Posts tagged GarySheffield at FanHouse

The Tigers went for broke this year, bumping their payroll from $95 million last season to $138 million this year in hopes of buying a spot in the postseason. In hindsight, it wasn't meant to be: the Tigers sit 8 1/2 games out of the division lead, and considering they've won just three of their past 12, the deficit seems to grow larger every day.

At least there's always next year, right? Yeah, about that ... After footing the bill for baseball's third-highest payroll, owner Mike Ilitch is allegedly putting pressure on the front office to slash costs next year, according to the Detroit News' Lynn Henning.

Ivan Rodriguez was already dealt in a cost-cutting trade, and expensive veterans like Edgar Renteria, Todd Jones and Kenny Rogers almost certainly won't be re-signed or have their options picked up this winter. It'll be hard to unload Gary Sheffield without picking up a substantial portion of the $14 million he's owed next year, but by putting him on waivers this year, the Tigers are at least trying.

Getting rid of the guys mentioned above makes as much baseball sense as it does financially, but will the team go so far as to unload their most productive players? Henning thinks Magglio Ordonez could be sent to bigger market in exchange for cheap prospects. If that happens, it'll be a hard sell to fans, who have filled Comerica Park to 99.3% capacity this summer, to keep turning out in 2009. If the Tigers can't post a winning record with Maggs, why should fans think the team can contend without him? This team has made huge strides the last several years -- it'll be a shame if Ilitch gives up now.

While the Tigers learned something new about Gary Sheffield on Tuesday - that he hits really well when he's angry about being placed on waivers - they also saw something they've known about for a while. Their bullpen sucks. After Sheffield's two home runs helped get a lead for the Tigers, the Detroit bullpen came in and blew the game like they normally do.

Tuesday's goat was Joel Zumaya, who walked three Blue Jays and gave up the game-winning runs without recording an out, all to the chorus of boos from the hometown crowd. As a result, Jim Leyland doesn't plan on using Zumaya again anytime soon, but it's not because of his performance. No, The Black Lung fears that there's something wrong with Joel and that he's not telling anybody.

"I can assure you, I'm not going to have Zumaya for a while, even if everything checks out all right," Leyland said. "All I know is there is a problem. Joel is not himself. I can see it in his face. I can see it in his demeanor."

Asked how long Zumaya might be out, Leyland said, "Right now, I don't feel comfortable pitching Joel. I'm not talking about because of results. I'm talking about because something is not right.

"It's going to be next year until he gets back to 100%."

Normally, when a player spouts off nonsense and his manager is asked for comment, said manager will offer something like, "I just don't know what to say," or "he's entitled to his opinion," or something else deflective and insubstantial.

Not Jim Leyland. You rarely see a manager turn around and give his player the business like this. Gary Sheffield probably isn't a moron -- we all say stupid things when we're bored and navel-gazing -- but Leyland sure made him look like one.

Today's Dugout is after the jump.

The Tigers Gary Sheffield has been in the papers a bit lately thanks to some comments he made to the Boston Globe in recent days. In the article Sheffield says he'd be open to a trade if the Tigers felt like moving him was the right thing to do, and that he'd be happy to go somewhere else in hopes that he'd get to play in the field everyday and possibly win another World Series.

You see, Gary isn't that big a fan of his role as designated hitter (which is something he's hinted at before).

"I can be in the outfield and play every day. I don't want to DH. I don't feel like a baseball player when I DH. I don't know how to be the leader that I am from the bench. I can't be a vocal leader. I can't talk to guys from the bench because I don't feel right about it.

"I'm in a role now where I don't know what to do, really. The guys are out there busting their butt for nine innings, they come in and they hit and they grind. I just sit down and hit. That's all I do, so I can't be in a leadership role from that position."

Obviously Gary's comments eventually got to his manager, and after reading them and being asked about them, The Black Lung couldn't do much more than scratch his head.

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Before the season started, the Detroit Tigers were the popular pick amongst baseball fans and experts alike as the eventual World Series champion. After adding Miguel Cabrera to a potent lineup that already included hitters like Magglio Ordonez, Gary Sheffield, Carlos Guillen, Curtis Granderson, and Ivan Rodriguez, there was talk that the Tigers would score 1,000 runs this season.

Who knew they'd need to? Though most people were aware that the Detroit bullpen would be a problem area, I don't think anybody thought they would be as bad as they have been in 2008. So now here we sit on August 7th, and the Tigers find themselves in a tailspin.

After building up some momentum in recent weeks to get back into the AL Central race, the Tigers have now lost six in a row to fall three games under .500. They're also on the verge of being swept by the division leading Chicago White Sox and falling 9.5 games out of first place, which could effectively end any hope they have of playing this October.

So will the Tigers pull the plug on their season tonight, or are they going to rise up and start mauling people again? Find out after the jump.

Remember earlier this week when I told you about how happy playing in the outfield makes Gary Sheffield? How the grass looks greener, the air smells sweeter, the ball looks bigger, and life just seems better for Gary when he's not relegated to a role as a designated hitter. I hope Gary cherished those memories of chasing down fly balls, because he's not going to get the chance to do it too much in the near future.

The Black Lung has pulled the plug on the experiment.

"His shoulder isn't right, and I don't think it's made any better by playing the outfield, because he can barely lob the ball in," Tigers manager Jim Leyland said Wednesday. "The longer I think about it, it doesn't make sense that the shoulder can get better when you're playing, swinging and having to throw than serving as DH."

