In the spirit of yesterday's Cabrera trade post, my thoughts turned to Jim Leyland: how long does he want to manage?

More to the point, is his eventual successor in house? Gene Lamont had a near miss with Boston this year, and I wonder if he's the organization's safe pick when Leyland decides to hang it up.

Joe Maddon would be nice; so would Terry Francona. Last summer, when there was a lot of fan talk about firing Leyland, no one could ever come up with an apt replacement. Since I'm just spitballing here I haven't delved into Joe Maddon's contract status but knowing Francona's available, and the esteemed Lamont (tongue in cheek) is right here, it's fun to speculate.

Your thoughts?

Ed. note: Promoted to the front page. Nice wrap-up of Tigers players in the DR this winter. - allikazoo

As a lot of you are aware by now, I am no longer affiliated with Aerys Sports at this time. I am currently in the process of constructing a new website which I hope to have up and running before spring training starts. In the meantime, their loss is your gain, as I would really like to conclude my series on the players in the Tigers organization who played in the Dominican and Venezuelan winter leagues this offseason. And I'll start with the home country of the 2012 Caribbean Series champions: The Dominican Republic.

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Let me set the record straight before going any further in this fanpost, I am in NO WAY advocating that the Tigers should trade Miguel Cabrera nor am I even hinting that the team is entertaining the idea of putting him on the block. I am a HUGE, ASTRONOMICALLY BIG fan of Cabrera, what he brings to the Tigers & this city, his body of work (no pun intended) and what he has done and meant to this team but since Prince will be here til my 34th birthday I just want to have some fun with this. I am simply writing this to get a consensus from fellow Tiger fans on what it would take for the Tigers to consider a trade for the big man. Again this nothing more than a bored baseball fan looking for some reaction until spring training starts in a matter of a few weeks.

Be that I’m looking for anything to talk about on the Tigers, I wanted to write this to see if my expectations on return were reasonable and what you, the BYB conglomerate, think would be a reasonable trade for the best hitter in the game. Miguel’s time with the Tigers, on the field, has been nothing short of magical. Since coming over in 2007 he owns a .322/.403/.573/.976 slash with an OPS+ of 158. His yearly averages include 41 doubles, 35 HR, 115 RBI and he’s increased his walks every year as he had well over 100 (108) this past year.

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As a baseball fan, I regularly mix wild optimism with Tokarzian despair and expectation of 2008/163-level disaster.

With one of the Tigers' most anticipated seasons in living memory only weeks away, I thought I'd share what the devils and angels are whispering into my ears these days and see what other BYB'ers might have going through their heads as well.

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I haven't seen anything on tigers.com or even here on this website... but alot of the Tigers on Twitter are going nuts because "he's back". So I had to check out his Twitter page, and here was the quote: @bdlugach Heading to spring training at my home away from home again. #LAKELANDFLORIDA Glad to be back with the Tigers

anybody else excited to see him back in the Tigers organization? apparently, he is the focus of Brandon Douglas' Bro-mance.

Thanks for the onsite report! Edited slightly from its original form- Kurt

Friday night, I went to Tropicana Field here in Tampa to attend the Annual Induction Ceremony for the Ted Williams Hitting Hall of Fame and this years inductees were Tino Martinez and Cecil Fielder. I shot some video of Fielder's speech (with a FLIP Camera so not the best quality) , which I planned on posting after I downloaded it. As I was waiting for the video to download, an article came across my Twitter feed from the Tampa Bay Times titled: Cecil Fielder chides his son Prince at Ted Williams Hitters Hall of Fame Induction. (Story linked and below are the pertinent quotes from the story).

Cecil claims that he has no interest in seeing his son play in Detroit

"As a father, of course you're proud of what your son's been able to accomplish on the field. But as a father also you worry about how he is growing as a man, how — I want to say this correctly — how he is communicating with everybody that had something to do with how he got to where he is. And that part of my son, I think we're all a little disappointed." - Tampa Bay Times

He reiterated that Prince has no ties to the extended family including his ill grandparents and hides behind Scott Boras. He says Prince refuses to acknowledge those that helped him along the way:

"We all knew the kid was obese. He had a hard time running to first base without getting tired. You don't transform your body by yourself, you've got to have trainers, you've got to have people cooking for you, there's a lot of things that go into that. …

"There's a lot of people that wish he would get over whatever he's got going on with his self. … And once he gets rid of that, I think those people he needs to reach out to other than me, I think hopefully he will."

