Inge Again Left In the Cold After Fielder Signing

He has been, in a way, the Rasputin of the Tigers. Or the poetic feline who possesses nine lives. Take your pick.

They’ve tried running Brandon Inge out of town for about eight years now. It’s all been done to him—free agents and trade acquisitions arriving to play his position (twice), talk radio blazing with anti-Inge venom. The Tigers even designated him for assignment last summer, and traded for a replacement: Wilson Betemit.

Betemit has been signed by the Baltimore Orioles as a free agent. And Inge not only survived his DFA, he made it all the way back to the Tigers’ playoff roster.

Betemit, the man the Tigers traded for to take Inge’s spot on the roster, is gone. And Inge is still here. Figure that one out.

Nature even tried to nudge Inge out of Detroit, vis a vis the infamous bout of mononucleosis that befell him last year, which was likely a factor in his woeful performance at the plate.

Yet here Inge was, as recently as last week, boldly and gamely speaking of seizing, once again, his cherished spot at third base.

He declared himself healthy, and frankly a little ticked off.

“I love Don Kelly,” Inge told the media during the Tigers Winter Caravan last week, speaking of the man he was slated to platoon with at the hot corner. “But I don’t intend on platooning.”

Inge, the player who many Tigers fans either hate to love or love to hate, looked to be working on yet another life wearing the Old English D.

Then came the news that rocked the baseball world.

It started spilling out on Twitter shortly after 3:00 p.m. Tuesday afternoon.

Prince Fielder, the Herculean free agent first baseman, had been signed by the Tigers. For nine years, at a cost of $214 million.

Inge again became collateral damage, because in order to make room for Fielder—no fat jokes, please—the Tigers planned on moving incumbent first sacker Miguel Cabrera to (drum roll please) third base.

Rim shot!

They’re doing it again to Brandon Inge.

The first time this happened was eight years ago, when the Tigers, coming off a 43-119 debacle, managed to snare free agent catcher Pudge Rodriguez.

Inge was the Tigers’ catcher back then.

Despite Pudge’s Hall of Fame credentials, Inge, with a sour puss, whined about the acquisition. Inge thought himself fit to be the team’s starting catcher, despite a batting average hovering around .200 in 2003.

Inge pointed to his defense, which he felt was akin to Rodriguez’s at the time.

I thought Inge to be a petulant young player back then, with the way he reacted to the (at the time) gargantuan news of Pudge’s signing.

Then in spring training 2008, Inge, the Tigers’ starting third baseman at the time, was displaced by the winter time acquisition of Miguel Cabrera. On Opening Day, Inge found himself in center field, of all places. Soon he was back behind the plate, playing a position he thought he’d left for good after he fell in love with third base.

Meanwhile, the Tigers kept playing musical chairs with their glove men.

Cabrera moved from third base to first base after 14 games. Carlos Guillen switched from first to third. Inge kept catching, and would replace Guillen in the late innings at third base.

Guillen didn’t play after August 25 that year, so Inge reclaimed third base.

In 2009, Inge was an All-Star third baseman, and played the second half of the season on two ravaged knees.

The 2011 season was a disaster for Inge. He didn’t have his health or his strength, and soon he didn’t even have a spot on the Tigers roster. He was roasted daily on sports talk radio. Even after being designated for assignment in July, Inge refused to leave the Tigers, accepting the assignment rather than becoming a free agent. He ended up in Toledo, which wasn’t far enough away for the haters’ liking.

It looked like the end of Inge’s Tigers career. The team traded for Betemit. Inge was a minor leaguer, his teammates mostly 10 years younger than he, or more.

Yet I wondered aloud on “The Knee Jerks” podcast in mid-August whether the Tigers might call Inge back to the big club when rosters expanded on September 1. Wouldn’t it be something, I opined, if Inge returned to the Tigers and became productive?

The Tigers indeed recalled Inge—on August 20, making him eligible for the playoff roster. Leading off the second inning, taking his first hacks as a Tiger in a month, Inge clobbered a home run. The man fans hate to love and love to hate got a curtain call.

That game on August 20 was the first of four multi-hit games Inge would register as he got stronger and more productive. Rasputin was still alive.

As the Tigers’ winter caravan rolled on last week, Inge spoke eagerly about the upcoming season, being healthy and all.

Then came the Fielder signing, and Inge was knocked for a loop yet again.

As manager Jim Leyland put it the other day, Inge is “not the happiest camper” in the wake of the news of Fielder’s blockbuster, totally unforeseen signing.

Leyland told the media at the Fielder press conference on Thursday that he wishes he could have broken the news to Inge personally, instead of the latter finding out the way the rest of us found out.

