Tiger Cubs (notes on the minors)

[gehringer_2]

But let's keep the logic straight. There is a difference between being bad because you are trying to stay profitable during a rebuild and being bad with the objective of getting good draft picks. The Tigers cut payroll to maintain profitability, not to be bad to get draft picks. The difference being that you can't solve that with a draft lottery because the picks were not what motivated the behavior. If you want to stop teams from cutting payroll when they are losing and revenue goes down, you have to do what the NFL does and uncouple revenue from winning. But that requires 'nationalizing' the major leagues, and NY and LA are never going to give up their current market advantages and agree to a more fully revenue shared league.

[Jim Cowan]

I still think that "tanking" means "pursuing a better position for draft picks".  It does not mean "having a low payroll and, consequently, a lousy team".  Those are two entirely separate things.  And feel free to tell me why Ausmus was fired if the organization was losing on purpose.

[Jim Cowan]

1 hour ago, Archie said:

I don't know what more they could have done to lose games.  They put a team on the field that wasn't even a good AAA team.  I understand the aspects of a rebuild but the Tigers didn't have to completely destroy the team to rebuild.  They could have kept a few "building blocks" and added to it.  They got very little for the trades they made of the veterans.  An expansion team could have started better than the rebuilding Tigers did.  Its not a good look for a team and horrible for the loyal fans.

What is your explanation for that?  Do you really think they did it for better draft picks?  Chris Ilitch cares about draft picks?  He cares about profit.  He makes more money if they win more games.  He tried to do it with a more stable approach to long term cost.  It didn't work out well to begin with.  But to suggest that he lost on purpose is nonsense.

[Tiger337]

33 minutes ago, Longgone said:

I wouldn’t have done a thing differently, except the prospects I traded for would all have panned out.

It seems to me that teams that trade proven players for prospects at the deadline lose the trade more often than not.  When you repeatedly have deadline fire sales, you are not dealing from a position of strength.  

[casimir]

1 hour ago, Longgone said:

I wouldn’t have done a thing differently, except the prospects I traded for would all have panned out.

Come on....

[casimir]

1 hour ago, Jim Cowan said:

I still think that "tanking" means "pursuing a better position for draft picks".  It does not mean "having a low payroll and, consequently, a lousy team".  Those are two entirely separate things.

I think they can be separate, but a lot of times they are in tandem.

Oakland has a low payroll, but they ain't tanking.

[Longgone]

53 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

It seems to me that teams that trade proven players for prospects at the deadline lose the trade more often than not.  When you repeatedly have deadline fire sales, you are not dealing from a position of strength.  

I believe prospects being overvalued or undervalued is cyclical.

[Tiger337]

6 minutes ago, Longgone said:

I believe prospects being overvalued or undervalued is cyclical.

I think it's just the nature of prospects.  They are risky.  You are going to miss more often than you hit, so you need your hits to be big ones.  There is a lot of luck involved too.   

[Longgone]

15 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I think it's just the nature of prospects.  They are risky.  You are going to miss more often than you hit, so you need your hits to be big ones.  There is a lot of luck involved too.   

Baseball players are risky. 

[Tiger337]

13 minutes ago, Longgone said:

Baseball players are risky. 

Prospects in particular.  I bet if you went through all the proven player for prospect deals in the last 15 years, you would find out that the team getting the propspect loses more often than not.  That doesn't mean a team shouldn't make those deals, but if your team gets into that position too often then the odds will be against them.   

[RandyMarsh]

9 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

Prospects in particular.  I bet if you went through all the proven player for prospect deals in the last 15 years, you would find out that the team getting the propspect loses more often than not.  That doesn't mean a team shouldn't make those deals, but if your team gets into that position too often then the odds will be against them.   

One thing to keep in mind on these trades is that yeah prospects in general are risky but what makes it even riskier is the team trading them knows more about them then the team trading for them so they are going to be more apt to trade the guys that may have drawn some red flags from their scouts or analytics departments.  The guys with the lowest risk are guys that the team probably isn't going to want to get rid of and are just going to keep for themselves. 

That's not to say that prospects you trade for don't pan out but I think generally there must be some sorta flaws in them that you either have to work out once you get them or hope that the player just overcomes them.

[RandyMarsh]

Kiley McDaniel of ESPN put out his top 100 and he has Greene at 5, Tork at 7,  Jobe at 58...and Dingler at 86.

