By Jeff Moss
August 7, 2011
DetroitSportsRag@gmail.com
It isn’t complicated. It really isn’t. As a matter of fact, it is something most young boys who like sports and not playing with Barbie dolls discover around the time they enter kindergarten.
I personally learned this life message back in 1978 at a baseball diamond at the Southfield Civic Center while playing Tee Ball as a six year old kid.
The lesson was that your BEST hitter on a baseball team bats third in your lineup. And even to a child who at the time thought Darth Vader was real, it made perfect sense.
You want your best batter getting the optimum amount of at-bats during the game, but you also want the opportunity for men (or in my case, prepubescent rugrats) to be on base when said hitter comes to home plate in the first inning.
Pretty fucking simple. SO WHY IN THE HELL DOES TIGERS MANAGER JIM LEYLAND TREAT THE 3-HOLE IN HIS LINEUP LIKE SOME SORT OF ONGOING PARLOR GAG?!?!!?!?!?
Just yesterday he thought it would be a brilliant idea to place Ryan Raburn and his .228 BA, .266 OBP and .654 OPS in the three spot in front of Miguel Cabrera.
In past years he has shown so little respect to the traditional spot for your team’s best hitter that he has written Alexis Gomez and Don Kelly’s names into that slot. Which is basically the equivalent of The Comedy Zone in Charlotte, North Carolina deciding to let Tyler Coxx CLOSE on a night that Louie C.K. is performing.
(If you aren’t a member of the DSR Facebook Forum and don’t get the Tyler Coxx reset then click this link:http://tinyurl.com/4xumvak and prepare to asphyxiate yourself.)
But as moronic of a decision as it was to bat Raburn in the three spot to close out the Tigers series in Kansas City, IT WAS ACTUALLY AN IMPROVEMENT OVER THE GUY WHO NORMALLY OCCUPIES THAT POSITION!!!!
It is now August 8th and we are entering the far turn of the MLB season and Leyland continues to insist on batting Magglio Ordonez, his repaired fractured ankle and his Austrian physician corrected left knee in the #3 hole of the Tigers batting order.
I mean, the guy can’t hit for average, he can’t hit for power, he can’t run at all and he is an abortion of a fielder yet Cancer Stick continues to give him the garden position in the order right in front of Miguel Cabrera.
The 38-year old Venezuelan entered Sunday’s game with a batting average of .234, an OBP of .297 an absolutely ANEMIC slugging percentage of .310 and an embarrassingly low OPS of .606.
Yep, a guy with 4 homers and 21 RBI is constantly the #3 hitter on a team that has aspirations of winning the freaking World Series!!!!
If Ordonez was batting EIGHTH OR NINTH in the Tigers lineup it would be mildly upsetting. The fact that he has been given the most coveted spot in the order is FUCKING CRIMINAL!!!!!!!!!!
On Sunday afternoon I decided to look up the HR, RBI and OPS numbers of every other regular three hitter in the American League to demonstrate how asinine it is that Ordonez continues to occupy that spot in the Tigers order.
(I am not even sure why I wasted my time because if you don’t know that a .606 OPS and a .310 slugging percentage is historically awful for #3 hitters, you probably shouldn’t be reading this column in the first place.)
Here is the breakdown:
Billy Butler: 13 HR-60 RBI-OPS .829
Adrian Gonzalez: 18 HR- 91 RBI- .973
Mark Texiera: 32 HR-86 RBI-.870
Jose Bautista: 33 HR-74 RBI-1.102
Adam Jones: 20 HR-69 RBI-.828 OPS
Paul Konerko: 25 HR-78 RBI-.931 OPS
Joe Mauer: 1 HR-21 RBI-.690 OPS
Hideki Matsui: 10 HR-54 RBI-.755
Evan Longoria: 15 HR-57 RBI-.768
Asdrubal Cabrera: 19 HR-65 RBI-.841 OPS
Josh Hamilton: 13 HR-60 RBI- .893 OPS
Dustin Ackley: 5 HR-23 RBI-.921 OPS
Torii Hunter: 14 HR-54 RBI.-717 OPS
Other than Joe Mauer, who has only played in 56 games this year due to injury, every other #3 hitter has an OPS over .700. And even Mauer has a BA of .286 and an OBP of .353 which Tigers fan would die for from Hugo Chavez’s biggest cheerleader.
The average OPS of the American League three hitters listed above is .855. POINT-EIGHT-FIVE-FIVE!!! About .250 higher than Ordonez’s awful number.
And none of the guys listed above have the benefit of batting in front of MIGUEL CABRERA!!! How horrid would Ordonez’s numbers be if he didn’t have the perennial MVP candidate batting behind him?!?!?
(Ordonez is like Kenny Bania without the Metamucil material.)
Even the offensively challenged Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics throw out a #3 hitter with far superior splits than Maggs.
Shit, if Jimmy Cancer Stick ran the world we would probably have the following based on his Ordonez obsession:
— The promotional poster for the movie Inception would have had Tom Berenger’s name at the top and Leonardo DiCaprio’s buried in small print.
— The top name on Grantland.com’s masthead? How about Molly Lambert or Katie Baker.
— The anchor for NBC’s “Nightly News”? Brian Williams? Nah, how about Lester Holt?
And it isn’t like Cancer Stick doesn’t have a plethora of options to fix this problem and he is forced™ (“Jizz Bucket” Samuelsen) to continue to bat a guy whose career is over in the three spot.
He could make the most obvious move and ya know, put his best offensive player (Cabrera) in the three hole.
He could bump Jhonny Peralta and his .872 OPS into the #3 slot or move the shortstop to #2 and lower Brennan Boesch by a spot.
He could shift Miggy to #3, bat Victor Martinez at #4 and place Alex Avila and his .867 OPS at #5, but that would mean the Tigers catcher wouldn’t be able to bat ninth like he did Saturday night.
Or Leyland can continue to do what he is doing which is give Cabrera as few RBI opportunities as humanly possible. Because he could manipulate this batting order in about a million different ways and still NOT come up with one that places two of the team’s worst OBP guys (Ordonez and Austin Jackson) in front of a machine with a .978 OPS!!!!!
And I am sure there are idiot Tigers fans out there who think I am just nitpicking at old Emaciated Hitler and are screaming at their monitor that he has the team in first place in August.
Well, I am sorry, but when the Tigers get to the playoffs they won’t be facing the clowns in the American League Comedy Central. They will be playing against the Yankees, Red Sox, Angels or Rangers and the margin for error won’t be as great for a team that’s divisional games should be a lead-in for Jon Stewart or fodder for Jeffrey Ross, Whitney Cummings and Lisa Lampanelli’s next roast.