Normally it wouldn’t matter what a guy who hit .197 last season thinks about player personnel moves. It wouldn’t matter if that player found out by TV, radio, Pony Express or by messenger pigeon.

But there’s something about this crazy, mixed up relationship between Brandon Inge and the Detroit Tigers. And, by extension, the fan base.

It’s a relationship that keeps all parties off balance. Just when Inge thinks he has it made, the rug gets pulled out from under him. And just when the Inge haters who follow the Tigers think they’re rid of him, he re-emerges.

Frankly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it in my 41 years of following and covering Detroit sports.

Brandon Inge has, yet again, been nudged out of the picture, and this time there isn’t center field or catcher waiting as a consolation prize.

Even though Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski said Inge “is still an important part of this team,” it’s hard to see how, with Cabrera moving to third base and Alex Avila entrenched at catcher.

Lots of Tigers fans couldn’t care less if Inge is “not the happiest camper” right now. They’re too giddy about Prince Fielder. Duly noted, and understood.

With Brandon Inge, it always seems like there’s someone else. Then it always seems like it’s him again. This has been going on for eight years now.

To quote the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip it’s been.

Tigers’ Surprise Signing of Prince Fielder Likely Dotted With Ilitch’s Fingerprints

Victor Martinez’s name just got wiped off the front pages as if it had been written on a dry erase board.

There have been some shocking free agent signings in baseball since Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally unleashed the genie from the bottle back in 1975.

But the Tigers signing of Prince Fielder today caused more gasps than the first audience that ever saw a lady being sawed in two.

This wasn’t only unexpected, it was dismissed—by the very same man who consummated the deal.

Tigers President and GM Dave Dombrowski, just last week, said the Tigers wouldn’t be getting involved in the Fielder sweepstakes because of the longevity Prince would be seeking, despite the Tigers needing a bat to replace Martinez, lost for the 2012 season with a torn up knee.

Yet there it was, around 3:00 pm ET today: the news breaking with some salvos fired from Twitter, that the Tigers dug deep and snared Fielder for nine years, to the tune of $214 million.

This is “man bites dog” kind of stuff. Jimmy Hoffa was found—alive. Smoking doesn’t cause cancer.

Already it’s being speculated that Dombrowski wasn’t the real trigger man here. Owner Mike Ilitch, it is being said, stepped up to the plate, so to speak.

If that’s true, then the octogenarian owner just knocked one into the seats.

You wanted protection for Miguel Cabrera, in the wake of the Martinez injury? You wanted a left-handed stick to complement Miggy’s right-handed one?

Well, here comes Prince, complete with a navy blue and orange bow tied around his big belly.

Fielder is a Tiger, the second Fielder to be one. And Prince is even better than the first one—and the first one was pretty damn good.

Fielder is a first baseman, as you all know. The Tigers currently employ a pretty good one, if you recall.

No worries. It’s likely that Cabrera will move across the diamond to play third base, which would be the highest-profile sports move in Detroit since the Pistons fled to the Silverdome.

The Fielder signing comes from left field, to use yet another baseball term. But it ends at first base, which is where Prince will be entrenched. Reports say that the Tigers consulted with Cabrera about the signing before handing Prince the magic pen.

Miggy, those reports say, gave his blessing.

Why wouldn’t he? He has a bona fide elite slugger hitting behind him. He now has more protection than a Sicilian store owner paying the Mob.

Prince Fielder to the Tigers. Nine years, $214 million. Mr. Ilitch continues to spend his kids’ inheritance.

Think the Hot-n-Ready pizzas will stay at five bucks?

I think it’s highly likely that Ilitch shoved Dombrowski aside, so to speak, and ponied up the pizza dough to sign Prince.

Ilitch is past 80 years of age and he’s coming up on the 20th anniversary of buying the Tigers. Lord knows he had no idea he’d be 20 years into this and have next to nothing to show for it, except for a division title and two playoff appearances.

I’m guessing the owner thought he’d have a few World Series trophies in his case by now.

But it hasn’t happened. The Tigers made it to the Fall Classic in 2006, and saw their 2011 hopes dashed when too many of their guys tried to play while held together by baling wire and duct tape.

Then came news of the Martinez injury, suffered nearly two weeks ago during some agility drills.

V-Mart gone—for the season.

It was the biggest slug in the gut in Detroit since Houdini.

But here’s one way to mourn and grieve the loss of such a key player as Martinez: simply go out and buy an even bigger star.

Since when did the Tigers start wearing pinstripes?