[Tigeraholic1]

 

[Tigeraholic1]

 

[Tigeraholic1]

 

[casimir]

1 hour ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

 

I just peed myself a little.

[RandyMarsh]

Damn there was some late movement on that first pitch which I presume was a slider and I dont know if it was the camera angle or not fastball appeared to have quite a bit of arm side run to it.

Looked like it started in the lh batters box and finished over the plate.. probably in the low to mid 90s as well. Nasty stuff. 

[HeyAbbott]

On 2/12/2022 at 1:30 PM, Tiger337 said:

I think it's just the nature of prospects.  They are risky.  You are going to miss more often than you hit, so you need your hits to be big ones.  There is a lot of luck involved too.   

This is spot on. If a guy is a sure fire can't miss guy, he wouldn't be a prospect. He'd be a starter.

With respect to tanking, I am still debating with myself what constitutes a tank.Oakland very frequently has low payrolls, but has had many competitive teams .

I do tend to think that long term management might mean that the upper limit for a free agent contract should be 4 years. After all, a couple of years pass there will be another star, another"can't miss" guy available.

Edited February 18, 2022 by HeyAbbott
spelling

[Stanley70]

There are 3 elements to what many consider to be tanking.

1. Trading away expensive players and lowering payroll.

2. Not spending to improve the team.

3. The team that is left is bad.

Sometimes this happens due to penny pinching ownership and sometimes it is due to the natural ebb and flow of talent maturation and the ability to replace it.

I don't consider what has happened to the Tigers to be a "tank". They spent big, probably overextended themselves, and due to poor management have taken an eternity to develop another completive team.

What Miami and some other teams are doing is probably more about the bottom line than putting together a good team.

[RatkoVarda]

Keith Law's Top 20 list for The Athletic is interesting.

Bergner 15

Flores 17

EDLR 18

Alfonso 19

No Olsen, or Faedo.

 

[Jim Cowan]

Tanking means losing games deliberately in order to earn a reward, and the reward is improved draft choices.  Tanking does not mean having a low payroll, simply for the sake of a low payroll which is its own reward.

No one tanks for draft picks in baseball, because the picks are so worthless compared to the other sports.

[RandyMarsh]

Kiley McDaniel of ESPN has us at number 13 in his system rankings. He echoed what many people on here have said, to paraphrase "It'll be interesting to see how Avila and Co. Build the system now that they are competitive at the big league level cause almost anybody can hit on top 5 picks but now we will see if he can hit on picks that are later."

[Tiger337]

1 minute ago, Jim Cowan said:

Tanking means losing games deliberately in order to earn a reward, and the reward is improved draft choices.  Tanking does not mean having a low payroll, simply for the sake of a low payroll which is its own reward.

No one tanks for draft picks in baseball, because the picks are so worthless compared to the other sports.

They are worth less in baseball than other sports, but talent evaluation has improved a lot over the last couple of decades.  Would we be so optimistic about the Tigers future without Mize and Torkelson?  Their potential is a pretty big deal.  I don't really think teams go into to a season looking to tank, but I think the temptation for an already bad team to tank down the stretch is strong enough to think they might tank.   

[RandyMarsh]

6 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

They are worth less in baseball than other sports, but talent evaluation has improved a lot over the last couple of decades.  Would we be so optimistic about the Tigers future without Mize and Torkelson?  Their potential is a pretty big deal.  I don't really think teams go into to a season looking to tank, but I think the temptation for an already bad team to tank down the stretch is strong enough to think they might tank.   

India was the 5th pick in the Mize draft and just won ROY, Kelenic 6th and after his rocky call up he appeared to look like a legit bat going forward, Madigral has looked good,  Bart is a top 20 prospect in baseball, Grayson Rodriguez is top 5 so even  without Mize there's a good chance we would have ended up with a really good player anywhere in the top 10ish range and right now any one of them could end up turning out to be the best in the class which is how it usually is in baseball. 

[Tiger337]

2 minutes ago, RandyMarsh said:

India was the 5th pick in the Mize draft and just won ROY, Kelenic 6th and after his rocky call up he appeared to look like a legit bat going forward, Madigral has looked good,  Bart is a top 20 prospect in baseball, Grayson Rodriguez is top 5 so even  without Mize there's a good chance we would have ended up with a really good player anywhere in the top 10ish range and right now any one of them could end up turning out to be the best in the class which is how it usually is in baseball. 

Good points.