If you didn’t get a chance to see it, I joined Brian Kenny on Clubhouse Confidential to talk about the Fielder-Kinsler deal on Friday. Here’s a link to the conversation. If you’re looking for my initial take from the night of the deal, you can find that here, along with some thoughts about what this might mean about big contracts going forward.

We should also have some follow up analysis on Kinsler coming this afternoon or this evening.

That escalated quickly. Heading into the offseason the Tigers were expected to look to move Prince Fielder’s 7/$168M contract, but it didn’t look like there were going to be any takers. Fielder, even if he aged extremely well and bounced back to his pre-2013 levels, was barely going to be worth the contract. If he ages at a pretty normal clip and never goes back to his 5 win ways, we were looking at something like $70M in dead money. Maybe not anymore.

News broke on Wednesday night that the Tigers and Rangers agreed to a one for one swap of Prince Fielder and Ian Kinsler that gives the Rangers their power bat and frees up a spot for Jurickson Profar while the Tigers get salary flexibility and a new second baseman. The deal is amazing because if you squint really hard, it looks really good and really bad for both sides. It’s a challenge trade, but it’s also about position.

The Tigers had three guys who should be playing 1B and DH and now they have two. The Rangers had three middle infielders and now they have two. Kinsler will cost 4/$57M with a $10M/$5M buyout for year number five, plus something like $30M in cash. The Tigers are saving some cash in this deal that could prove to be extremely valuable when it comes time to extend Max Scherzer or Miguel Cabrera, but they’re also probably straightening out their defensive situation. Cabrera can go back to first where he belongs and Nick Castellanos can get into the lineup a little easier. Maybe Peralta gets back on the radar. It’s too soon to tell.

Kinsler had an insane 7 win peak in 2011, but looks a lot more like a 2-3 win player going forward. He’s a league average or slightly better bat with a history of running the bases well. The defense is a bit unclear because DRS loves him and UZR thinks he’s meh. Either way, you’re looking at solid player who is probably just a bit overpaid at $16M per season, plus however you want to allocate the $30 million

This trade has moving parts. If Kinsler is a 2 win player at 2B, Cabrera moves to first and is league average at the position defensively, and then the Tigers use Castellanos at 3B for about 2 wins, you’re looking at something like 11 wins for something like $40-44M. Re-signing Infante for $10M would put them somewhere around 12-13 wins for $54M. That’s a small improvement financially especially if it softens the risk later on in the deal.

I think this trade makes the Tigers worse in 2014, but it also gives them more financial resources to get better. They’ll save a few extra million that they can spend on a LF/RP/3B and they’re much better off in later years of the deal. Kinsler doesn’t look like a great player, but he’s good enough to probably make this work.

What we don’t know is how much of this momentum towards a deal came from the comments Fielder made after the season and his performance in the postseason. If the Tigers traded him because there were hard feelings, this is silly. If they traded him to save a little extra money that could be better allocated, it looks a lot better.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t have a strong opinion about this move. I think it makes a lot of sense for Texas and it’s a giant freaking question mark for the Tigers. Fielder probably bounces back in 2014 and beyond, but the trade saves them more money than it is likely to cost them in overall on field value. It’s a smart long term deal that might bite them in short run. Which means we really can’t judge this deal until we know how Dombrowski is going to spend the savings. That’s the key. Saving money is good, but you save that money so that you can spend it elsewhere.

I enjoyed rooting for Fielder and watching him slide, and had absolutely zero problem to his comments after the postseason ended. I’m sorry to see him go, but happy to welcome Kinsler. It’s hard to tell if this is an overreaction or a smart calculation, which is what makes it so interesting. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I don’t know what this one’s going to end. This won’t be the last thing I write about it, but my initial take is that this is probably going to work out for the best.

Stay with me here. This is going to be short and to the point. Brad Ausmus is pulling an Abraham Lincoln move right now and it’s worth noting. I’m not comparing the two, I’m saying Ausmus is borrowing a leadership tactic at which Lincoln was very skilled. This week, after hiring Matt Martin to be his defensive coordinator, Brad Ausmus told the Free Press that Martin is “a baseball guy” and “not a number cruncher” and “not a sabermetrician.” The manager doth protest too much.

