If We Ran the Detroit Tigers…

I have these two friends that I discuss Detroit Tigers with baseball on a weekly basis sometimes daily basis. All three of our views are totally different on how we would run the team. For the purposes of this reading, I will call my friends Moose-Man and The Cuban. Here are all of our thoughts leading up to the trade deadline.

Moose-Man believes right now that the Tigers should trade Miguel Cabrera for some quality pitching. He believes Cabrera is a distraction and hits into to many double plays. He also feels that we have a good enough lineup without him and we shouldn’t give up our whole farm system like we normally do.

Now The Cuban on the other hand loves her baseball and that’s obvious because she’s from Cuba and they love their baseball. For some reason she does not like Justin Verlander but she’s coming around. She believes Brandon Inge needs to go. Inge has been there a long time and has had a great glove but a very horrible bat. We need another decent bat at the bottom of the lineup she says and Inge is not it.

Then there is my way of how I would do things. We all agree that Jim Leyland needs to be fired because he makes very poor choices a lot of times. However I would actually backtrack if I was running the Tigers. I would have never gotten rid of Jair Jurrijens, Omar Infante or Matt Joyce. I would have instead packaged Inge, Guillen and Ordonez to get a good pitcher. I love all three guys but they are no longer the future of Detroit.

Now acquiring Jhonny Peralta and Victor Martinez was a great thing and they have helped the Tigers tremendously but that still doesn’t solve out pitching problem. I think right now we could get rid of Brandon Inge, Ryan Raburn, Ramon Santiago, Ryan Perry, and Phil Coke. None of them are really consistent and it would be roughly nine million dollars of wasted money we would be getting rid of. If Guillen comes back strong and Ordonez keeps hitting great like he has been then keep them around but remember they are both getting up in age and won’t be around much longer. Both of them have been injury plagued so how do you really want to keep them?

The trade deadline is coming up in three weeks and it should be interesting to see what happens. What moves would you make if you ran the Tigers or any other MLB team?