Jair Jurrjens rolls on for Braves

kellmellus50 · Post #1 » by **kellmellus50** » Sat Jul 2, 2011 10:30 am

The former Tigers right-hander threw a one-hitter in his strongest start of a breakout season, Jason Heyward ended a long home-run drought and the streaking Braves beat the Orioles, 4-0, on Friday night.

Jurrjens (11-3) became the first NL pitcher with 11 wins and lowered the NL's best ERA to 1.89 in a performance that will almost certainly get the attention of San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy as he decides on an All-Star starter.

From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110702/SPO ... z1QwVuAA6u

TSE · Post #2 » by **TSE** » Sun Jul 3, 2011 2:33 am

kellmellus50 · Post #3 » by **kellmellus50** » Sun Jul 3, 2011 2:55 am

JJ reminds me when the tigers traded away john smoltz .The tigers do not know when they have a good pitcher to keep them. The day they traded JJ i was against it saying why.

TSE · Post #4 » by **TSE** » Sun Jul 3, 2011 4:59 pm

My dad said the exact same thing yesterday when Jurrjens also happened to pop up in the conversation when we were on the way to the game. My dad has brought up John Smoltz countless times, that's arguably his #1 most frustrating Tigers moment for him. He was tortured by that move for decades and he's still really pissed off about it.

kellmellus50 · Post #5 » by **kellmellus50** » Tue Jul 5, 2011 12:13 am

TSE ... Your Dad's a very smart man.

m23uza1hem36 · Post #6 » by **m23uza1hem36** » Tue Jul 5, 2011 5:06 am

At least we didn't trade away Verlander :¦

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kellmellus50 · Post #7 » by **kellmellus50** » Tue Jul 5, 2011 11:30 am

Well thats 1 out of 3 in baseball .333 would be a good average .But really that's not acceptable.

TSE · Post #8 » by **TSE** » Tue Jul 5, 2011 4:32 pm

m23uza1hem36 wrote:At least we didn't trade away Verlander :¦

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Well one of the nice things about having a guy like Verlander, is not only to play and use them, but to have the option to use them in a trade to get something you like even better. And we don't even have a trade option with him, only because our team roster is so screwed up that we can't make a deal with him in order to solve our problems. And that's fine if people don't want to trade him, but there's still no logic in shooting yourself in the foot and disqualifying your franchise from being able to select from what should be available options. This team is just a mess and Illitch is still losing multiple tens of millions of dollars every single year on just the act of mismanagement of team resources alone.

m23uza1hem36 · Post #9 » by **m23uza1hem36** » Tue Jul 5, 2011 6:29 pm

TSE wrote:
m23uza1hem36 wrote:At least we didn't trade away Verlander :¦

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Well one of the nice things about having a guy like Verlander, is not only to play and use them, but to have the option to use them in a trade to get something you like even better. And we don't even have a trade option with him, only because our team roster is so screwed up that we can't make a deal with him in order to solve our problems. And that's fine if people don't want to trade him, but there's still no logic in shooting yourself in the foot and disqualifying your franchise from being able to select from what should be available options. This team is just a mess and Illitch is still losing multiple tens of millions of dollars every single year on just the act of mismanagement of team resources alone.

I agree, but even if it was feasible to trade Verlander to improve the team, I doubt the front office would pull the trigger. He has become an icon for the team with fans along with Cabrera.

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TSE · Post #10 » by **TSE** » Tue Jul 5, 2011 7:53 pm

Lots of people said that about Granderson when it was joked about before he was traded too. People said it was set in stone that he would be the next Gordie Howe, or Steve Yzerman, or just great Detroit sports icon. How did that turn out? And if I was trading Verlander, it would be for something that would be a better icon than him, or I wouldn't trade him. I do think however that it would be better to trade him, as there are better ways to build a roster, and I think moving out all of our pitchers to acquire a young core of offense would set up an unbeatable franchise for decades to come by building the layers of the team in a way that is conducive to dominating a baseball scorecard. Having this string of offensive players would create too many opportunities for run chains, and it would create an unfair imbalance of required pitching talent to support that run creation power. That's only possible because all of the other teams mismanage their rosters such that they can't put up any semblance of logical offensive units, and by having the only roster that has a pure line of logical qualified hitters, you can't lose. Just watch an All-Star lineup bat against the best pitchers, the pitchers can't beat the batters. And the average teams don't have full All-Star pitchers from 1-10. It's game over if you plan the right way and set up the game in accordance with the physics of the formula for winning logic working for you rather than discounting you.

m23uza1hem36 · Post #11 » by **m23uza1hem36** » Tue Jul 5, 2011 10:19 pm

We tried to win based on offense alone-many people thought Miguel Cabrera's first year the Tigers were going to break all sorts of offensive records, it unfortunately didn't pan out and we started the season in a huge slump. I for one believe "defence" is the key, whether it be football, basketball, or baseball: and a huge part of having good defence in baseball is having great pitchers who make it easy for the guys out in the field. Building a team with only offense in mind is a hit or miss in my opinion, you don't need an all star rotation to win. You need an ace and a couple of decent guys coupled with a constant lineup with good bats and a guy like Cabrera. Of course in text it sounds easy, but players don't always produce like they should. Which is why I believe it would be hard to really build a perfect roster that fully lives up to expectations, it's not only about numbers, formulas, and whose a stud and whose not: **** happens, players who are supposed to be studs become a waste of a spot, and guys who are supposed to be out of the league shine, you know?