Ilitch is acting like the Mike Ilitch of the pre-NHL lockout days, when he could wait for the clock to turn midnight on July 1st each summer and fork over the money for Kenny Holland to snag the free agent star du jour.

It was all so easy, and fun, back then. Stanley Cups were the payout for such largesse investments.

But back to Ilitch and his age.

It may be that the length of Fielder’s contract outlives the man who signed off on it. I know that sounds morbid but it’s very possible.

Mike Ilitch wants to win a World Series in the worst way. He’s more driven than most owners, because most baseball owners didn’t live through World War II; actually, most of them weren’t even born then.

Age can be a big motivator, along with fear. They sometimes go hand in hand, like in this case. Mike Ilitch is scared to death of not winning baseball’s biggest trophy before he passes.

The owner has done this before. He stepped in and got involved, enabling Dombrowski to trade for Cabrera in December 2007.

That has worked out pretty good so far.

But the brass ring has eluded Ilitch, with his baseball team.

So he broke out 214 million ways to try to resolve that.

When does spring training start?

Franzen’s Play Not Pretty, But it’s Pretty Important to Red Wings

Ice hockey, the world’s fastest sport, is played at blinding speed by powerful men gliding along the rink on razor-sharp blades fastened to their boots, swinging fiberglass sticks at a vulcanized rubber disc.

It’s polo played on ice, sans the horses.

The thrills and chills come from the long, effortless strides of a puck-carrier as he bores down at the goalie from the wing, at some 25-30 miles per hour. Until he loses the puck, and the same thing happens, going the other way.

It’s a sport whose stoppages of play can come in rapid-fire fashion or as few and far between as an apology from Rush Limbaugh.

The typical rink is 200 feet long by 85 feet wide. That’s 17,000 square feet of frozen fun.

Yet despite all that area with which to work, an Italian-Canadian named Phil Esposito made his living operating within a fraction of it.

Esposito was a center man, or, to be true to his Canadian roots, a centre man. But he played the position as if he was employed by the Boston Celtics instead of the Boston Bruins, for whom he toiled in his heyday of the 1970s.

If the NHL had a three-second rule in front of the goal crease, Esposito would have led the league in violations.

The Bruins led the NHL in goals in the 1970-71 season, scoring nearly 400 in 78 games. Esposito scored 76 of those, by far a new NHL record. If you measured the distance the pucks traveled, those 76 goals likely traversed no more than the 200-foot length of a rink, combined.Esposito was immovable in front of the opponent’s goal. He never took a slap shot in his life. He didn’t shoot the puck, per se—he shoved and poked and pushed it past the goal line.

The single-season goal scoring record that Esposito shattered was held by Bobby Hull, who ONLY took slap shots. The two players’ styles couldn’t have been any more different.

Hull skated; Esposito planted.

As for their shooting skills, if they were pitchers, Hull was Nolan Ryan and Esposito was Phil Niekro.

Yet both hockey players made it into the Hall of Fame by scoring bushels of goals. It’s just that Hull did it from afar and Esposito did it from the goalie’s doorstep.

Esposito comes to mind as I watch this man the folks around town call The Mule play hockey for the Red Wings.

Johan Franzen wears No. 93, a number never considered to be worn in Esposito’s day. Hockey players back then didn’t wear a number higher than 35, and that was reserved for the goalies.

If a player was sent to the minors, his replacement simply took his number—kind of like a hockey doppelganger.A hockey player wearing No. 93 in Esposito’s time might as well have been all green with one eye in the middle of his head.

Doesn’t matter. Franzen plays Esposito-like hockey.

They call Franzen The Mule because, well, you ever try to move a mule that doesn’t want to be moved?

Like Esposito four decades ago, Johan Franzen takes a vast majority of his cracks at the net a stick’s length away from it.

Franzen is the bull to the goalie’s china shop. He has the finesse of a caveman and the grace of the town drunk. His goals have the beauty only a mother can love.

But hockey doesn’t award style points. Like its brethren, hockey is a bottom-line, end-of-the-day sport. Wins are doled out to the team with the most goals, not the most oohs and ahhs.

Every team should have a Johan Franzen. Yet not every team does.

It may seem that all Franzen does is throw himself at the net like a blind squirrel in search of a nut, hoping to pick up a few. But Franzen is a strong, powerful forward with a will to match. He is maybe the most purposeful player in the NHL.Especially come playoff time.

Since he’s been a regular with the Red Wings (seven seasons), Franzen has been his most lethal when the buds begin appearing on the trees and you can start smelling the charcoal and lighter fluid again.

In 83 career playoff games, Franzen has 37 goals—about 10 more than he averages per the same amount of games in the regular season.

