Archive for the 'Blast from the Past' Category

The Tigers purchase the contract of first baseman Hal Morris from the Reds.
Morris played in 40 games for Detroit and hit .311 with one home run and eight RBI. He retired at the end of the 2000 season.
I’d forgotten what a great hitter Morris was for the Reds; he’s got a .304 career average.

How bad is it going for the Indians? Former Tiger Matt Ginter was recalled from Triple-A to start against the Rays on Saturday night — and he won!
That’s one more win than he had for the Tigers in 2005.

The last we saw of Frank Tanana (in this 1987/Frank’s-birthday-mini-mini-series, at least), he pitched brilliantly against the Blue Jays at Exhibition Stadium only to watch the bullpen blow the game and put the Tigers farther behind Toronto in the A.L. East race.
Tanana faced the Jays 10 days later, this time at Tiger Stadium, and with [...]

The righty from Phoenix posted a record of 8-19 for the awful 1974 Tigers. But let’s step back and look at his totals:

1970: 0-1, 7.03 ERA in 12 innings pitched
1972: 0-1, 1.32 in 27 IP
1973: 1-5, 4.33 in 54 IP
1974: 8-19, 4.66 in 216 IP
1975: 7-14, 4.38 in 164 IP

The Cardinals purchased his contract from [...]

Frank Tanana turned 55 on Thursday.
I was ecstatic when the Tigers picked up Tanana on June 20, 1985. For years — since the days of Mickey Lolich, in fact — Detroit lacked a long-term lefty in the rotation. Unfortunately, Bob Sykes didn’t pan out as we’d hoped.
But along came Tanana in a one-for-one swap [...]

Remembering The Trade that started the shaping of the current Tigers…
On July 5, 2002, the Yankees obtained P Jeff Weaver from the Tigers in a three-team deal. New York sent P Ted Lilly to the Oakland A’s while the Athletics sent first-baseman Carlos Pena to Detroit. The Tigers also acquired P Franklyn German and a [...]

Bruce Kimm, Mark Fidrych’s personal catcher, turns 57 today.

Eddie Miller played 14 games for the 1982 Tigers and got one hit in 25 at bats; that’s an .040 average, folks. He turns 51 today.

Dizzy Trout was born on this date in 1915. The righty pitcher won 27 games for the Tigers in the 1944 season [...]

Fifty-five years ago yesterday, Al Kaline made his major-league debut for the Tigers against the Philadelphia Athletics. The Tigers lost 5-2. Believe it or not, neither Retrosheet.org nor Baseball-Reference.com has the box score.

Let’s peer into the wayback machine and see what happened on this date in Tigers history (from Baseball-Reference.com, of course):

1950 - Eleven home runs - a ML record - drive in all the runs scored in a 10-9 Tiger win over the Yankees before 51,000 Detroit fans. Detroit has four home runs in the 4th [...]

1958 - Ozzie Virgil, who became the first black to play for the Detroit Tigers 11 days before, hit 5-for-5 in his first home game at Briggs Stadium. The Dominican’s performance helped Detroit to beat the Washington Senators, 9-2.

1967 - A nine-hour and five-minute doubleheader between the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Athletics set a [...]