For his part, while he's not exactly happy about it, Sheffield understands the move and isn't going to complain about it. Though if he continues to lose playing time because of it, that might change. Sheff was out of the lineup yesterday, and will be in it today, but he's only going to play one game this weekend as the Tigers go to Arizona and won't get to use a DH.

Another source of frustration for Gary may come from the fact that Leyland still doesn't really know what he's going to do with Sheffield in the future.

"I kind of have to play that by ear. That's a tough situation for him, because he doesn't want to put me in that situation and I don't want to be in that situation.

"I don't really know what to do, to be honest with you. I'm confused."

Which is always what you want to hear from your manager.

Okay, so we're nearly a quarter into the season, and we're all still waiting for the Detroit Tigers to get things going. I'm not sure how long we're going to have to keep waiting, or if the Tigers are ever even going to get out of the cellar, but they may have taken a step towards getting on track.

Gary Sheffield has never been shy when it comes to speaking his mind, and he'd been letting Jim Leyland know that he'd much rather be out in the field than relegated to nothing but a designated hitter. Well, going into the weekend Leyland finally listened to Sheffield, and put him out in left.

Sheffield responded by going 5-for-15 over the Tigers latest homestand, and raised his batting average 23 points in the process. Sure, it's still only at .208, but it's a start.

"I say it all the time. It's just tough at DH to have that fire going, and intensity with which I play," Sheffield said. "I never accepted that I was just a pure DH."

The problem is that Sheffield's right shoulder still bothers him from time to time, and he's still in the process of rehabbing it. That means he's not going to be able to play left field everyday, because his throwing arm is going to become a problem. The Tigers are already having enough trouble keeping the other team from scoring, and adding another liability in the outfield won't help.

Still, if Sheffield's bat only comes alive when he's playing the field, any damage he may cause out in left will probably be more than offset by the damage he can do with his bat.

While coming into the 2008 season, the lineup in the AL Central that everybody seemed to be falling in love with was the Detroit Tigers, and it was hard to blame anybody for doing so. I mean, Magglio Ordonez, Curtis Granderson, Carlos Guillen, Gary Sheffield, and they added Miguel Cabrera? Damn. While I was interested in seeing what kind of astronomical numbers Detroit's lineup could produce, I was also pretty interested to see what the Cleveland Indians could do.

After all, this was a lineup that scored 811 runs last season, and did so without any real help from their big masher, Travis Hafner. I figured that Pronk had just had a down year in 2007, and that this year he would return to the form that saw him get MVP consideration in 2006.

That's not the case so far. After Cleveland's extra-inning victory over the Mariners on Thursday night, Hafner finds himself hitting .221/.314/.365. Those numbers are well below his career averages of .287/.394/.544. He's still driving in runs, as he does have 17 RBI already, but his lack of hitting has caused manager Eric Wedge to drop Pronk from the third spot in the order to the sixth.

"I feel like this young man is going to get back to where he needs to get to," Wedge said. "It's going to take a little bit of time and a lot of work. [Hitting coach] Derek Shelton and I have spent a lot of time together, and Derek has spent a lot of time with Travis talking about this. We're going to get him there and he's going to get himself there. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when."

I'm not going to go into everything that's wrong with the Tigers right now, as their problems are pretty obvious to any baseball fan that cares to look. They can't score, and they can't keep their opponent from scoring. It's the type of equation that leads to 2-10 records and manager blowups.

What I want to know is when it's safe to pronounce the Tigers as dead.

It seems that no matter where you look, there's somebody saying that while the Tigers are off to a horrid start it's still too early to abandon all hope with this team. After all, they've only played 12 of the 162 games on their schedule. I'm one of those people as well, but if you'll allow me to play devil's advocate for a bit here, why is everybody so afraid to say what seems to be growing more obvious with each passing day? That maybe, just maybe, the Tigers aren't as good as we all thought they would be.

Is it pride that is keeping everybody from writing this team's obituary? I hear that once Curtis Granderson comes off the disabled list, the Tigers are going to start hitting and climb back to the top of the Central division standings. Really? A team that consists of hitters like Magglio Ordonez, Gary Sheffield, Miguel Cabrera, Carlos Guillen, and Ivan Rodriguez is dependent on Curtis Granderson? Are we really supposed to believe that?

The way the Tigers have been playing this season, you knew it could only be a matter of time before manager Jim Leyland had seen enough and tore his team a new one. Leyland has never exactly been the type of manager to keep his feelings to himself or coddle his players, so it was obvious that he was going to reach a breaking point if the Tigers continued to play as horribly as they have, and that breaking point was after the Tigers' 11-0 loss to the White Sox on Sunday that saw them drop to 2-10.

"I finally got (ticked) off," Leyland said. "I'm to the point where I didn't hold it in very good, and I meant what I said. I'm not going to get into what I said. That's nobody's business.

"There was one thing that sticks out to me right now that's going on, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back with me. And that's why I'm (ticked) off.

"It's glaring."

Well what was it? Jim says it's glaring, but frankly, there are a lot of things going wrong with this team that are "glaring." They've now been shutout four times this season, the pitchers can't get any deeper than six innings into a game, the bullpen isn't any better. What is it?

Maybe it was the fact that in Chicago cigarettes are nearly $8 a pack that set Leyland off, I don't know.

Whatever it was that Jimmy said to his players, it wasn't anything they didn't already know.