There are two obvious points here, ones that Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller argued on today’s Effectively Wild Podcast. First,  Ausmus is going out of his way to sell Martin as “one of the guys.” This is Ausmus wrapping serious changes in a conservative cloth. This is Ausmus channeling Lincoln.

The key is that Martin’s job is weird and new and baseball players as a group tend to be slow to adapt. Columnists and writers tend to be slow to adapt. The Detroit media environment as a whole has been slow to adapt. If you start seeing the Tigers shake up defensive positioning – as Martin is likely to do – then Ausmus has already set the table to answer the questions. Martin isn’t some nerd who looks at spreadsheets, he’s a baseball guy with lots of “real” credibility. Lincoln was a master at this. Instituting massive change and convincing people it wasn’t massive change. That’s what this is. This position didn’t exist as a coaching position until three weeks ago when the Nationals created it. Now the Tigers and Angels have one too. More are likely coming.

What’s so great about the sales job is that it’s so obviously a deke. I doubt that Martin is programming is own algorithms, but he’s obviously going to be looking at the sabermetric data we’ve all been talking about for a while now. There simply isn’t another way to do that job. You can’t watch the last 100 at bats of every player on the opposing team and eye-ball the shift you need to employ. This requires batted ball data – the kind of data that sabermetricians use all the time.

I don’t know if Martin knows how to run and interpret regression analysis, but I’m fairly confident he knows how to employ the information readily available to all major league front offices. You don’t have to crunch the numbers to use the numbers, but you do have to get the players and local media to go along with it. That’s Ausmus’ job. Ausmus is selling the idea and Martin is implementing it.

They’re wrapping a newfangled position with fancy numbers in the cloth of an old set “of baseball eyes,” as Ausmus put it. The Tigers didn’t have this position a few days ago and no one had one in 2013. To suggest this isn’t a analytic innovation is silly, but that’s exactly how you have to sell it to get most people to buy in. That’s how you effectively institute change – by convincing people it isn’t really change at all. The hiring of Brad Ausmus looks better and better every day.

It was pretty exciting to hear that the Tigers hired Omar Vizquel to be their first base coach and infield instructor given his reputation for strong defense and good instructional ability. With all due respect to Vizquel, his hiring was completely overshadowed when we learned today that the Tigers also hired Matt Martin to be their, I’m not making this title up, “defensive coordinator.” Oh boy.

The idea behind the position is pretty simple. Martin will be in charge of shifting and positioning the infield against specific hitters and will work with the advanced scouting group to prepare for this kind of decision-making. He’ll be joining with Vizquel to form a super-infield-defense-academy. In other words, the Tigers are about to get shifty.

This is big news for a couple of reasons. First, it’s one of the biggest leaps into the future that the Tigers have taken, at least in public, in many years. This is a big jump forward into analytics for the Tigers who have leaned much less on their statistical analysis team than many others in the industry. It also tells us that Ausmus is a believer as well because they wouldn’t bring someone like this in if the manager wasn’t on board. Leyland didn’t have a DC on staff, Ausmus does. This supports the idea I floated when Ausmus was hired that he’s going to be very receptive to analytic information when it comes to macrolevel decisions about his team.

But this hiring also tells us something else; it tells us the Tigers are going to get better. Well, it doesn’t really guarantee that, but if the Tigers are really going to go all-in here they stand to benefit more than almost any other club in the league. They have serious range issues in the infield and shifting is going to tighten up some of those holes. There’s no perfect answer, but if you look at the massive shifting integration the Pirates employed in 2013, it’s hard not to get excited. The Tigers probably won’t move that far, but we’ve seen the potential for BABIP payoff if a team is willing to make the move.

Finally, the specific hire looks extremely promising. I love the position in general, but Gabe Kapler, former Tiger and friend of the movement, speaks extremely highly of Martin.

Kapler also followed up with a link to something he wrote for Baseball Prospectus in August about Martin and coaching in general which lays the praise on pretty thick.

A couple of coaching hires doesn’t change a whole lot about the Tigers chances in 2014, but they send very positive signals about the future of the organization that seems to be growing more comfortable with modern thinking by the day. It’s too soon to tell what kind of impact these moves will have on the team, but they’re moves in the right direction. The Tigers have clearly had success without a lot of love for sabermetrics; imagine what they could do with even better information.