An injury reduced him to just eight playoff games and two goals last spring, his effectiveness neutralized by his poor health. It was one major reason why the Red Wings couldn’t advance past the San Jose Sharks and the second round for the second year in a row.

Franzen is 6’3”, 225 pounds and doesn’t take no for an answer around the net. He plays like a bulldozer, but in reality he has hands as soft as rose petals. Often, you need to see the replays of his goals to appreciate his dexterity in such close quarters in the crease area.

Franzen has 18 goals this season in 47 games. On that pace, he’ll register about 30 for the year, which would be second to his career-high of 34, set in 2009. Of his 18 tallies thus far, all but a few have been scored while breathing down the goalie’s neck.

Franzen plays on a very intriguing line with center Pavel Datsyuk and right wing Todd Bertuzzi. I say intriguing because few lines in the NHL can match theirs in terms of creativity (Datsyuk), smarts (Bertuzzi) and sheer strength (Franzen).The line is becoming a beast in the league. All three of them are playing some of their best hockey right now. It’s a matchup nightmare for opposing coaches.

Johan Franzen isn’t likely to get a sniff of MVP talk, probably ever in his career. His play isn’t glitzy or glamorous. His goals don’t find their way on any of the ESPN highlight montages.

But try playing chunks of games without him and see how the Red Wings fare.

Not that I’m suggesting it.

Forget Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg et al—how Johan Franzen goes will pretty much determine how the Red Wings go. They are, after all, the only team that can saddle up a mule.

V-Mart’s Loss Tough, But There’s Still a Season to Play

The knee is an unpredictable and petulant joint—one that can take an inordinate amount of pounding, twisting and extending, then can buckle and tear while performing much less strenuous activities.

We’ve had some famous knees in Detroit sports.

Nick Eddy was a hard-running, even harder working running back for the Lions in the late-1960s. A star at Notre Dame, Eddy started suffering knee injuries while playing under the Golden Dome. Those injuries followed him from South Bend to Detroit.

Eddy tried as hard as any human being could, to keep himself healthy and being available to tote footballs for the Lions. But his knees betrayed him, and his pro career never really got going.

Billy Sims took a pitch in Minneapolis one fateful Sunday in 1984 and swept to his left. A Vikings linebacker named Walker Lee Ashley leveled his helmet at Sims’ knee and blew it up. It was the last carry of Sims’ mercurial NFL career, after just four-plus years.

Mark Fidrych shagged fly balls in Lakeland in spring training, 1977, despite the warnings of teammate Rusty Staub. The clairvoyant Staub was right. Fidrych landed awkwardly on his right knee and “felt something slushy”—words he used to me as I spoke to The Bird via phone in 2007.

The “slushy” feeling turned out to be ligament damage, and contributed greatly to Fidrych not only missing most of the ’77 season, but indirectly causing him to overcompensate and develop arm trouble, from which he would never recover.

And who can ever forget the torture and pain that Steve Yzerman put himself through during the 2002 playoffs, his knee so ravaged that he would have to undergo highly unorthodox reconstructive surgery during the off-season? But the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup, so mission accomplished, in the Captain’s eyes.

This after Yzerman, in 1988, slammed into the goal post the night he scored his 50th goal against Buffalo at Joe Louis Arena, knocking him out for the remainder of the season and the first two rounds of the playoffs.

So we know a little about daunting knee injuries in this town.

But these things are like deaths in the family—no matter how many times you experience it, the next one isn’t any easier to cope with.

The news of Victor Martinez’s major knee injury, the one that will likely cause him to miss the entire 2012 season, was something I caught in a “wait, what?” fashion.

I had the TV muted and was peeking in on the Red Wings game, during intermission. On the screen was a graphic, and it had V-Mart’s photo and it said something about missing the entire 2012 season.

Wait, what?

Surely I must have read it wrong. Or so I hoped.

The news was all too true.

That petulant knee, again.

Martinez, it turns out, was doing some agility drills as he prepared for his second season as a Tiger. No doubt the drills he did have been performed by tens of thousands of athletes in the past.

A slip of the foot and a knee buckle later, and the Tigers, just like that, lost a .330 hitter who drove in 103 runs last year, and who was invaluable as a consummate pro and teammate.

Players of Victor Martinez’s ilk simply don’t grow on trees.

So as the Tigers—and their fan base—try to come to terms with the news of Martinez’s expected 2012 absence, it helps to keep expectations to a realistic level.

Meaning, you ain’t replacing V-Mart with another V-Mart.

There are plenty of free agent options available. GM Dave Dombrowski’s cell phone just about blew up in the hours after Martinez’s injury was made public fodder, with calls from agents of players looking for work.

