Today’s news and notes from around the Tigers Blogworld.
-If you haven’t already heard, Lee Panas, a senior member of the blogoshere, as a few new irons in the fire. He recently released a book, entitled Beyond Batting Average. The book gives an in-depth look at the new statistics of baseball. What’s great about that is Lee assumes his reader has zero knowledge of the subject and walks you through how to understand and apply all the crazy stuff you find on the sabermetric based sites. I ordered my copy yesterday. You should get one as well.
-In addition to his fine [...]

If you are not familiar with HotStove.com, you should be. Founders Tom Reese and Paul Rubillo have put together a fine site that collects all the news and rumors from around Major League Baseball. In addition to linking to mainstream media members (much like MLBTR), HotStove also frequently links to blogs, which I certainly appreciate, having been linked to a few times myself.
What sets them apart thus far is that they also host two or three daily chats with fans and a person covering some aspect of the sport, either in general or a specific team. In the past, our [...]

Typically, the month of April is the best time of the year for fans of Detroit sports. In any given year, the Pistons and RedWings are vying for playoff positioning (not this year, but we won’t mention that) and it also marks the beginning of baseball season.
Fox Sports Detroit is your home for nearly every game of the season for all three clubs, and that does create some interesting scheduling conflicts for the network, usually resulting in alternate channels being utilized, my favorite part of being a DirecTV customer, by the way.
Each April over the past few years, FSD has bombarded their [...]

Just as Joel Zumaya drew praise and hyperbole with his first session of throwing live BP at Tigers camp yesterday, Jeremy Bonderman did today.
Bonderman was one of only two American League pitchers to work over 200 innings and strike out over 200 batters in 2006, along with then-Twin Johan Santana. Since that season, however, things have been a struggle for him. An early season injury ended his 2008 campaign and he made only a handful of appearances in 2009, coming back from major surgery to remove a rib to correct a thoradic outlet problem that caused his arm to lose the life [...]

Relax folks, we have a long way to go. Today marked just the first time this spring that pitchers began throwing to live batters. The regular season doesn’t start for another five weeks or so. Spring Training games don’t even start until next week. Nevertheless, it seems all of Lakeland is buzzing about former phenom Joel Zumaya and his apparent return to form.
We know the back story, Zumaya worked over 83 innings as a rookie in 2006 and his 100+ mph fastball set the American League on its ear. Over the past three seasons, Zumaya has managed just 88 innings combined. [...]

Tigers incumbent third baseman Brandon Inge is said to be progressing well in his recovery from off-season surgery on both knees. Still, he will not be able to participate in games until at least the final two weeks of camp. In the meantime, once games begin next week, the Tigers will use an array of players to fill that spot including utilityman Don Kelly and displaced outfielder Ryan Raburn.
Joining those two in seeing work at the hot corner will be Ramon Santiago, Brent Dlugach and Non-roster invitees Kory Castro and Jeff Larish.
By all accounts, Inge should be ready for opening day, but [...]

In order to clear a roster spot for the newly signed Johnny Damon, the Tigers announced via twitter that reliever Casey Fien was designated for assignment.
Fien will work out at the Tigers minor league complex in Lakeland for the next several days. If he clears waivers, the Tigers can re-assign him to the minor leagues, but could be back in big league camp as a non-roster invitee.
This move comes as a bit of a surprise to me, but perhaps it shouldn’t. My thought had been that Don Kelly would be the odd man out, as his age (30) and lack of major league success [...]

I know, it’s not just New Yorkers. Seemingly every time a player signs a free agent deal with another club, the fans and sometimes media in the jilted city take up arms and go about bashing the player. He was greedy, he’s just about the money, he’s got no integrity. Usually, this happens when a player leaves a smaller market to take the big bucks from the Yankees.
This time, for once, the shoe is on the other foot.
When I was a boy, my grandfather taught me about baseball. I grew to love the Tigers as he did. Almost more than that, perhaps, [...]