All I have been hearing these days about the Detroit Tigers is "Who would've thunk'd it?" or "How'd we end up here?", when it is very easy to see why they are failing to to anything thus far this season. I will tell you though that I knew way before the season even started that we wouldn't win out of the gate and that it would take some moves to get this team back on track, te onlt thing is we haven't been making the right ones. I will talk about this from time to time, anyways here is my first entry.
It all started last season when Dombrowski said that the the Tigers would not be offering Sean Casey a contract for next season and announced that Carlos Guillen would take over first. Now, the reason that the Tigers wanted to move Guillen to first was because he is injury prone and they don't want to risk further injury with him than he has already had in his short MLB career. The big problem here is Guillen is not a first baseman. Thames is alright at first, heck even Pudge looked like he knew what he was doing when they moved him over their for a short while a couple years ago but Guillen's footwork was as horrible as I have ever seen a first baseman's and you always found yourself holding your breathe on every ground ball in the infield. What we should've done is move Guillen to DH while ditching Sheffield because ever since he came over here he has just been a cancer to the team. We should've never failed to resign Casey and had him at first. As for LF, I knew as soon as I saw Marcus Thames play his first week with the Tigers that he was special. I mean you just can't have a guy who is capable of hitting you 40 HR's a year sitting on the bench. Now as for SS, call me crazy but I believe that Ramon Santiago should be there, he's got great defense and he can hit a little as well, and it doesn't hurt if you work with a man by the name of David Ortiz in the offseason, even if they are two totally different tooled players.
This is what I wanted our starting lineup to look like this season but once again I did not get my way.

CF - Granderson
2B - Polanco
DH - Guillen
RF - Ordonez
LF - Thames
1B - Casey
3B - Inge
C - Rodriguez
SS - Santiago

Now, I really truly don't see anything wrong with this lineup. It's best to keep the pieces that you've had then go out and get new ones. If it's not broken don't fix it. We didn't have anything broken but the management thought we needed even more room to improve. I don't know what gave all of them in the Front Office the idea that big bats will win you games. They should know by now that pitching wins championships and that is probably the one thing that could've used a small tune up.
I do not know if any of you other Tiger fans out there have noticed this but when you start to break apart a team things only go downhill. I noticed last season at about the time we traded Maroth that things took a turn for the worse and then after Monroe was traded all hope had failed. You cannot go tearing apart an already great team like the Tigers have done. You guys wouldn't believe how much heat I took this winter when I kept telling everyone that the Tigers have no chance to compete in the division after they traded for Cabrera and Willis. The team they had coming in did not have the right makeup to win. Although I think Leyland knows now that you can't keep playing guys because of the name on the back of their jersey or the amount of money they are making but ever since Leyland has come here I have not been a fan of him. I will not get into that right now because I'm glad to see he's attempting to make changes.