcher, Ryan Raburn in LF, and Guillen at DH with possibly Scott Sizemore playing 2B. Avila will get his time the other days at catcher, and V-MArt can hit up DH on those days. Guillen could field 2B on those days as well. This would easily be our most lethal offense in my mind. Not as good defensively, but we aren't great anyways so who cares right? Hitting trumps defense everyday for me. Pitching can handle that job.

What are we hearing though? I think LF is still a bit open to interpretation. Raburn I believe is the best choice there for the everyday guy due to him being able to hit both LHP and RHP about the same average. A nice thing to be able to do for an everyday player obviously. Makes him less likely to need to be in a platoon situation. He also has about 30 HRs in a little over 700 ABs so the power is certainly there as well to go along with a .280 or so average. He has never played everyday, and many think he is an awful fielder, but I say give him the shot and he may also get better playing ONE position all the time.

According to MLive: "He [Dombrowski] reiterated that the job belongs to Carlos Guillen if healthy, and that Will Rhymes, Scott Sizemore and Danny Worth are in a “quiet competition” for the spot while Guillen is out."

I'm really not against Guillen playing 2B, but I feel having him at DH would keep him in the line up much more this year than him actually playing everyday. I most certainly don't want Rhymes playing a lot. OF course he may be alright. He just has no real skills at the plate IMO. He's Everett with a few more lucky hits last year. That's what those guys are. Little slap hitters that are subject to the baseball gods and balls sniffing open infield. Nobody is going to be hanging banners off of chandeliers because of guys like him being in the line up.

Friday, March 04, 2011

Porcello Unleashed

I don't know if I have posted about this before, but I have always been waiting for Rick Porcello to be allowed to expand his pitching arsenal. His first couple of years ahve been focused more on his main fastball and sinker to get him by with a little dash of this, or that. Now it sounds like we may finally get to see a bit more variety.

As an article on MLB.com posted a couple weeks back (I completely missed it actually until a couple days ago), Porcello is much more than a 3 pitch guy. When he was drafted he had a few more pitches at his disposal, but the Tigers made him into that groundball pitcher his first season, and he was quite successful. Then last year he began to have a bit of trouble keeping the sinker down and his ratios went to hell as well as all his other stats.

At this point he has the sinker, a curve ball, and a slider as his non-standard pitches. The kind of arsenal, that if able to be used effectively puts him on a completely different level.
While both the slider, and the curve ball seem to be still in the tinkering phases, it is said there that he has improved both quite a bit, and we should be seeing a much larger assortment of pitches this year. This has been my dream since he was drafted. a 4-5 pitch guy. Can you imagine if he can keep all these pitches under control?

It's not like that is the extent of it either. He has a bit of a cutter on his fastball he throws at times too with a slightly different speed than his top heat. Throw a bit of a change up in there and this guy with control of even half this arsenal is dangerous. I can't wait.

Looks Like Kevin Smith is On His Way Out

Lions didn't offer a tender to Kevin Smith this week, which makes him a free agent. Lions did a bit of green cleaning this week and tried to hold the 2 most important ones of Avril and Houston at least. While I have no problem with this, and I don't exactly want to go out of our way to bring him back, it is a shame he couldn't stay healthy. I guess all those carries in college caught up to him immediately.

I have posted before that I thought both KS and Mo Morris had better years than Best did. We are going to give Best the benefit of the doubt since he was supposedly injured all season with "turf toe", and we have seen his explosiveness at times. We still have Mo Morris to run that job that KS would have had as well, and he's probably more seasoned in the things that RBs don't get much credit for as well, and cheaper.

The only real negative I see coming from this is that the Lions decide to jump on a RB early in the draft, but I am optimistic it won't happen. Smith after all was the 1st pick in the 3rd round. He was a smart and safe pick at that point.

What we don't want to see again is the Lions patented trade up from the 2nd to take a RB in the first again. This is just not something I buy into much. Best I don't think cost us too much so I wasn't that upset with it, and he could be really great as a committee back. I just don't want to see it AGAIN.

Good luck, KS. Miami may want you.