Yesterday, the Tigers traded Austin Jackson. While this was good news because it made the team better, it was also sad news because Austin was a big part of the team for the last five years. I was planning to offer a nice tribute to Jackson’s time in Detroit today centered around his best moments.

Then, some jerk named HookSlide at Bless You Boys did that exact thing!

I’m kidding of course. HookSlide went ahead and made up for his idea-theft by locating and packaging some wonderful Dan Dickerson calls of big Austin Jackson moments for publication here at New English D. Hook and I share a fondness for Dan as a play by play guy, so it makes sense to showcase that here. So big thanks to HookSlide, Dan, and Austin on this one.

*****

I was skeptical when the Tigers traded for Jackson. This was a long time ago in internet years. It was 2009 and the Tigers were dumping salary after a really poor year in the ledger. I didn’t think Scherzer was ever going to be a star, but man did he work at it. And I had see Jackson play a little in AAA and didn’t see anything special in that regard either.

Truth be told, Austin Jackson was not a special player. He’s a good player who had one really great season and a few very nice ones in Detroit. He has an average bat and used to have a great glove. The glove is more like average now and he’s more of a regular than any type of star. So I was basically right about Jackson, but only by accident. Forgive me, that was before FanGraphs was popular and you could get detailed scouting information by sneezing on Twitter.

At any rate, for this reason, I was slow to warm up to Jackson. It wasn’t personal, but Granderson was a favorite of mine and it was hard to separate the two. But he was a Tigers and he’s a good guy and there’s really nothing else that matters to me when it comes to welcoming a player in.

I could write about Jackson’s saga, but I think I’d rather just share the moments that made his time in Detroit special. These aren’t all inclusive because the archives only allow you so much access. But here you go, Austin Jackson’s time as a Tiger through the voice of the game’s best non-Vin Scully voice.

 *****

Note: Having some trouble embedding them, but the links work for now!

Let’s warm up with a nice inside the park home run.

Did you know that Jackson dove a couple times? No really.

And how about his big playoff home run in 2012?

And who could forget this season defining play in 2011?

And, of course the defining moment of his Tigers career. Saving Galarraga’s perfect game…

That is, of course, until Thursday. I’m not one for emotions, but this one made you feel things. Watching Austin leave the field like this was certainly something I’ll remember for a long time.

We’ll miss you, Austin.

I wasn’t a fan of the Tigers’ offseason strategy – that won’t surprise anyone who reads the site regularly. Up to that point, Dombrowski had made very few missteps as the Tigers’ GM, but he didn’t impress me this winter. Well he nailed the deadline…or he almost nailed it, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The Tigers needed to upgrade in order to be a true playoff contender. The biggest opportunity for that upgrade was in the bullpen, the second biggest was in the outfield.

The bullpen came first with the Tigers nabbing the best reliever on the market in Joakim Soria. Dave paid a steep price by losing Corey Knebel and Jake Thompson, but those players weren’t going to contribute until at least 2015 and Thompson was probably not coming until 2016. The price was high, but the future matters much less to the Tigers than to the average club, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The Tigers need to do more, though. And then Oakland pushed the chips in and grabbed Jon Lester this morning. The AL rival isn’t messing around and the Tigers needed to follow suit. For a while, Andrew Miller seemed like a nice option to upgrade the bullpen, but Dave had other ideas.

Enter David Price and the Rays. The best player on the market and one who is under team control for 2015 as well. The Tigers had holes in the bullpen, but adding to the roster is adding to the roster. An extra win in the rotation will do the trick just like one in the bullpen would. At least for the regular season.

Not only did Dombrowski grab an upgrade for the stretch run, but he replaced Scherzer for 2015. Great. The upgrade is a little offset considering that the Tigers had to give up Smyly to do it. They also lost Jackson. And a very nice prospect. Price is an upgrade over Jackson and Smyly for the rest of the year and probably next season as well. It will cost them in the checkbook, but they have plenty of room to carry Price in that regard. Adames could really help the Tigers in 2017 or 2018, but that’s a long way off. He’s the cost of doing business.

Price makes them a near lock to wrap up the division and makes them even better in the postseason. Maybe getting three relievers instead of a reliever and a starter would be better in the postseason, but Price makes them better than they were otherwise. And then he helps next year too.

Theoretically, the Tigers could have done something better than this, but this was the Tigers grabbing the best two players they could.

So what we have is the Tigers giving up six years of Knebel, six years of Thompson, six years of Adames, four plus years of Smyly, and a year plus of Jackson for a year plus of both Soria and Price.That’s a high cost but it’s one that makes them more likely to win the 2014 World Series and probably the 2015 World Series. And everything after that doesn’t matter.

Let me say that again. Everything after 2015 doesn’t matter. This is the window. Cabrera and Verlander are getting older. Scherzer is leaving. Porcello might be gone after next year. Kinsler won’t be this good forever. The Tigers are going to have a shot this year and next and then they’re going to have to retool. That might only take a year, but it also might take five. And the owner doesn’t care. He’s getting older and wants a winner. The general manager has done just about all he can do in this job except win a title.

