My only nit-pick is that Edwin is another right-hander leaving the only viable lefty options being Dontrelle Willis and Nate Robertson, and I’m not certain Willis is really that viable currently. Edwin’s 2008 season was quite a bit better than previous seasons and saw his walk rate drop and strikeouts rise.

Below are the bullpen stats for the last 6 games:

Starters need to come around now because the team isn’t going to score 19 runs every night. But it sure is fun when they do :)

“We know he’s going to miss at least a start, and we don’t want to take any chances,” club president/general manager Dave Dombrowski said. “Hopefully, in 15 days, he’ll be ready.”

We can only hope he returns in full health and with all control issues figured out as the team needs it. For now Detroit will be filling his rotation Armando Galarraga who will be making only his second major league start. The Tigers acquired Galarraga from the Texas Rangers this past February, sending Michael Hernandez to Texas. A small trade that looks good now since Galarraga will be helping the big league club this year, Hernandez would not have been. At the time Dombrowski was positive on Armando as well:

“Galarraga is a quality prospect with a quality arm,” Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski said in a statement. “His acquisition adds depth to our roster, and he is a pitcher we feel will be able to help our club in the future.”

Thing is, Armando Galarraga isn’t exactly what I’d term a prospect any longer, and if so certainly not a top prospect. He started off with the Montreal Expos organization in 1998 as a nondrafted free agent. He did rather well when not injured and injuries continued to be his major issue through even the last few years. He gets a large number of strikeouts, something that followed him to the few innings he pitched in the major leagues but also something that makes him a bit more suited for the bullpen. Additionally, his splits don’t show a major difference between right handed batters and left handed batters but, unfortunately, aren’t great for either as well.

PECOTA (subscription) is far from positive on Armando and the same goes for Chone and ZiPS projections systems which put his projected ERA at 6.25 and 5.65 respectivly. I was surprised to see him selected to fill the rotation instead of other pitchers who Leyland has liked in the past such as Virgil Vasquez, but both have done very well in Toledo thus far.

Tigers will need him to pitch deep since we know that there isn’t the bullpen to continuously fill an entire nine innings.

Looking back in the crystal ball, having Willis pulled from the game was probably for the best, at least for this particular game. I’d never wish an injury on someone to be pulled from the game but Willis was not pitching well and struggling to find the strike zone even before the injury. The injury, however, might make the win not worth it.

Detroit is not in a good position to handle an extended outage from any of the starters. Billfer from the Detroit Tigers Weblog has outlined some of the possible replacements if it comes to that. Another option was Macay McBride, who the Tigers acquired in a trade for Wil Ledezma last year, was recently lost for the season due to surgery to repair torn ligaments in his elbow. McBride was part of the Tiger bullpen last year but was being moved to a starting role with the Toledo MudHens, likely to handle situations such as the current one.

The bullpen, consisting of Aquilino Lopez, Jason Grilli, Denny Bautista and Todd Jones, pitched the entire game and pitched very well. But with the struggles as of late, the last thing the team wanted was to have them cover a full nine innings. Which makes it all the better that they performed well as not to rely on further bullpen arms.

While the large number of walks allowed was glaringly obvious tonight, the problem isn’t a new one this year. Going into tonight Detroit pitchers lead the American League with a WHIP (Walks Hits per Inning Pitched) of 1.59, the bullpen had a WHIP of 1.65.

This will get worse after tonights game. While I have no doubt that Tiger hitters will perform up to expectations, it might not matter unless Detroit pitchers can turn around their own issues. When Bostons’ bullpen ran into trouble in the seventh inning they were able to bring in Hideki Okajima to shut down Detroit. When Bostons’ bullpen began bleeding in the eighth inning they were able bring out Jonathan Papelbon stop it. Detroit has no such go-to bullpen pitcher that can be depended upon and this needs to change.

The bullpen must be more than Bobby Seay who can be depended on to get a K against a lefty when needed but not for more than an inning of work. The team cannot wait until the return of either Fernando Rodney or Joel Zumaya, both of whom are making progress.

Pitching coach Chuck Hernandez has a lot of work ahead of him to figure out how some guys who were good Triple-A pitchers, such as Yorman Bazardo, can’t buy an out in the bigs.

He’ll report to Lakeland, where he’ll pick up his throwing and prepare himself for games. Once he reports there, the Tigers have 30 days to evaluate him, after which they’ll have to decide whether to add him to their 25-man roster or outright him, since he’s out of minor-league options.

Cruceta had a good year with the Triple-A Oklahoma RedHawks, a farm team for Texas Rangers. He pitched 65 innings striking out 70 and walking 40 with a 1.19 WHIP. A pitcher who can come in and get a strikeout when needed would truly help this bullpen. Maybe he could replace Jason Grilli in the ‘pen

Spanning back through 2006, Detroit has been horrible when playing in front of the entire nation, that is if you don’t take the playoffs into count. There isn’t a reason for this but tonight would have been a wonderful night for the teams bats to slug out a few runs. Buerhle was also a good pitcher for it as well but Detroit made him look like Cy Young.