You’ve heard the names, over and over, by now.

Is there a Martinez on the list?

The closest is Prince Fielder, and while it’s intriguing to imagine Cecil’s kid accepting a one-year deal in Detroit before testing the market again for 2013 and beyond, it’ll take a boatload of cash and quite a payroll hit to make that happen. Not likely to transpire, but fun to think about.

The next closest, perhaps, is Vlad Guerrero, coming off a so-so season in Baltimore.

The rest of the list contains some acceptable names, but not all of them would one consider to be enough protection behind Miguel Cabrera. In fact, few of them would be.

So the Tigers have to realize that they just won’t go out and pluck another V-Mart from the tree.

Guerrero would be a fine addition. He is strictly a DH at this stage of his career, so in that way he’s a tit-for-tat replacement for Martinez, who even before this latest injury wasn’t going to play in the field anymore—not with the Tigers signing Gerald Laird to be catcher Alex Avila’s backup.

But Vlad won’t hit .330, and he’s not a switch-hitter, another thing that Victor has over the available free agents.

Still, a Guerrero who can hit for power but not threaten .300 would make opposing managers at least think twice before issuing Cabrera the four-finger pass.

My money is on the Tigers signing Guerrero for a year.

The next step in the coping/grieving process is to find perspective.

Yes, the Tigers lost a major cog to the machine when Martinez’s foot slipped and his knee exploded. No, they cannot hope to totally replace all that V-Mart brings to the table, on the field and off.

So what would you have them do, wave the white flag, a month before pitchers and catchers report? You want Dombrowski to throw up his hands and say, “Well, we might as well not even play the games this year”?

No. This is baseball. Teams lose star players to injury all the time, and often times, if they’re good enough, they overcome those injuries.

If losing Victor Martinez was the only thing the other teams in the AL Central needed in order to bridge the 15-game gap between the Tigers and the second place Cleveland Indians, then the pessimists are right—may as well not even play the games this year.

But Martinez isn’t the only reason the Tigers ran away and hid from their Central brethren in 2011.

This is another bad knee injury that has slugged this city’s sports fans, and it didn’t even happen during a game. In a way, that makes this even worse. The least Martinez could have done was get hurt actually playing baseball.

Last I checked, the Tigers still have 162 games to play this season. Last I checked, they were runaway winners of their division.

See you in Lakeland.

NHL “Iron Man” Wilson Deserved Better Upon News of His Passing

He was the NHL’s original Iron Man—a man of perfect attendance, whose offices were located in six Taj Mahals of indoor sports venues.

Long before the tentacles of corporate sponsorship wrapped themselves around the naming of stadiums and arenas, the NHL of Johnny Wilson was played in a half dozen barns, each wonderfully devoid of anything remotely corporate in name, though several were botanical.

Chicago Stadium. Maple Leaf Gardens. The Boston Garden. Madison Square Garden. The Forum. Olympia Stadium.

The names of the arenas screamed hockey.

And Wilson screamed hockey by showing up to work everyday—580 consecutive times, to be exact.

This was the Original Six era—14 games played against each of your five opponents, for a 70-game schedule.

Which means that Johnny Wilson, playing for the Red Wings and Blackhawks in the 1950s, suited up for eight straight seasons without missing a game.

It was hockey without helmets, with shoulder pads smaller than those on today’s women’s attire and with cages around the rink, not Plexiglas.

Travel was by train, sometimes on the same cars as your opponent, if the teams were playing a home-and-home set. That made for some interesting commutes.

It was a race to see which would happen faster: players losing their teeth, or their faces being sewn back together.

All the players were Canadian.

The 70 games were scrunched together between mid-October and late-March. There was no two-month run of playoffs. Everything was wrapped up by mid-April, in time for the baseball season to take center stage.

Wilson joined the Red Wings late in the 1949-50 season, a 20-year-old from a town called Kincardine in Ontario. That was another constant—not only were all the players from Canada, they all hailed from towns that you needed a map to find.

Wilson, a left winger, picked a great time to debut in the NHL, because just weeks later, the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup.

Too young to crack the Red Wings’ talent-rich lineup on a consistent basis, Wilson bounced back and forth between Detroit and the minor leagues until midway through the 1951-52 season, when he got called up yet again.

That’s when he started his streak of 580 consecutive games played. No more minor leagues for him.

Three more Stanley Cups followed (1952, ’54, and ’55), with Wilson popping in the odd goal, and skating up and down his wing, dutifully, every night.

EVERY night.

The bottom line was this: Johnny Wilson got called up to the Red Wings in 1951 and didn’t miss a game the rest of the decade, despite a trade to Chicago in 1955 and back to Detroit in 1957.

