Shifting Gears

I've been thinking about taking the next couple of posts to write a Michigan Football preview rather than making fun of Lynn et al.

The images above will be discussed so wet your whistle and stay tuned...

Changed The Site Name, Yo

My hand was forced.  

We've always loved when our buddy Lynn would write those question and answer columns where he writes the questions that nobody is asking and gives the answers that make no sense.

Along those lines we get the fun "Point-counterpoint: Breaking down the popular Tigers debates from August 10th.

* Point: The Tigers have the best starting pitching among all their Central Division rivals because of their depth and talent: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Rick Porcello, Doug Fister and Brad Penny.

Best = depth and talent.  Hmm, OK.  Pointless yet redundant.

Counterpoint: Probably true, although the White Sox will argue.

Maybe someone should tell Lynn what a "counterpoint" is?  Typically it doesn't mean "agree" does it?

But you still need defense behind those guys and the Tigers aren't the best there.

But will the White Sox argue?  That's what I want to know.

* Point: The change in pitching coaches seems to have gone smoothly with Detroit's staff. But the hitting coach, Lloyd McClendon, remains. Don't people see what's happened with Curtis Granderson since he left Detroit?

Justin Verlander was great with the old pitching coach and remains great.  Brad Penny was a tomato can and remains a tomato can.  I guess the pitching coach transition has been pretty smooth.

* Counterpoint: You mean the Granderson who's batting .273 for the Yankees when he batted .302 and .280 during the first two years of McClendon's stint as Tigers hitting coach? You mean the Granderson who has 29 home runs at Yankee Stadium, where most of us thought he would hit 35 or 40, or more, each season? You mean the Granderson who hit .247 last season as the Yankees' omniscient hitting coaches got a hold of a guy whom McClendon had so hopelessly screwed up in Detroit?

I'm not going to get into a futile discussion about the uselessness of using only batting average to judge a hitter's performance let alone the performance of the hitting coach.  Not gonna do it.

What I can gather from Lynn's counterpoint is that he thinks Granderson was quite average for the Yankees last season and his huge 2011 is really no big deal and mainly a manifestation of his home ballpark.  After all, most of us* thought Granderson would hit 35-40 homers a year after being dealt to New York, right?

Clearly, Lynn must think the Yankees got fleeced dealing for that middling outfielder that swats 35-40 homers only because the cheating Yanks move in the right field fence by 150 feet every time Granderson bats, right?

Not right.

August 12th: Early returns favoring Yankees in megadeal

Take a peek at those statistics from Aug. 11, 2010. The Tigers were utter geniuses for trading Curtis Granderson to the Yankees.

OK, that's a year ago but the baseball season doesn't typically end on August 11th does it?  I just checked and it turns out that it doesn't.  And when the 2010 season ended Granderson finished with an OPS+ of 109.  In his last year with the Tigers, Granderson finished with an OPS+ of 102.  It would seem that his stats on August 11th, 2010 might not be all that important in the grand scheme of things.  But let's let Lynn continue with his thought experiment...

Meanwhile, in Detroit, a kid named Austin Jackson was flourishing in center. Max Scherzer and Phil Coke helped reconstruct manager Jim Leyland's pitching staff. And a young left-hander named Daniel Schlereth was getting some polish at Triple A Toledo in between stints that would leave him with a 2-0 record and 2.89 ERA in his first taste of life in Detroit.

Arizona might have liked its part of the bargain, but the Tigers looked like con artists.

The Tigers con-artisted their way to the golf course and the Yankees got fleeced into the playoffs.

It's a year later, and new numbers have arrived. Much like replays that can show different results from different angles, the picture has changed, at least temporarily.

Temporarily is probably the key word here as Lynn's mind floats like a plastic bag in the wind.

In fact, you can excuse the Yankees for not being terribly concerned what the Tigers or Diamondbacks do with their two-thirds of that parcel from December 2009.

The Yankees no longer mind being con-artisted?

Granderson is having one of those MVP-brand seasons the Tigers thought he would regularly amass after he had early monster years at Comerica Park.

He has 32 home runs and 93 RBIs for the Yankees. He is hitting .275, which isn't as important as how a player who once viewed left-handers as if they had skulls and crossbones on their uniforms is batting against those same lefties in 2011 — .273.

Whoa.  There's so much crazy here it's very hard to parse.  Hitting .275 overall isn't as important as hitting .273 in a minority of your at-bats huh?  In fact, what's more important is being able to hit .273 against pirates.  Gotcha.

The winner from all that finagling is, today — the Yankees.

Lynn goes on to ramble about who could win the finagling tomorrow.  But I want to know about yesterday man.

April 5th, 2010: A taste of Austin Jackson ... 

The throw he made in the seventh inning to nail Jason Kendall was one tool from Austin Jackson's workbench.

He's a very good baseball player. These were the skills we saw throughout spring camp.

The double he ripped down the left-field line in the Tigers' big sixth inning rally was another.

We'll see some struggles, no doubt. But the Tigers knew what they were doing when they brought on Jackson to replace Curtis Granderson.

Can't wait for the 2012 edition!

P.S. Lynn whips out a "splendid" in the article about the Yankees winning the deal when discussing Phil Coke.  He's seriously a Terminator Skynet sent back to never stop typing splendid.  There's no other explanation.

*most of us = not most of us