There were a few take aways:

• Carlos Guillen continues to be a shining part of the lineup. He continues to work every single at-bat and hasn’t been giving up constant easy outs like say… Magglio.
• Guillen appears to still be uncomfortable at first base. It’s not only with the error in today’s game due to dropping an easy catch, he has played over too far and gone after balls that were really for the second baseman.
• Third-base Coach Gene Lamont, who is normally very conservative, should never have waved Santiago to third base. It was an obvious very bad call and ended in a ridiculously unnecessary out.
• Magglio has swung at the first pitch in nearly all of his at-bats and it feels like he is trying to make something happen.
• Yorman Bazardo was quite a disappointment. In some of the previous games I was hoping they would go with him instead of Miner or Jason Grilli. Oh well.

I don’t leave games early too often but I did tonight. It was cold and there just wasn’t a good game out on the field. Listening to the game on the ride home made me feel good about my decision.

Below are a few pictures from today’s matchup.

1. Magglio Ordonez giving some pre-game interviews to ESPN.

2. They put out a stand for the gold glove and silver slugger awards given to the Tiger players. Al Kaline and Willie Horton were in attendance as well.

3. Many of this vaunted lineup warming up before the game.

4. Verlander on the mound. He looked pretty good, other than the leadoff home run, to start the game. It went downhill very quickly.

5. Brandon Inge on third-base due to an errant throw to first by White Sox third-baseman Joe Crede. Brandon would eventually score.

6. Magglio got a hit, one of a few so far. This ended in one of the 5 double-plays on the night.

7. Can’t think of much bad with Bobby Seay’s performance, he was as advertised.

The optimist would say he threw a one hitter and that a bit of wildness can help a pitcher throw batters off. This is something not even D-Train himself seems to believe:

“I was terrible and that’s pretty much it,” said Willis, obtained from Florida along with Miguel Cabrera in a six-player deal. “But you still have to battle and try and keep your team in the game.”

Outside of the 7 walks allowed (3 of which went to Nick Swisher) over just 5 innings pitched there are a number of other worrisome stats that, while possibly helping Willis during this outing, won’t last for future starts. In yesterday’s start, Willis threw a total of 89 pitches with only 46 of them being for a stike. That means that an astounding 48% of his pitches were balls, this against a team that is not the most patient in the league.

Where some combination of luck, a large park and good defense helped out was with balls that were hit into play. Looking at stats such as BABIP and what happened with balls put into play shows a drastic difference between Willis’s one start and those of the rest of the starters. Below is a breakdown of each Tiger’s first start of the season:

One might think that Willis is a fly-ball pitcher from these stats, but he has historically not been such a pitcher as his lifetime GF/FB average is 1.34. Willis coaxed a large number of infield fly balls, which are easily handled, as well as outfield fly balls. The White Sox were struggling to get a good hit and these stats show that but they weren’t giving anything to hit. In reality, against a more patient lineup there should have been a much larger number of walks and a much worse score.

D-Train needs to get his control fixed and quickly.

Leyland said that when Rodney had his latest bullpen session Friday at the team’s spring-training base in Florida, he had stop to throwing because of pain in his shoulder. Leyland said the news on Rodney “isn’t good at all.”

This, obviously, puts a timely return by Rodney even more in doubt and raises questions of whether he will return at all. Fernando faced shoulder issues through the entire 2007 season which caused major struggles for the first few months. These lingering problems don’t seem to be subsiding so we shouldn’t be surprised if surgery is in his future.

Beltran saw limited action during Spring Training making appearances in 10 games in which he allowed 13 hits and 7 walks with only 5 strikeouts. His ERA was 1.42 but those peripheral stats are not impressive. Beltran has had a long career in the minor leagues after being signed by the Cubs in 1996 but has only seen 61.3 innings in the major leagues. We should keep our expectations low here with the purpose being to allow more rest for the other bullpen pitchers.

Whether or not this statistic measures “dominance” it is still a good look at how efficiently a pitcher gets through an opposing lineup. The folks at Saber-Scouting looked at how each starting pitcher that received CY Young votes fared in 2007 and had Justin Verlander ranking 12th out of 16 with 28.9%. While it’s interesting to look at starters, relievers have the same if not more importance on dominating opposing lineups. They are called upon to get quick outs and shut down a batter with inherited runners on base.

Since they only took a look at perceived “aces” for each team, I’ve calculated the stat for each Tiger pitcher including relievers. This is based on 2007 stats for pitchers who saw at least 20 innings of work.

You almost could have guessed at the results here without having to look at the statistics. Jeremy Bonderman racks up strikeouts and usually doesn’t throw many pitches whether he’s killing opposing batters or getting killed. Kenny Rogers is the opposite of Jeremy falling more into the ‘Finesse’ category of pitching relying on location and the defense behind him to make plays on balls hit.

Again, no large surprises here except maybe Zach Miner. Miner scored rather bad with this statistic not only when compared with other relievers but all Tiger pitchers. For fun I ran Joel Zumaya’s 2006 season and he had a PTO% of 31.15. I hope he can return to form.