The original NHL Iron Man.

Johnny wasn’t the only Wilson kid playing in the NHL—he just played in it longer. His brother, Larry, made it with the Red Wings for a time.

Larry also followed his big brother behind the bench as Red Wings coach.

More about that later.

Johnny Wilson died in Metro Detroit on December 27 at age 82, after an illness.

You’d hardly have known it, judging by the shameful under-reporting of his death by the Detroit newspapers.

Wilson was one of those Red Wings alumni who stayed in the area, hung around the team and who was always eager to talk hockey.

I should know.

In fall 2006, I moderated a roundtable discussion about hockey, comparing eras and talking about how the game has evolved since the 1950s.

The panel consisted of Ted Lindsay, Shawn Burr and Johnny Wilson.

Wilson was 77 at the time but he was as sharp as a scalpel, talking hockey and, more importantly, listening.

It was a wonderful hour.

Before we sat down and talked, I told Wilson that I thought he got a screw job, when he was fired as Red Wings coach after less than two seasons in 1973, and right after missing the playoffs by two measly points. I had wanted to tell him that ever since it happened.

He grinned and said, “Darkness with Harkness,” referring to GM Ned Harkness, who rendered Wilson’s ziggy.

About four years after Johnny was canned as Red Wings coach, brother Larry came along and tried coaching the second half of a 16-55-9 year in 1977. Two years after that, Larry dropped dead of a heart attack, at age 49.

You may know Larry’s son—and Johnny’s nephew—Ron Wilson, coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Johnny Wilson was a great Red Wing. He wasn’t a prolific scorer; there were plenty of those on the roster. He won no MVP Awards nor had any remarkable seasons, statistically.

But he was there every night, in the lineup, for those 580 consecutive games. He won four Stanley Cups. And he kept himself closely aligned with the Red Wings, being active in the Alumni Association.

Wilson was also a pretty damn good coach who won a championship in the AHL before coaching the Red Wings.

He was a true gentleman who represented the Winged Wheel with class, dignity and respect.

He died on December 27 and his death barely got a sniff from the local fish wrap. Maybe everyone was too giddy about the Lions clinching a playoff spot just days earlier.

It was a shameful example of under-reporting, because Wilson was among the greatest of Red Wings.

As a player, he was as solid—and reliable—as they come. As a coach, he was innovative and settled the team down from the upheaval that existed when he took over.

As an alumnus, Wilson was active, involved and you knew there was a Winged Wheel tattooed on his heart.

He deserved better from the local papers, which should get a game misconduct for virtually ignoring his legacy.

Zoom-Zooming Out of Motown

Last we saw Joel Zumaya on a big league diamond, he was throwing out a ceremonial first pitch at Comerica Park. He acknowledged the big cheers, and for the briefest of moments, it was 2006 all over again.

But the more resonating image of Zumaya, the fireballing reliever, was of him writhing on the ground in Minnesota in the summer of 2010, his elbow broken after delivering one of his violent pitches.

Who could forget it, if you were watching on television?

The tears of pain, the twitching of his fingers as Zumaya clutched his right elbow, apparently even having trouble breathing.

I know I’ll never forget it.

Zumaya’s dramatic end to his 2010 season was not unlike that of Dave Drabecky, whose left arm snapped and was left dangling after a pitch in 1989. Dravecky’s arm was eventually amputated.

Dravecky’s situation was cancer-related, but the image was still the same: pitcher throws baseball, pitcher is suddenly rolling around on the ground in massive pain.

Now it appears that Zumaya has thrown his last pitch—as a Tiger.

Looks like the Tigers aren’t interested in bringing Zumaya, a free agent, back into the fold—even after a showcase in front of MLB teams in Houston appeared to go well for the 27-year-old.

Tom Gage of the Detroit News wrote that Zumaya could end up signing with his hometown Sn Diego Padres.

Fine by me, if the Tigers won’t bite, because the last thing Tigers fans want to see is Zumaya in the American League, haunting them.

The comparisons have been made to Mark Fidrych, and there’s some of that, for sure.

Both were 21 year-old rookies when they took the baseball world by storm. Both had magical seasons, which were exactly 30 years apart. Both then fell victim to injuries (each had fluke ones) and had difficulty recapturing their prior glory. And both, of course, pitched for the Tigers.

But the book on Fidrych has long ago been closed. Zumaya still has time to distance himself from The Bird.

It’s just not likely to happen as a Tiger.

The Tigers have their late inning bullpen all set, at least on paper.