We’re about to find out.

Last night, news broke that Brad Ausmus would be the Tigers’ next manager and Dombrowski and Ausmus met the media to announce the 3 year deal this afternoon. My general thoughts can be found here and the basic takeaway is that it looks like a good move, but there is so much we don’t know about how he will fill the role.

In answering questions, Ausmus made a few comments that really encouraged me. When asked about sabermetrics, he discussed the need to take that information and boil it down into something he can give to players who are resistant to a lot of information. This is a really good mindset in that Ausmus knows it’s his job to pay attention to the advanced numbers and use that to craft his instruction and decision making. It doesn’t matter if Miguel Cabrera knows what his wOBA is, but it does matter that Ausmus knows why wOBA is something to focus on instead of batting average. I think that he does.

Ausmus also talked about leaning on Alex Avila and Gene Lamont during the transition which is a sign of wisdom. Ausmus doesn’t have all the answers, but he knows what he doesn’t know and knows who in the organization can help him. Lamont has been at the wheel before and Avila has marshaled this pitching staff for several years. I study political leadership and decision making in my other life and one characteristic that stands out is knowing who to rely on for assistance.

That said, he hasn’t made up his mind about the rest of the staff. The only thing that matters is Jeff Jones and he said Jeff Jones is a candidate for the job. Hopefully when he takes the time to sit down with Jones and talk with Avila and Lamont about a pitching coach, he’ll see the value Jones brings.

Finally, Ausmus spoke about thinking ahead and communicating, especially as it relates to taking pitchers out and having the bullpen ready. I’m not sure how far down the road he wants to take this, but it sure sounds like he’s going to use his communication skills to deploy a more flexible bullpen strategy. I don’t know if he’ll totally reinvent the wheel, but I would bet he won’t be afraid to use his set up men in much less rigid roles than his predecessor. It’s hard to say how the whole closer thing will go until we actually know who he’ll have in his bullpen, but it sounds like the Tigers are moving in the right direction.

As I said yesterday, we won’t know how Ausmus will do until we see him take the reins but the signs are pointing in the right direction. He gave good answers, even if the press asked predominantly routine questions. Ausmus seems to be a mix of good old boy credibility with some modern sensibilities. That’s the kind of change the Tigers needed. Now the only question is if the perception we have of Ausmus today will match the reality we find in April.

We’ll know more in the days and weeks to follow, but news broke late Saturday that the Tigers will finalize a deal with former catcher Brad Ausmus that will make him their next manager. I normally don’t give a lot of credit to people who “break news” like this in sports, but I will tonight because ESPN annoyingly referred to him as a “media report.”

On the face of it, I really like the move. I loved Brad Ausmus as a player and always thought highly of his baseball IQ. That said, he’s never managed at this level before and we just don’t know anything about his philosophical leanings or his ability to lead from the manager’s office. I’m not saying you have to hire a tried and true skipper, but I’m saying the untested are difficult to judge. Newsflash, I know.

Mike Matheny comes from the Ausmus tradition in that they’re about the same age and both filled similar roles in the big leagues before becoming first time managers. I don’t think that highly of Matheny as an on field manager, but that also tells me nothing about what Ausmus will do.

This is going to get repetitive quickly, but I just don’t know. Anyone who thinks they know is lying unless they’re Brad Ausmus or Dave Dombrowski. I’ll analyze his every move for you, but I won’t speculate. That’s not what we do here. I liked Ausmus as a player and think highly of him. For now, that’s all I’ll say. When he starts saying and doing things, I’ll write more about him.

I’ll leave you with a final thought. The best thing Ausmus can do at the beginning of this is to keep Jeff Jones. Jeff Jones makes  a difference and knowing your personnel and how to get them to perform their best is critical. I normally harp on tactical stuff because that’s the stuff we can see, but when it comes down to it, making sure Anibal Sanchez and Rick Porcello maintain their improvements is way more important than calling on the right middle reliever at the right time.

And just in case you forgot, Brad Ausmus made the All-Star Game as a Tiger in 1999 courtesy of a .365 OBP and the team being awful. Even if Ausmus doesn’t work out as a manager, you’ve got to appreciate how much nicer it is to be a Tigers fan this time around.