Cecil claims that he took his family to see Prince play in Atlanta a few years ago and when he went to the family waiting area he was asked to leave.

"I know what I did for my son, and he knows what I did for him," Cecil Fielder said. "I'm going to take the high road, stay away from it and not cause any friction. … You play for the Tigers, I played for the Tigers, do your thing. … If you want to stay stuck whatever cocoon you're in, stay there, but I'm not going to join you."

Cecil claims that is going to take the high road? As shown below he just accused Prince of alienating the family, not caring about ill grandparents, not crediting those that helped him overcome his obesity, and accused Prince in a roundabout way of having security remove him from a family waiting area at a ballgame.

Then, at the end of all this claims that he is going to take the high road?

--

Rob Neyer has an additional take at Baseball Nation.

Bumped. Get your submissions in by tonight if you're interested! --Kurt

Links posts are valuable. They're also kind of time consuming to do right. I used to do them a few times a week but more and more time that I could spend doing a better job in other areas of the blog was being taken up. So I just kind of stopped doing links posts altogether. Fortunately we've got some people doing FanShots on a regular basis sharing links. I'd really love to see that expanded into full posts again: I just don't want to do them myself!

If you're the kind of person who likes to read a bunch of stories and share with others, and who can commit to doing a few a week, we'd really like to have you as a front-page author. It is volunteer work, but at least you're going to have access to more eyeballs than you would at almost any other location, Tigers-wise. And those eyeballs range from fans to national media to front office and players. It's a good way to make a name for yourself and hopefully open up some doors down the road. It's a cool gig.

If you're interested, I'd like you to send a sample post to BYBTigers@gmail.com. What I'm looking for is 2-fold: A writer who fits into the tone of posts we already do here while maintaining an individual voice, and 2) Someone who finds links off the beaten path. Anyone can round up what the Freep, News, MLB.com and MLive are doing. I'd like to find someone who travels different paths who can bring what they find interesting back to the rest of us.

Serious inquiries only, please. If this can't be done right and on a predictable schedule, it's better not to do it at all.

If you have any questions, fire them at me in this post or to the e-mail address above.

OK, so I did a little number crunching. I wanted to see what kind of batting average we might expect out of Austin Jackson if he cuts down on his strike outs.

As we all know, Jackson had a .249 batting average in 2011. For at bats that he did not strike out in, he batted .359 (hits / (by total at bats - stikeouts)) which, I know, is a fictitous number but I needed something to work with. That came out to 147/(591-181) = .359.

I then took his total at bats and divided that into his 2011 hit total plus half of his strike out count (assuming that the adjustments he's making results in a 50% improvement) multiplied by that non-strike-out batting average (.359). That came out to =(147+0.5*181*(147/(591-181)))/591 = .304.

Is it reasonable to think that Austin may be able to reduce his strikeout total by half?

If so, is a .304 (or so) batting averate a reasonable expectation for him this season?

Even more important, if he gets to an average like that, with fewer strikouts, what do you think would be the likely impact on the Tiger's offense this year?

A thought-provoking question arose when the Prince Fielder to Detroit signing went viral. Would Prince Fielder's numbers (more specifically, his power numbers) be affected by the spacious Comerica Park? In short, research suggests the answer would be no.

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Amid all the hoopla over the loss of Victor Martinez and subsequent signing of Prince Fielder, there has been a steady undercurrent of concern over Austin Jackson's regression at the plate in 2011, and the Tiger's failure to replace him at the top of the batting order for 2012. That, coupled with Ryan Raburn's inability to hit for average OR power before the calender turns to July has got many fans worried that Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski still has work to do on the personel front before the start of the 2012 season. I'm here to tell you to stop worrying, because the Tigers have it all figured out.

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