Motor City Bengals All-Time Detroit Tigers Team: 3B Miguel Cabrera

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The best Detroit Tigers shortstop of all-time is Alan Trammell.

Alan Stuart Trammell was the second round pick of the Detroit Tigers in the 1976 draft. It didn’t take the San Diego native long to make his first appearance in the major leagues. On Sept. 9, 1977, in the second game of a double-header at Fenway Park, Trammell and a young second baseman named Lou Whitaker each made their major league debut.

The pair would go on to play together for 19 seasons. While his partner won the 1978 AL Rookie of the Year award (Tram finished fourth), Trammell hit nearly 100 points higher than in his limited action of 1977. His average reached .300 for the first time in 1980, and it netted him the first of six All-Star appearances.

As the Tigers began to contend in the American League East in the early 1980’s, Trammell’s plate production increased. In 1983, the Tigers won more than 90 games (92-70) for the first time since 1971 but finished a distant second place to the eventual World Champion Baltimore Orioles and, of course, we all know what happened in 1984. Those two seasons were among the best of Tram’s career. He notched double-digit home runs for the first time in his career (14 in both ’83 and ’84) and hit .319 and .314 respectively. He had a .351 average with three homers and nine RBIs in the 1984 postseason and won the World Series MVP.

After a couple off-years while battling injuries, Sparky Anderson asked a healthy Trammell to anchor the Tigers’ 1987 lineup and bat cleanup. He responded with the best year of his storied career, setting career highs with a .343 average, 28 homers and 105 RBIs. When it appeared the Tigers would miss out on the postseason after falling behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the standings, Tram came to life. He hit at a .416 clip in September, lifting the Tigers to an astonishing come-from-behind AL East title.

In shades of things to come, Trammell was robbed in the AL MVP voting that season, finishing second to Toronto’s George Bell.

Defensively, Trammell wasn’t thought of in the same sentence as defense-first guys like Ozzie Smith, but he was steady and rarely made miscues or cost his team runs with errors. He won five Gold Gloves during his career and, along with Whitaker, formed the longest continuous double-play combination in baseball history (19 years and more than 2,000 games).

In the latter portions of his career, Trammell battled numerous injuries which caused his production to ebb and flow, however he still batted over .300 three more times. Most expected Trammell to retire when Whitaker announced that the 1995 season would be his last, but Tram decided to give it one more go, playing a reduced roll for the awful 1996 Tigers. Tram spent time at third base, second base, left and center, in addition to shortstop and DH the year Detroit set a then-franchise record of 109 losses.

Seven years later, Trammell managed the worst team in American League history, the 2003 Tigers. The team bounced back from that terrible season and improved by nearly 30 games in 2004, but when the team regressed a bit in 2005, Trammell was fired. It’s worth nothing that even the best managers in baseball history could not have done anything with that 2003 team and, after winning the AL pennant in 2006, Jim Leyland thanked Alan Trammell for his help in turning the franchise around.

We’ve greatly covered Trammell’s continued Hall-of-Fame snub, so we’ll skip that for now. Most believe that he will certainly get in via the Veteran’s Committee, so how fitting will it be when Tram is (eventually) inducted into Cooperstown along with Lou Whitaker? It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.

Next week, we’ll look at the all-time best third basemen in Tigers’ history. The consensus choice of the Motor City Bengals’ staff is sure to surprise some of our readers!

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We name the organization’s top second sacker, Charlie Gehringer.

We’ve lamented the fact that Lou Whitaker may never make the Hall-of-Fame, but as great as he was, Charlie Gehringer was truly one of the best players in baseball history, and certainly one of the best second basemen of all time.

Gehringer had a long and distinct career in baseball, all with the Tigers. Born in Fowlerville, Charlie was a naive Michigander and would be the place he’d live all his life.

In the early 1920’s, Gehringer lettered in basketball, not baseball, at the University of Michigan, but his skills on the diamond were solid enough to grab the attention of Tiger Bobby Veach. In 1923, Veach brought Gehringer to Navin Field for a workout in front of player-manager Ty Cobb. The Tiger legend loved what he saw and convinced management to tender him a contact.

