The worst ever? It’s still May, man. Chill.
:rolleyes:
It doesn’t make much for as good a discussion when the season is over.
I just hope they can stay bad one more night. I’ve got tickets to tonight’s game versus the Yankees.
Me too. I took the $1.20 about the Yankees to win. There is much money to be made from terrible teams. The teams beating them at their last few starts have paid between $1.40 and $1.50.
That’s cold man. I’m a Cleveland fan, and not even I am that bitter. 
The Tigers haven’t finished above .500 in 13 years, and haven’t made the playoffs in 19. This is not a remarkably fast turnaround.
Actually, that’s exactly what makes it a remarkably fast turnaround, since, at the moment, they’re leading the AL Central, and have the best record in baseball. (Insert caveat about being early in the season, etc etc etc).
Watching the Tiger’s over the last 3 years. You could see they were getting better. Young Pitching was coming together. The farm system was producing players and they were not trading them off for ill-fitting vets like Juan Gone anymore.
The Free agents they added were excellent pickups. Especially Pudge and Kenny Rodgers and taking a gamble on Magglio Ordonez was a very good risk. If you look at the team, the GM did a great job. I think they have a legit chance at the Wild Card this year. I think over the long season they cannot keep up with the White Sox.
All that said, look at KC. Terrible Scouting, weak farm system and unlike Tampa, there is not a lot of high end kids playing. It is middling kids and scrap heap veterans. The worst team on paper since the 1962 Mets.
Jim
I agree that they’re better this year that most would have expected. I still don’t think the Tigers have had a remarkably fast turnaround though. It’s not like they went out and bought themselves a new team this year. They’ve slogged through the last few years with largely the same roster. A lot of their young players are now coming around.
They’ve returned to prominence the same way the Twins did a few years ago. They were terrible for an exentended period and built themselves from within. The Twins pulled their resurgence off much more quickly though. They only spent 8 years below .500 and 11 between playoff appearances. Not a history to be proud of, certainly. But when Kansas City has been so bad for so long and they aren’t even to the point the Tigers were a few years ago…at least with talented youngsters to run out there everyday…the reason can only be organizational incompetence.
No no no, they’re a good team. Old guys? Nah - veterans! Believe you me, the Royals are on the road to victory by 2007!
ZipperJJ (who’s promising young Indians have managed to drop 5/9 games to the Royals so far this year, and won 3 of those games by 1 or 2 runs.)
Woo! Everyone sing! “Beat the Mets! Beat the Mets! Go, KC, and Beat the Mets!”
I’m sorry, but if there’s a new record being made, I’m for it. Even if it’s a horrible one.
So do I. But I would prefer to see them beat a better team.
Actually, it can hardly be a satisfactory game. If they win, they’ve only beat the Royals; and if they lose, it will be that much more embarassing, especially after having just taken 2 out of 3 from the Red Sox.
But with Mussina on tonight, it’s hard to see the Yanks losing.
I’ve watched most of the games that RSTN has televised this year, and listened to the rest on the radio. Yes, that makes me an idiot. We’re horrible. Unbelievably bad. But I should mention the fact that we’ve been hit pretty hard by injuries. If Mike Sweeney would stay healthy for more than a week he’d be the All-Star that the OP said we lack. Our best outfielder has been out most of the season. Greinke had ‘emotional issues’ and is just starting to throw. Also, the farm system isn’t completely hopeless. We’ve got Alex Gordon, Billy Butler, and Chris Lubanski showing promise in AA-Wichita, and hopefully we can sign a good pitching prospect in the draft. We’re also excited about Justin Huber in AAA-Omaha.
The best solution would be for Glass to sell the team to someone who doesn’t have their head up their ass, but it probably won’t happen.
Least Original User Name Ever:
Sorry, but your guys have the A. L. record. The Royals could break that by merely tying the 1962 Mets. Has to be mentioned.
Jonathan Chance:
No chance. Even if contraction was on the table (and I’m not aware that it is), the city of KC would sue MLB over the attempt since the Royals are locked into a long-term lease on Kauffman Stadium. Minneapolis succeeded in preventing Twins contraction exactly that way. (And a good thing, isn’t it? When people were discussing contracting the Twins, they didn’t foresee them being division champs 2002-2004. The pathetic can rise again.)
Ass For A Hat: I think we’re using different definitions for “fast turnaround.” For me, a “slow” turnaround involves slowly making your way back into contention, and then eventually putting it together. A fast turnaround means exactly what Detroit is doing: going from a bad year to a great one. A similar “fast” turnaround would be the Braves in '91. In both cases, the groundwork for the turnaround was obviously being laid for a while, but the actual resurgence occurred over a very short time span.
A slow turnaround, on the other hand, would be more like what the Mets are doing this year. Granted, they keep buying players, but they went from “decent” last year to “good” this year. No quick jump into contention.
I take it, on the other hand, that you take “fast turnaround” to mean “going from in contention, to out of contention, and then back into contention, quickly.” Yes?
The reason I can’t get on board with your characterization is that the the Tigers aren’t just coming back from a bad year. They’re coming back from two full decades of badness. The other reason I don’t agree this is necessarily a fast turnaround, is that this year’s team, while currently exceeding expectations, also had siginificantly higher expectations than any year in recent memory.
And yes, there are a number of teams, while not bouncing back and forth between the playoffs and the cellar each year, that have rebuilt themselves far more quickly than the Tigers.
I think it would be more likely that the Royals would pick up stakes and move to a city so thirsty for a major league club that it wouldn’t care about being on the short end of the payroll stick.
Sorry, I didn’t really address this properly in my last post. Basically yes, that is how I define a “fast turnaround”. A “turnaround” tends to be a rebuilding process and not just a matter of being bad one year, and good the next. How long the process takes varies widely, based on the competence of the organization.
In the Tigers’ situation, to say that they’ve had a fast turnaround, minimzes the though rebuilding process they’ve been through the past 3-4 years. It also ignores the very poor job of rebuilding they did the 10 years prior to that.
Moving the Royals to another small market isn’t going to solve any of their problems. Then again, I’m not sure moving the Royals to Brooklyn would solve their problems.
Exactly. But that doesn’t stop people from fooling themselves into thinking that a fresh start in a new city is all that stands between a team and instant success.