First off, congratulations to the San Francisco Giants.  It’s been a while for their fans and it’s the first since they’ve moved to the West Coast.  Still, I don’t like the fact that the Tigers have moved up another notch as far as World Series droughts go.  It was interesting seeing all of the former Tigers as well.

So now we enter the new and accelerated free agency season.  Under the old rules, teams had fifteen days to work out deals with their own players before they could talk to other teams.  This year it’s being sped up to just five days so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.  Starting Monday, we could see some players jumping ship. 

The Tigers have a lot of money coming off the books this offseason so the speculation is that they’re going to be big spenders.  I’ve heard both Victor Martinez and Adam Dunn mentioned a bunch, with Carl Crawford mentioned to a lesser extent.  Victor Martinez would give us some more flexibility but might also hinder Al Avila’s development.  My personal favorite is Adam Dunn because you pretty much know what you’re going to get (including 180+ strikeouts) and it’s nice having that consistency.  And then Carl Crawford is coming off of a career year with an .851 OPS.  I could see Crawford nabbing 25 triples at Comerica Park in a season.  Crawford also fills one of our biggest holes in leftfield.

There’s been some talk of expanding the playoffs and I’m pretty much against that.  The only way I’d like it is if they added the one extra wild card team on each side and had the two Wild Card teams play a one game playoff to get in.  This would make the division title more meaningful and make the team with the best record in each league have an extra advantage because they’d play a team with their rotation most likely out of whack.

It looks like the first order of business for the Tigers is what to do with Jhonny Peralta.  Jason Beck thinks the Tigers will turn down the $7.25 million option but still try to sign him.  Getting Peralta at a decent price would fill a hole so hopefully they’ll be able to get this done.

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