2022-23 Detroit Tigers Offseason Thread

[Tenacious D]

I was a very junior advertising grunt at one of the bigger ad agencies in Detroit.  My client was a sponsor of the Tigers radio broadcast and I had Rick Rizzs call me asking if he could do commercial work, in exchange for a car.  I was excited and starstruck until he basically started stalking me after that.  Seemed like a nice dude, though, and he eventually respectfully honored the restraining order I filed against him.

[Tiger337]

9 minutes ago, oblong said:

I delivered a pizza to him once.  I also remember hearing him do some NCAA tourny games.

 

Are you sure it wasn't Rick Rizzs?  I never could tell them apart.  

[chasfh]

42 minutes ago, Shinzaki said:

Trim those sideburns, Mattingly!!

He's still better than Steinbrenner.

[Jim Cowan]

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

Are you sure it wasn't Rick Rizzs?  I never could tell them apart.  

That was a big drawback for those 2 guys, they sounded exactly the same.

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, Jim Cowan said:

Here's my lasting memory of Tom Monaghan - he didn't like Kirk Gibson, because Gibson didn't shave every day.  That's it.  That's all I remember about him.

Hard to have lived through the Monaghan era in A^2 without concluding he was a total jerk. Was very sad when he bought the Tigers. He was sort of like the precursor to guys like Elon Musk. Worked really hard at one thing and did it well and immediately thought that made him competent in a bunch of things he knew nothing about, but he came from less educaitonal background than Musk so it was worse. Then he went a bit off the deep end with his Catholicism. Luckily that more or less led him to removing himself from the public scene - at least in MI.

Edited December 8, 2022 by gehringer_2

[gehringer_2]

3 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

That was a big drawback for those 2 guys, they sounded exactly the same.

exactly!

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

Also, FWIW—I understand it's a huge apostasy to even broach this here—the JR people I knew at that time were not fans of Ernie in general.

The world is full of corporate types who meet the phrase "born on third base and thought they had hit a triple" who inherit a good situation and start to believe it was their own briliiance and decide to remake everything in their own image. Straight line from A->B where B=Fail.

TBF, the industry probably saw the writing on the wall that AM radio was dying long term and were desperate to do something that might change that but picking the best thing in their portfolio to screw up wasn't the move.

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

Are you sure it wasn't Rick Rizzs?  I never could tell them apart.  

Goodbye, goodbye baseball. 

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

Goodbye, goodbye baseball. 

That was a terriblre home run call.  

[chasfh]

16 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

That was a terriblre home run call.  

He still uses it, and I think there might be a few others who ape him.

[oblong]

they love him in Seattle.

I don't know.... is it any worse than.... at the risk of saying it.... "looooong gone"?  Things are great when spontaneous but now even Dickerson will take the "into the mob scene at home" from the Magglio call and use it for, say a Wednesday afternoon walk off in May.  

 

 

[Tiger337]

25 minutes ago, oblong said:

they love him in Seattle.

I don't know.... is it any worse than.... at the risk of saying it.... "looooong gone"?  Things are great when spontaneous but now even Dickerson will take the "into the mob scene at home" from the Magglio call and use it for, say a Wednesday afternoon walk off in May.  

 

 

I didn't really cared for "looooong gone" either.  He never even used that call until his later years.  He also played up his signature lines more in his later years which I suspect he was being told to do.  He was better when he was younger. 

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

they love him in Seattle.

I don't know.... is it any worse than.... at the risk of saying it.... "looooong gone"?  Things are great when spontaneous but now even Dickerson will take the "into the mob scene at home" from the Magglio call and use it for, say a Wednesday afternoon walk off in May.  

 

 

Ernie didn't start doing "looooong gone" until the 80s, I believe.

I think "goodbye baseball" is one of those calls where you have to hear it for a few years to get used to it, and then to appreciate it. It's just that he had an impossible act to follow, it the phrase was never going to catch on here.

Rick Rizzs has an outside shot at a Ford Frick award from the Hall of Fame.

[Tiger337]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

Ernie didn't start doing "looooong gone" until the 80s, I believe.

I think "goodbye baseball" is one of those calls where you have to hear it for a few years to get used to it, and then to appreciate it. It's just that he had an impossible act to follow, it the phrase was never going to catch on here.

Rick Rizzs has an outside shot at a Ford Frick award from the Hall of Fame.

I was surely biased, but I didn't like Rizzs and Rathbun.  I could not tell them apart, didn't like their voices and the good bye baseball call sounded forced to me.  I don't think it was just a "they're not Ernie Harwell" thing though, because  I liked Beckman as a broadcaster. 