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TSE · Post #12 » by **TSE** » Wed Jul 6, 2011 12:50 am

We've never tried to win with offense, we've never come close to having anything that resembles a qualified offensive roster. Defense isn't close to an issue with us, that's like a 90 year old man worrying about death and then complaining about a scratch on his wrist being detrimental to his health. The quality of a better defender being able to make a play that an average player can't make just doesn't come up in frequency enough and we don't have any defensive fielding talent deficiency that combines with that to create much of a negative output. We have 10 categories of serious baseball management problems that are far more serious than having a lack of defensive talent.

Manocad · Post #13 » by **Manocad** » Mon Aug 1, 2011 1:31 pm

TSE wrote:
m23uza1hem36 wrote:At least we didn't trade away Verlander :¦

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Well one of the nice things about having a guy like Verlander, is not only to play and use them, but to have the option to use them in a trade to get something you like even better. And we don't even have a trade option with him, only because our team roster is so screwed up that we can't make a deal with him in order to solve our problems. And that's fine if people don't want to trade him, but there's still no logic in shooting yourself in the foot and disqualifying your franchise from being able to select from what should be available options. This team is just a mess and Illitch is still losing multiple tens of millions of dollars every single year on just the act of mismanagement of team resources alone.

You don't trade a stud pitcher like Verlander unless he's playing for a 100-loss team. Teams that win have great pitching and top baseball teams, like pretty much any sport, are built from the inside out. Stud pitchers are the #1 priority and if you fill in with a good centerfielder, middle infield and catcher you've got a great start toward building a solid team.

The Tigers are nowhere close to being the mess you describe them as being.

chrbal · Post #14 » by **chrbal** » Mon Aug 1, 2011 4:22 pm

Trading Jair wasn't the problem, he wouldn't be as good against AL talent (he pitches to contact). It was trading him for a guy who was notoriously bad against AL pitching (Edgar Rentaria).

TSE · Post #15 » by **TSE** » Mon Aug 1, 2011 6:18 pm

You speak a lot of truth, that's the common problem and most likely problem with most baseball trades where one team gets hurt bad, and that's trading pitchers or prospects for veteran position players. GM's overvalue experience, and fail to understand the sacrifice they give up by taking the "breakout" factor away that doesn't exist with proven mediocre journeymen (and also the benefit of having a star bat hit for under a million dollars versus the inflated rates others have). They slug for anything but mind blowing numbers in the .400-.450 range, and they all appear as long-term rejects to me, yet GM's treat them like they are gold. It's just a different philosophy and a flawed one that GM's adopt, and so they continuously repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Therefore my price to trade for Renteria today, is the same price I'm offering when we did trade for him, which is nothing. Because I would never consciously choose to have an unqualified guy start on this team. Another option would be pursued or I'd dig up a high school Venezuelan to play SS if I couldn't find anybody else, but I'm sure there are qualified players to be had, cause I see those guys get traded for fair deals all the time. The Renteria trade by my logic was 100% irrefutable as a bad trade, and when you can disqualify a trade for certain on logic and you do it rationally, then you can avoid never making this type of categorical mistake. It's a certainty to avoid a negative, and by the same logic you can uncover and then manufacture equally impressive positive trades, for a double bonus instead of a single penalty. I could manage baseball for 100 years and I would never make a trade once like the Renteria trade, that's not possible within my baseball logic. My logic prevents me from making obviously flawed moves, and paves a way to making good deals consummate more regularly. It's very simple and very smart. And any GM that takes the post should already know how to do this, or he's a jerk that is cheating his community by pretending to be able to do a big important job that he can't possibly do appropriately.

All we have to do is stop trading for the reject half of baseball players while giving up guys from the valuable half, and everything would be fine.

chrbal · Post #16 » by **chrbal** » Mon Aug 1, 2011 9:05 pm

Trades in all sports are pretty much like playing the lottery, baseball wishes it was that easy.

For all the Jairs' and John Smoltz trades, people ignore that the Tigers really gave up nothing to get Miguel. Peralta came with money for some random minor league pitcher. The Granderson/Edwin trade got them Jackson and Scherzer.

there are other trades that worked out horribly for Detroit, remember Washburn and Huff. But every team has their own Smoltz for Alexander trade.

http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/list/20 ... ?page=1#sT

TSE · Post #17 » by **TSE** » Wed Aug 3, 2011 7:08 pm

Miguel is irrelevant, as that was a good trade, and we should always do good trades. And that wasn't a conventional trade where we had to compete with player compensation back with all the other teams in the league. That's because he was a specially priced player that other teams couldn't afford, so it's built-in to the equation that the player material is going to be a natural edge in our favor, the extra cost has to justify it and you could argue that Cabrera doesn't hit value for the money we pay him relative to other players in the league, and you would be right. But as far as player material for player material, that's not a qualified trade to potentially lose on as the massive money to that player is going to force the required material you need to give up to be just less, and again we had very tiny competition in this arena.

Just because we scored there doesn't give us a valid excuse to then give that value away in future negative deals. Yeah it is like playing the lottery, and trades are like trading lottery tickets. Suppose you had a group of $1 instant tickets, some $5 instant tickets, $10 ones, and some $25 grouped megaboll draws. All of those categories have vastly different prices in proportion to each other, in addition to vastly different prizes. So if you want to trade them, then you have to take the expected value from each king and come up with a cumulative score for all tickets going in and out. And as long as you have more coming in than going out, yes you are gambling, and yes you could win or lose, but the name of the game has nothing to do with getting lucky or not getting lucky, we can't control that, we can only control the entry odds. And if we improve our entry odds before we play the game, then we win, on logic, regardless of how the dice rolls come out.

That's the only sensible and logical way to approach it, and we do the opposite, we take lower valued EV deals and raise the odds against us instead of lowering them when we gamble with these "lottery tickets" and fail to value them appropriately against each other from one group to another.