Dynamic Duo

Ken Rosenthal from FoxSports.comm has a nice article up on Jim Leyland and the Tigers. In my humble opinion, the day to day decisions of managers are mostly meaningless. Not meaningless in the sense that they don't matter, but meaningless in the sense that all MLB managers are the same. This isn't football where you run a different offense and a different defense and somebody blitzes all the time on 3rd and long and this and that... Baseball is a series of individual matchups between pitchers and hitters. The most important job of the manager is to get the players to believe in him and each other. Leyland seems to have the confidence of the Tigers right now and that's a good thing. Alan Trammell lost them last year. And while the Tigers aren't going to the playoffs this year, they will have a good team and they will be competitive in the AL Central.

The Baseball Analysts have their 2006 AL Central Preview up. A touch of an anti-Detroit bias to it as they include a Twins and White Sox writer in the discussion, but the consensus seems to peg the Tigs around .500 this year which is in line with most opinions.