[gehringer_2]

2 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I could not tell them apart,

This is a bigger thing than I think most people credit. When you have two people in the booth, they spend a fair amount of time talking to each other and when you can't tell them apart, 'conversations' don't make any sense. Add that to the fact that you often are listening to a game in a noisy environment like a moving car or while you are working around the house, it's just a bad recipe. Whatever thier individual qualities, whoever paired them was a sonic idiot - a person with no actual 'ear' for sound at all.

[chasfh]

But did they appeal to young people and bring new fans to the team? What did the consulting firm from Chicago conclude?

[Edman85]

48 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I was surely biased, but I didn't like Rizzs and Rathbun.  I could not tell them apart, didn't like their voices and the good bye baseball call sounded forced to me.  I don't think it was just a "they're not Ernie Harwell" thing though, because  I liked Beckman as a broadcaster. 

I was conditioned to hate them. Basically, that was around the beginning of my time being old enough to follow the Tigers and my dad turned me against them from the jump.

[casimir]

19 hours ago, Jim Cowan said:

Bogarts is 30?  Somebody gave 11 years to a 30-year-old shortstop?  

Turner will be 30 in in the middle of next season, and he got 11 from Philadelphia.  I guess the safety net is that SS is the top of the defensive spectrum and so there are plenty of other defensive options on the diamond as that athleticism depreciates.

Which is the better contract?  Bogarts or Turner for 11 seasons or the 4 year extension that the Tigers gave to Victor Martinez?

[casimir]

20 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

Just as aside concerning Bob Rathbun. Anyone replacing Ernie, especially under those circumstances were bound to fail.  Bob did some play by play for the Tidewater Tides in Norfolk and also some basketball (ODU?)and football while we were there. He worked at the same station as my wife. I worked MaryBeth (Bob's wife) briefly doing traffic in Norfolk. They were both very ambitious in their careers. 

Detroit can be a tough town to acclimate to if you are an "outsider". One of MaryBeth's parents also became ill and died during their time here. From what I read she was not happy in Detroit.

Bob has been doing Atlanta Hawks games for the last 25 plus years. His resume also shows him doing some Braves games for about 10 years. He's had a very good career. Detroit was not a good fit for either broadcaster.

Yes, it was a bad situation for all announcers involved.

I wonder how the conversation went from the Rizzs/Rathbun side of the negotiation to replace Harwell/Carey.  I wonder what kind of discussion was had about the shoes they were trying to fill in.  And from all sides of it, from WJR, from the Tigers, from whomever helped represent Rizzs/Rathbun.

[CMRivdogs]

12 minutes ago, casimir said:

Yes, it was a bad situation for all announcers involved.

I wonder how the conversation went from the Rizzs/Rathbun side of the negotiation to replace Harwell/Carey.  I wonder what kind of discussion was had about the shoes they were trying to fill in.  And from all sides of it, from WJR, from the Tigers, from whomever helped represent Rizzs/Rathbun.

I ran across this article from shortly after Rathbun was let go. It's only one side of the discussion, but it seems that they were kept out of the loop.

https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950314/03140415.htm

 

[chasfh]

The deals given to Bogearts, Turner, et al might end up not unlike the Bobby Bonilla deal, in which they play maybe eight years, then agree to fade into the woodwork for the last three in return for a negotiated settlement stipulating payments into their old age. That way the player gets the full value of the contract with income security throughout the rest of their long life, while the team gets the dual advantage of a lower luxury tax hit while the player is playing, coupled with the ability to keep the settlement payments off the official payroll once he’s gone.

[oblong]

12 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

I ran across this article from shortly after Rathbun was let go. It's only one side of the discussion, but it seems that they were kept out of the loop.

https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950314/03140415.htm

 

I remember very shortly before they were fired, like maybe even the day before, they both hosted the nightly sports show on WJR.  There was a vacation or something so they had guest hosts that week.  I listened to it while delivering pizzas. They were both having fun with it and did a fine job.  Then either the next day or few days after, they were fired.  

WJR made a big stink about how Beckman was a former usher or whatever as a kid and it was a dream come true, blah blah blah.  Lary Sorensen was his broadcast partner. 

They were not given a chance here.

 

[CMRivdogs]

Just an aside re Rathbun, apparently he had a medical emergency just prior to the Hawks game earlier this week. Latest reports say he's ok, it was apparently dehydration. Scary though.

[oblong]

7 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

Just an aside re Rathbun, apparently he had a medical emergency just prior to the Hawks game earlier this week. Latest reports say he's ok, it was apparently dehydration. Scary though.

I think that's what prompted the discussion originally.

 

[chasfh]

47 minutes ago, oblong said:

I remember very shortly before they were fired, like maybe even the day before, they both hosted the nightly sports show on WJR.  There was a vacation or something so they had guest hosts that week.  I listened to it while delivering pizzas. They were both having fun with it and did a fine job.  Then either the next day or few days after, they were fired. 

They were not given a chance here.

 

That happened in Chicago when Chip Caray was run out of town for basically not being his grandpa.