After making some major waves in two of the last three winter meetings, the Tigers were fairly quiet this time around.  The big players were the Boston Red Sox (who really set themselves up nicely for next year) and the Chicago White Sox (who re-signed Paul Konerko and locked up Adam Dunn prior to the meeting) this time around.  It’ll be interesting to see if the Yankees now feel pressed and make Cliff Lee an offer he can’t refuse.

A lot of people have asked me about the Jayson Werth deal and here’s my take.  Werth would have been stupid to turn the money down so props to him.  As far as the Nationals, I equate them to the 2003 Tigers.  in 2004 and 2005 the Tigers overspent (or so we thought) at the time for Ivan Rodriguez and Magglio Ordonez but by 2006 they were playing in a World Series.  The Nationals had to overpay someone to get their ball rolling and as it turns out, that guy was Jayson Werth.  Yeah, it threw off a lot of other teams because it set an unusually high bar but they can take it up when they talk amongst themselves when getting ready for the CBA negotiations.

And with Werth and now Crawford out of the mix, it looks like Magglio is the guy the Tigers are targeting.  He held a private workout for the Tigers and you hope they’d get a little bit of a home town discount of course I’m not holding my breath.

The Tigers signed Chris Oxspring to a minor league deal.  He’s from Australia and he got a minor league deal.  Oxspring is playing in the Australian Baseball League with Brad Thomas and he’ll be competing for a shot in the Tigers pen.

The Tigers neither lost nor picked up a player in any phase of the Rule 5 draft.  It’s been a while (I think) since that happened.

It looks like baseball is going to lose another legend because Bob Feller is now in hospice.  The rivalry between he and Hal Newhouser made for a hot ticket back in the day (way back in the day).

Anyway, the meetings may be over but the Tigers still have some work to do.  It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the offseason plays out.

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