This is it. It really is. So the Tigers borrowed from the future to go for it now. And they should have. And they added two great players and I’m excited for the showdown in October.

The only thing Dombrowski got wrong was not going bigger. He could have gotten Miller too. Or Koji. Or Glen Perkins. Or something. Dave made the team better and he did it the right way. My only gripe is that he probably should have thrown two more good prospects at a team to get one more piece. Because it’s now or never. Dave almost nailed it, but he still did one heck of a job. Nothing is going to match what he did in 2011 or in the 2008 offseason, but this might be the one big deal that puts a trophy on Mike Illitch’s mantle.

Money be damned, future be damned. This is it.

The numbers don’t look good. Your eyes might disagree, but hold onto that thought for a moment. Let’s consider the data first and our perceptions second. Nick Castellanos was never heralded as a good defender at any time coming up through the system and he spent a year and a half playing the outfield prior to 2014, so the expectations weren’t terribly high. No one expected Castellanos to be Evan Longoria at third this year. The goal was simply to be better than what Cabrera over the last couple of years.

To date, by the numbers, this is the worst case scenario. Twenty eight third basemen have at least 500 innings at the position this year and Castellanos ranks last in DRS (-19), last in UZR (-10), second to last in UZR/150 (-17.4), and last in RZR (.611). No one is going to tell you that defensive statistics are perfect over the course of a half season, but when so many different methodologies line up like this, it’s probably safe to say that you’re not doing very well. We don’t have to say that Castellanos is terrible, but he’s definitely performed poorly during this 100 game sample.

But maybe you think these defensive stats are garbage. They’re not, but I’ll indulge you. Forget ball tracking and comparisons to average and all of the things that go into advanced metrics. Let’s go back to school on the most basic measure of defense. How well does Nick turn ground balls into outs? Let’s look at BABIP on ground balls to third.

Now the available data only allows us to grab Tigers’ 3B, so there are a few Cabrera and Kelly games mixed in, but Castellanos has played in close to 90% of the team’s games so this is a fine estimate.

To do this, I went to Baseball Savant and looked at ground balls toward third base and carved up the field by a few different cutoff points to make sure we had it right. The left field line is at -45 degrees and the second base bag is a 0 degrees, just to give you an idea. Let’s look at -45 to -25 degrees. This assumes that the 3B has about 45% of the left side of the infield.

BABIP on ground balls from -45 to -25 for the Tigers is .398, which is by far the worst in the league. Let’s try .-45 to -30 and ask that our 3B only covers 33% of the left side. That leaves the Tigers at .343, which is 29th in baseball. It’s also nice to see Cleveland in last because that’s who the other defensive stats look poorly upon. Finally, let’s go -45 to -35, which calls on Nick to cover just 22% of the field. Again the Tigers are last at .339.

You might think advanced defensive stats are still in beta testing, but there’s nothing advanced about looking at how well a player turns ground balls into outs. This is as basic as it gets and Castellanos is baseball’s worst third baseman in this department.

Uh oh.

There are a couple of reasons to pump the breaks, however. First, Nick just spent 18 months playing a different position. It’s possible that he just doesn’t have his bearings back. When you think about it, that’s totally fair. You shouldn’t expect him to pick the position right back up, meaning that even if his performance this year has been bad, it’s fair to say this is his floor and not his ceiling.

Second, this is all about range. That matters, but his hands and arm and such don’t grade out poorly. He’s not getting to a lot of balls, but he’s converting the ones he gets to. You can’t necessarily teach him to be more mobile, but I’d rather he have one big problem that four medium sized problems.

Third, he doesn’t look as bad as the numbers. I don’t think you can throw out the numbers just because you don’t like what they say, but Castellanos doesn’t look like he’s worse than Cabrera was. My guess is that when all is said and done, this is going to regress a little. He’s more of a -8 than a -18. It’s not hard for a few bad plays to haunt you on defense just like a bad week can sink your offensive stats.

The scouting reports are positive enough on his defense to the point where most see him staying at 3B for at least the next few seasons. I’m not so sure, but that’s because the Tigers might not need him to be there. Pretty much the only area of depth on the farm for the Tigers is middle infield and if Suarez is going to swim at the big league level, he’s going to need a new position next year. That might be 3B and he’s not the only one knocking on the door behind Iglesias and Kinsler.

It doesn’t sound like the plans are in place or anything but Castellanos could move to RF as early as 2015. Not necessarily because he’s so horrible that he has to move off the position, but because he’s not good enough there for it to matter. I can see a world where Castellanos is a serviceable gloveman at third, but that might not be the best way to line up the defense. He’s never going to be a plus defender, so it’s just a matter of finding a place for his glove so that his bat can shine.

I think he’s going to be a big time contributor at the plate, but while his defense doesn’t look as bad from a tools perspective as it has from a performance perspective this year, there’s not a lot of reason to think he can be a positive contributor at third base. It’s been bad this year. I think it can and will get better, but the simple fact of the matter is that it might not have to.