Tigers 2007 Review Part 1

Making a rare weekend appearance today.

What a difference a year makes. Just to make it even more upsetting, I can also offer you this too.

Disaster.

That's all it is.

When you are the returning AL Champ, have the AL Batting Champ (Magglio Ordonez), the runner-up to the AL MVP (Magglio Ordonez again), a top 5 Cy Young Candidate (Justin Verlander), lead the majors in hits, 3rd in the majors in runs, second in the majors in batting average, the second team to 60 wins, the 2nd best record at the All-Star break, 3,000,000+ fans, and the best record in baseball as late as July 23 and fail to make the playoffs, much less win 90 games, the season ends as a disaster.

Not 43-119 disaster. That's a different level.

But the season is a disaster.

You wasted two of the best individual performances by players in Tiger history (Magglio and Curtis Granderson) as well as brilliant seasons by Polanco, Verlander, Guillen, and Todd Jones. Failed to even win 90 games (which means you can't even play .555 baseball) and more importantly than all of that, not make the playoffs.

But, the injury bug was a huge problem this year. I do not think any team could overcome the injuries that destroyed this team.

• Their number 1 pitcher (Kenny Rogers) was gone for 2/3 of the season.
• Their number 2 and 4 (Bonderman and Robertson) pitchers also missed time with injury as well.
• With the starting pitching injuries we had to use 12 different pitchers to start games this year. That's not to "try a guy" out, but out of neccessity.
• Their number 1 setup guy (Zumaya) missed 1/2 the season
• Their number 2 setup guy (Rodney) missed a month or so.
• Their big bat in the lineup (Sheffield) missed a month or so and has been at maybe 70% the last month of the season too.

But injuries aren't an excuse or a reason to write off a season like 2007 as nothing other than a disaster. I say that for a couple reasons. First and tops among all are the expectations the season started with. Most baseball pundits were picking the Tigers to win it all. Also, most of those injury issues all came in before the collapse in August. It wasn't until September that the Sheffield thing manifested itself, Bonderman went down, and Kenny took a second stint on the DL.

But probably more than the expectations and the injuries their were some very bad performance issues as well.

• The starting pitching was brutal for a long stretch of time. Verlander was the only starting pitcher that met expectations this year...not exceeded, but just met.
• The bullpen had a horrible 1st half to the season. Todd Jones, yes, Todd Jones was the only consistency, and that isn't saying anything at all.
• The bottom 1/2 of the lineup had no performance (Pudge, flavor of the week for batting #7, Casey, Monroe, Inge, Santiago, Infante, Thames (who actually came the closest)) for nearly the whole season.
• None of their young players who were called up were consistent for anything longer than 3 days. This includes Miller, Maybin (a disaster to have been called up so soon), Rayburn, Hessman, Clevelan, Lopez, De La Cruz, Tata, and Vasquez. Compare that to Cleveland who had guys like Garko, Gutierrez (who was a Tiger killer this year), Shoppach, Cabrera, Carmona, and Perez for Cleveland.
• And Leyland rolled up some absolute horrible lineups and seemed too stubborn to make some necessary changes (like bench Brandon Inge, not bat Pudge 6th, etc.)
• Dombrowski also made bad moves. No deal at the deadline, waiting too late to send Monroe away, calling up Maybin too early to name a couple.
• And during the collapse we didn't win 10 series in a row: KC, at Chicago, at Anaheim (sweep), at Oakland, Chicago (sweep...at home!), Tampa, Oakland, at Cleveland, at Yankees, Cleveland (in that order) to go 11-23.

Throw in that shameful sweep by Cleveland a couple of weeks ago and that's an 0 for 9Detroit just cannot have. Going 19 - 17 against the horrible White Sox and Royals didn't help either. Finishing 6 games out of the wild card is a lot, but then again it isn't. If we win one game in each of the 3 sweeps we had, win two of those aforementioned 10 series we lost, and then go 21-15 against the last place KC and White Sox teams we are in the playoffs.

But that is the terror that is baseball. All it takes is a game or two here or there. Baseball is the only sport where coulda, woulda, shoulda works or has an iota of credence.

What the season did show was that 2006 wasn't a fluke or an apparition on the whole. Some individuals may have been (Inge, Monroe, etc.), but the team is legite in the grand scheme of baseball. The stayed in the race until the last weekend of the season. And no one is writing them off (on the national level...your ESPNs, Fox Sports, etc.).

Up next some positional breakdowns and a recap of the players as well as look at some of their offseason decisions (hint...one of them is in New York right now)