In his second full season in the big leagues (1927), Charlie became a star under new manager George Moriarty. In the years of Lou Gehrig‘s consecutive games streak, Gehringer was the Tigers’ Iron Man, playing every game from 1928 to 1930, 1933 to 1934, and 1936. He led the league in runs (131), hits (215), doubles (45), triples (19) and steals (19) in 1929.

On the defensive side, he was a very good defender and spent more than 1,000 games forming a keystone combination with shortstop Billy Rogell.

Gehringer was the lone Tigers’ representative in the very first All-Star Game, held at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1933, and led the team in average in the pennant-winning seasons of 1934 and 1935. He hit .371 in 1937, which was a career high and earned him the MVP.

Gehringer remained a force for the Tigers through their pennant winning season of 1940, hitting .313. In 1941, he hit nearly 100 points off his average and found himself on the bench in 1942. Following that season, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy until 1945. He considered making a comeback at the age of 41, but ultimately decided against it.

In 16 full-seasons in the majors, Charlie hit under .300 just four times (his first full year and his final two). In the peak of his career, from 1927 to 1940, the only sub-.300 season was 1932 when he hit .298. He finished with a career average of .320, 2,839 hits, 184 homers and 1,427 RBIs.

Charlie was a six-time All-Star, won three pennants, one World Series, an MVP, and batting title. His number two was retired alongside Greenberg’s number five in a ceremony at Tiger Stadium in 1983, and he was elected to the Baseball Hall-of-Fame in 1949 with more than 85 percent of the vote.

It is for all these reasons that Charlie Gehringer is named to the Motor City Bengals’ All-Time Detroit Tigers team, and was another unanimous pick by staff.

Honorable mention goes to Whitaker (of course), and Dick McAulliffe.

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The best Detroit Tigers’ first baseman of all time: Hank Greenberg. 

The original “Hammerin’ Hank,” was arguably the best slugger in Detroit Tigers’ history. The bulk of his Tigers’ career came from 1933 to 1946 with nearly a four-year interruption for military service during WWII.

Greenberg had a cup of coffee with the club in 1930, but came up full-time in 1933. He helped the Tigers win their first pennant in 25 years in his second full year in the majors, hitting .339 and launching 26 home runs. The following year, in 1935, he led baseball with 36 homers and brought the very first World Series title to Detroit.

After an injury-shortened 1936 season, Greenberg reached the peak of his career in 1937 and 1938. In those two years, he mashed 98 homers, including the highest single-season total in Tigers’ history, 58, in 1938. He fell just short of Babe Ruth‘s then nine-year old record of 60 homers.

Greenberg was the first American League player drafted into military service in 1940 at the age of 29. He was honorably discharged from service just two days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but promptly reenlisted. Achieving the rank of captain, Hank served in the China-Burma-India theater and was enlisted for total of 47 months, the most for any major league player.

He returned to the Tigers on July 1, 1945 and homered in his first game in nearly four years. In 78 games during the 1945 season, Greenberg launched 13 homers and hit .311. He hit a pennant-winning grand slam on the final day of the season, and contributed two homers with an average of .300 over a seven-game World Series victory over the Chicago Cubs.

He’d hit another 47 homers for the Tigers in 1946, but a salary dispute with the notoriously stingy Tigers’ management team of the 1940’s ended in Greenberg being sold to the Pittsburgh Pirates. He had another great year in 1947, but chose to retire and move to a front office role in Cleveland.

Hank Greenberg finished his 13-year major league career with a .313 average, 331 homers and 1,276 RBIs. He was elected to the Baseball Hall-of-Fame in 1956 and had his number five retired by the Tigers in 1983.

It is for all these reasons that Hank Greenberg is named to the Motor City Bengals’ All-Time Detroit Tigers team, and was a unanimous pick by staff.

Honorable mention for first base go to Norm Cash, Miguel Cabrera, and Cecil Fielder. 

See Cabrera as he moves back to first base by getting your Detroit Tigers spring training tickets here.