First off, a thanks to everyone for their support. Things are going much better now, so I can get back to blogging. And it looks like there's a few topics for me to catch up on. We'll start with this one: What's with this Vladimir Guerrero to the Tigers talk?
SI.com's Joe Sheehan wrote a piece on Thursday that mentioned Detroit as the best place for the right-handed hitting designated hitter.
The Tigers have made a huge push for 2011 and can justify the extra $7-8 million it will take to bring in Guerrero. It's not a perfect fit -- the Tigers could really use a lefthanded bat instead -- but it would help their depth, provide day-to-day flexibility and give Guerrero the best chance he'll have at returning to the posteason.
Guerrero had a .300 batting average, .345 on-base percentage and .496 slugging average for Texas last year. Which was maybe a bit low for him but obviously quite respectable.
At the start of the offseason, he was actually one of the players who I thought the Tigers should go after to fill their DH role, rather than Adam Dunn. And if you take defense out of the equation for a second, starting Guerrero at DH and Martinez at catcher certainly has the potential to give the Tigers one whale of a lineup .Add defense back into it and you cringe a bit. I'm starting to get flashbacks of 2008 just thinking about a Tigers lineup with Guerrero in it, frankly.
That's not exactly a good thing, given how 2008 turned out. The softball team couldn't score enough runs to stay ahead of the number it routinely gave up. The pitchers were under an insane amount of pressure all season. It was not pretty.
I really don't think it has much chance of happening. I think the Tiger are content to go forward with Alex Avila at catcher, for a year anyway, and they know they'll need to keep the DH role available for some of their aging batters -- just in case.
But what do you think of the idea?