They signed Octavio Dotel, a veteran of 13 MLB teams, to handle the seventh inning. Joaquin Benoit handles the eighth inning. And Jose Valverde closes things.

There’s Phil Coke and Daniel Schlereth for left-handed variety. And don’t forget righty Al Alburquerque, he of the wicked slider, but who is battling arm troubles of his own.

There simply isn’t room for an arm with a checkered past, i.e. Zumaya.

I wish Joel Zumaya well, obviously. I’m sure the rest of Tigers Nation is with me, even if it looks like his career will resume with another team—if it resumes at all.

There’s still time for him to silence the Mark Fidrych talk.

I hope he does.

Lions’ Playoff Loss is GM Mayhew’s Mulligan

They say you should never bring a knife to a gunfight.

Well, the Lions didn’t; they brought a shotgun. Trouble is, the New Orleans Saints have a howitzer.

The Lions, 45-28 losers on Saturday night in New Orleans, didn’t get blown out because they don’t have a good offense. The Lions lost big because the Saints’ offense is better, and the Lions’ defense is still a work in progress. If the Lions defense was a freeway, three lanes would be shut down and it would be filled with orange cones.

Did you notice any glaring differences between the Lions and Saints, when it came to having the football?

Don’t look at the quarterbacks; Matthew Stafford and Drew Brees are pretty comparable.

Don’t look at the receivers; the Lions have the best one on the planet, but the Saints have a cache of good receivers in their own right.

Did you happen to notice that the Saints have something called a ground game?

Oh, what the Lions offense could look like, if they had someone to run the football with any consistency.

My kingdom for Stephen Jackson of the St. Louis Rams.

But we’ll just have to settle for a healthy Jahvid Best and Mikel Leshoure; which should occur next season, if Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside recover from concussion and Achilles injury, respectively.

The Saints gashed the Lions’ supposedly dominant defensive line with the run all evening, as if Brees needs any help.

And as if the Lions’ could have stopped him, even if your Aunt Mary were running the football.

Brees’ surgery on the Lions secondary was complete. The Saints quarterback wielded his scalpel to the tune of 466 yards passing and three touchdowns. He left the Lions looking like Gerry Cheevers’ goalie mask.

Now it’s up to GM Marty Mayhew to make sure another scene of carnage never happens again to the Lions in a playoff game. This was Mayhew’s Mulligan. He’s allowed this implosion, because his team is still just three years removed from 0-16.

But next year, and the year after, and the year after, it will no longer satiate the fan base to simply qualify for the playoffs. We’ve fallen for that once before, in the 1990s, when the Lions went one-and-out in the post-season five out of six seasons in the decade.

That won’t cut it, with a franchise quarterback and an All-Universe Receiver.

Mayhew’s charge, in a way, gets simpler with the more success the Lions find, yet it also gets harder.

It gets simpler because the holes are fewer on the roster, thanks to Mayhew’s astute drafting and slick trading and signings.

Yet it also gets harder because expectations have now been ratcheted up.

The Lions got carved up on Saturday and 626 total yards later, they were nothing but a carcass, the bones licked clean by the Saints’ well-balanced offense.

Mayhew has to draft for secondary help this spring, and he needs to find a new center and left tackle, to be on the ready when Dom Raiola and Jeff Backus retire.

There needs to be more roster massaging before the Lions can truly call themselves Super Bowl contenders. No one gets bumped out of the playoffs in the first round, as soundly as the Lions did, and comes back with the same cast and crew and expects to make progress.

This was no fluke loss. You can’t blame this one on the crazy bounces of an oblong pigskin.

The Lions were beaten, and beaten good, by the Saints, who are legitimately elite. The Saints are what the Lions would like to become, in short order.

The Lions can now check off “Make the playoffs” on their to-do list under the Mayhew/Jim Schwartz regime.

Next is, “Advance beyond the first round.”

The biggest challenge yet for Maywartz.

Like Steelers of 1970s, Lions Need to Take Playoff Lumps Before Success

***********************************************************
So here they come marching into New Orleans, this previously bedraggled pro football franchise, in seek of something which has eluded them 53 of the past 54 years.

It’s funny, in a way, that the Lions will be looking for just their second playoff victory since 1957 in New Orleans, a city that has vexed them and which has been the scene of many a crime against football humanity.

The Saints are winners now, and almost annual Super Bowl contenders these days. But from their inception in 1967 to nearly the dawn of the second decade of the 21st century, the New Orleans Saints were the Los Angeles Clippers of the NFL.

The Saints were slapstick, back in the day—a laughable franchise with a beaten down quarterback named Archie Manning, and with yearly won/loss records like 3-13. In 1980, the Saints managed to go 1-15.

