No Tigers Position Player has Won MVP Since 1940

There has been much talk about the Tigers not having an MVP winner since 1984 when Guillermo Hernandez won the award as a reliever on their last championship team.  The feeling is that Tigers ace Justin Verlander has a good shot at winning the MVP and he would be in select company.  That would be a rare feat as no pitcher has won the AL MVP since Dennis Eckersley of the Athletics in 1992.  Moreover, no starting pitcher has taken home the honor since Red Sox right-hander Roger Clemens in 1986.

What would be even more rare though would be a Tigers position player winning the prize.  The last one to do so was Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg in 1940.  While most of the talk has centered around Verlander, first baseman Miguel Cabrera also has an outside shot at the award.  I don't think he'll win, but it's hard to ignore a batter who led the league in batting average, on base percentage and times on base.  Cabrera also finished second in OPS ans slugging and third in total bases. 

If either Verlander or Cabrera is the MVP, he would be the tenth Tiger to win the award. The others are listed below:

1911 Ty Cobb
1934 Mickey Cochrane
1935 Hank Greenberg
1937 Charlie Gehringer
1940 Hank Greenberg
1944 Hal Newhouser
1945 Hal Newhouser
1968 Denny McLain
1984 Willie Hernandez

My MVP Ballot

I don't have time for a long analysis tonight, but I wanted to list my AL MVP Choices.  I explained in an earlier post why I wouldn't vote for a pitcher, so I won't be putting Justin Verlander on the list.  As I said previously, it's not that I don't think pitchers are as valuable as hitters.  It's because I consider the Cy Young Award to be the MVP for pitchers and the MVP to be a position player award.  If I was going to include pitchers on my ballot, Verlander would probably be number one or two.  Here is how I rank the position players:

1. Jose Bautista TOR
2. Miguel Cabrera, DET
3. Jacoby Ellsbury, BOS
4. Dustin Pedroia, BOS
5. Curtis Granderson, NY
6. Adrian Gonzalez, BOS
7. Alex Avila, DET
8. Ben Zobrist, TB 
9. Robison Cano, NY
10. Ian Kinsler, TEX

Tigers Add Five Players to 40-Man Roster

The Tigers have added five minor league players to their 40-Man roster in order to protect them from December's Rule 5 Draft: starting pitcher Casey Crosby, relievers Matt Hoffman and Tyler Stohr, outfielder Avisail Garcia and infielder Hernan Perez.  They also dropped once highly touted infielder Cale Iorg from the roster.  The roster is now at 39 players.  Since the Tigers will almost surely add more than one player from outside the organization this off-season, you can be sure that there are more subtractions to come.

The most highly regarded player among today's additions is Crosby, one of the Tigers top five prospects.  The 23 year-old left-hander pitched at Double-A Erie last year, but still needs to work more on his control.  Hoffman, a southpaw who pitched for Toledo has the best chance of making a contribution to the Tigers next year.  The right handed Stohr also may not be far away.  Garcia and Perez are young raw prospects, who are still years away from Detroit.       

Gerald Laird is Back

The Tigers have made their first somewhat significant move of the off-season by signing catcher Gerald Laird to a one-year deal. Before you get too upset, keep in that he will probably be playing fewer than 40 games as Alex Avila's back-up catcher.  The 32-year-old Laird needs no introduction to Tigers fans who remember him as a good field no hit catcher on the 2009-2010 teams.  He spent last year backing up Cardinals starter Yadier Molina and wound up with a World Series ring. 

In 884 plate appearances over the past three seasons, the right-handed-hitting Laird has put up a sub-par .220/.291/.319 batting line.  On the positive side, he has a .729 lifetime OPS versus left-handed pitchers, and those are the pitchers he'll be facing as you can be sure that Avila will not sit versus many right handers.

Laird is a strong defender with a deadly accurate arm.  Over the past three years, he has thrown out 36% of base runners attempting to steal.  The MLB average is 28%.

The Tigers used Victor Martinez as their back-up catcher for much of 2011, but ran into trouble when a knee injury confined him to designated hitter in the second half.  While Martinez was able to continue to excel offensively, the lack of an experienced back-up forced manager Jim Leyland to use Avila almost every day over the last couple of months.  He was obviously beat up and worn down for the playoffs.

The Tigers wanted to add another catcher this winter so that Martinez could be the full-time DH and Avila could get more rest  They reportedly also considered Ramon Castro, Jose Molina, Kelly Shoppach and Matt Treanor, but apparently decided that Laird was the best option.

MLB Re-alignment Could Mean More Interleague Games

Several sources are now reporting that Major League Baseball will announce the sale of the Astros to businessman Jim Crane tomorrow.  Why should Tigers fans care?  All baseball fans should care because it means that the Astros will move from the National League Central Division to the American League West Division starting in 2013.  This will allow for two fifteen-team leagues with six five team divisions rather than silly four-team AL West and six-team NL Central setup than has existed since 1998.  

Another change will be be two wild cards in each league which will most likely meet in a one-game playoff to see who joins the three division winners in the divisional series.  I don't know about this one.  It seems absurd to play 162 games only to have the winner of the final playoff spot determined by a single game even if one team wins 10 more games in the regular season.  The one positive is that division titles will become more meaningful since teams will do whatever they can to avoid a one-game playoff. 

The other big change will be the schedule.  With 15 teams in each league, they will probably have to have an interleague game every day.  None of this is confirmed yet, but some Twitter rumblings (most recently by MLB.COM Astros writer Alyson Footer) suggest that there will be 30 interleague games for each team.

I think this means that the schedules will look like what Danny Knobler of CBSports detailed this summer.  For the Tigers, that would mean:

18 games vs each AL Central Opponent = 72 games
6 games vs each team in AL East, AL West = 60 games
3 games vs each NL Central team = 15 games
3 games vs each team in NL East or NL West (rotating every other year) = 15 games 

While I don't like expanded interleague play, I do like the logic and symmetry of this plan. I like the fact that every team within a division would have the same schedule.  I also believe that the AL Central teams playing NL Central teams every year could create create some interesting rivalries.

While it's not radical re-alignment, this would be pretty big news for a league that is (thankfully) slow to make changes.  I think we'll know all the details for sure within the next few days.