The Saints were the ones getting their shirts and wallets lifted, like those audience participants at a magic show. Teams came to New Orleans for some gumbo, a little fun in the French Quarter and a 27-10 victory. The city’s nickname, The Big Easy, was perfectly apt—for opponents.

The Saints were the league’s coupon to a free victory.

Yet despite the pockmarked nature of the Saints franchise, the Lions suffered perhaps their most inglorious defeat of all time in New Orleans, on November 8, 1970, when Tom Dempsey thwacked a 63-yard field goal at the final gun to lift the Saints to victory.

In keeping with the times, the dramatic—and record-setting—victory was one of just two wins the Saints had in 1970.

The Lions haven’t won much in New Orleans, and just last month, the Saints ran away with a 31-17 victory.

The Saints have shaken their losing image like a caterpillar doing its butterfly thing.

No longer do teams fly down to Louisiana for a Big Easy win.

The Saints went 8-0 at home this season, and the scoreboard rings up like a pinball machine when they get into rhythm.

The Saints are 11-point favorites in Saturday night’s Wild Card game, and the NFL rarely sees those kinds of point spreads in the playoffs.

The game could turn into a disaster for the Lions, who have precious few players on their roster who’ve stepped onto the field for an NFL playoff game.

So the Lions will use that lack of experience to their advantage, or so they’ll try.

They’ve already talked of enjoying the underdog role, and that they have nothing to lose and that all the pressure is on the Saints.

The typical things teams who run the risk of getting run out of the building say as their execution approaches.

I look at the Lions now, just three years removed from the ignominy of 0-16, and I can’t help but think of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The Steelers, the Team of the 1970s, were a wayward franchise in the 1960s, usually an also-ran and finding that football games were harder to win than a husband’s fight with his wife.

The bottoming out came in 1969, when the Steelers won on Opening Day for their bright young coach in his first season: Chuck Noll.

Then the Steelers lost their remaining 13 games.

From the ashes of 1-13, the Steelers drafted their franchise quarterback, Terry Bradshaw, in 1970. This was one year after the Steelers selected a brutally dominant defensive tackle named Joe Greene.

The Lions, just months removed from 0-16, drafted Matthew Stafford in 2009. In 2010, they added DT Ndamukong Suh.

The Steelers got better, and with defter drafting, they built a defense that became dominant, and an offense that could compete, too. By 1972, just three years from 1-13, the Steelers were in the playoffs.

The Lions are in the playoffs, just three years after 0-16. They’ve managed to do it with good drafting and smart free agent signings.

The Steelers began arming Bradshaw with weapons, adding a tough and fast runner, Franco Harris, in 1972 from nearby Penn State. They drafted a gazelle receiver in Lynn Swann in 1974.

The Steelers, via the draft, added pieces yearly. Trades were few and free agency didn’t really exist.

From the ruins of 1-13, the Pittsburgh Steelers won four Super Bowls in the 1970s—from 1974 thru 1979.

The Steelers won a miraculous playoff game in 1972—the famous Immaculate Reception game against Oakland. From that experience, the Steelers, with all their smart and brilliant draft choices, parlayed their Super Bowl credentials.

That’s how winning, perennially successful NFL franchises are built—through the draft. It has been the blueprint of the Steelers of the ‘70s, the 49ers of the ‘80s, the Cowboys of the ‘90s.

It says here that this same blueprint will be the success of the Lions of the ‘10s.

Lions GM Martin Mayhew is a smart man who learned from a dumb guy.

Mayhew, longtime second in command under the dunderhead Matt Millen, was promoted to GM after Millen’s firing early in the 2008 season. Quickly, Mayhew proved adept at the job. It was obvious that Mayhew took everything that Millen did, and did the exact opposite.

Wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall in meetings that Millen held with Mayhew in attendance?

I can only wonder how many of those meetings Mayhew emerged from, shaking his head.

The 1970s Steelers didn’t take the NFL by storm right away. It took a couple of playoff losses before they found their footing. You know the rest.

The Lions have no business winning a playoff game in New Orleans, of all places, on Saturday night. They are three years removed from 0-16. Their quarterback is very good, but he’s all of 23 years old.

The Saints won the Super Bowl two years ago and could darn well do it again this year.

Only a delusional optimist would think the Lions can win this game.

And they probably won’t.

The Steelers needed a miracle play to win their first playoff game of 1972. Then they stumbled, and eventually learned how to win.

The Lions will likely lose on Saturday night, blocks from the French Quarter. It will be a necessity, almost, in their learning process.

The Team of the ‘10s?

Why the hell not?