With Prince Fielder Around, Miguel Cabrera Preparing For Third Base

This one’s a two-parter, in which there’s a mea culpa and some concern-trolling, albeit of the well-founded variety. It has to do with the Detroit Tigers and their defense.

The mea culpa first.

But hey, good news! Miguel Cabrera is lighter now!

It’s just - it’s not as simple as losing weight. Not that anybody’s asserting that it’s as simple as losing weight, but dropping 25 pounds is not going to make Cabrera a good defensive third baseman. It might help a little bit, but the issue is more about instinct, reads, and range, and being a little lighter only changes so much. Cabrera’s going to try hard, and that’s terrific, but he’s probably still going to be more of a problem than an asset. In the field.

Friday night, Cecil Fielder and Tino Martinez were inducted into the Ted Williams Hitters Hall of Fame. Which gave Fielder a soapbox. And apparently rumors of a rapprochement between Cecil and son Prince -- who recently signed with the Detroit Tigers, for whom Prince starred 20 years ago -- were greatly exaggerated. Marc Topkin:

Here’s the kicker: Cecil Fielder also said (as he has before) that he’s “going to take the high road”.

SI’s Joe Sheehan doesn’t like the gamble. In his words:

You probably don’t’ care about this stuff in June, so you sure as heck don’t care about it in January, but here’s the point: Man, the American League is stacked at first base. It’s unlikely that Pujols, Fielder, Gonzalez, and Teixeira will all make the Hall of Fame, but they’ve certainly had Hall-worthy peaks, and now they’re all in the same league. I’d wager those are four of the game’s five best first basemen, and I’d give Hosmer and/or Santana (when he stops catching completely) decent odds of cracking that top five sometime soon.

…

One of my hobby horses over the last some years has been the American League’s obvious superiority over the National League, which of course some National League fans would just like to wish away.

Sorry. That doesn’t work. MGL:

Thanks for coming, everyone; please drive safely on your way home!

You think Bowden’s just making things up, because he can? Via Joanne C. Gerstner in The New York Times, we have an unimpeachable source regarding the Detroit manager’s thinkings:

Those all-time greats had room to add weight as they aged. Fielder, like the group that included his father, does not. As a result of that difference, when Fielder begins to add weight in his thirties, as most athletes (and non-athletes) do, it could slow him down to such a degree that he’s simply unable to compete at the major league level. That is the trend for players his size. They don’t have declines, they just vanish because there’s no room for them to get bigger or slower and continue to compete at the highest level. The gap between being a star player and out of baseball is tiny for players like Fielder compared to more athletic players who can age more gracefully.I don’t have a great deal to add, except that we’re in uncharted territory here. And that I would like to have been a fly on the wall when Dave Dombrowski was trying to convince his owner that nine years is a really, really, really long time.

The Dodgers were a surprise entrant in the sweepstakes, making a major push to sign the star slugger with an offer that guaranteed him seven years but provided a sweet four-year opt-out. And for a couple weeks, they looked like a real possibility for Prince.The deal reportedly would have been for a $26 million annual salary for the first four years, with an opt-out clause after the fourth year that would have allowed Fielder to seek his fortune anew.

Also of note: You rarely heard about the Dodgers’ involvement while it was happening. This is why the mystery team will destroy us all, people.

No. 1) The fact the total figure come in at $214 million and places Fielder’s take fourth overall in largest contracts ever handed out.

No 2) The fact that Fielder is a big boy, and those do not typically age well.These should be valid concerns for any fan base, but essentially, Mensching says that Tigers fans shouldn’t, and don’t, care:

If the Tigers win a World Series or three in Fielder’s nine years there, the fan base will surely be quite content with the deal. If they don’t, though… things could get ugly.

Now, at last, the Tigers have officially announced this signing, via their official Twitter account, which you know is official because it is called OFFICIAL_TIGERS:

Tigers have agreed to terms on a nine-year contract with first baseman Prince Fielder. #tigersGlad to know that we didn’t waste the last two days talking about something that wasn’t going to eventually be official!

So when the Detroit Tigers did sign Prince Fielder -- or announce their agreement to sign him, anyway -- we immediately began to wonder what the Tigers would do with two first basemen. And we were somewhat nonplussed upon the news that management was/is seriously considering playing Cabrera at third base, where he’s not played for even a moment since 2008. For good reason.

As the New York Times‘ Benjamin Hoffman notes, the Tigers’ infield defense could be brutal:

A few years ago, I wrote a book about baseball mistakes.*

* It was a bestseller on the New York Times’ “extended list of books given by Rob Neyer to friends, family members, and random Twitter followers”.

He builds through the farm like a good general manager should, but there’s another quality of his that’s often overlooked: When an owner says to him, “Say, I’d like to spend all sorts of crazy money on free agents,” Dombrowski thinks that’s a swell idea.

Well, a lot of general managers would. Most of them, even. All right, so this isn’t really about Dombrowski. According to Jim Bowden, he didn’t really have a choice:

↵↵How many home runs will Prince hit in 2012? Vote in the poll.

With the Astros fielding a team of mostly kids, the Pirates going through their 20th annual retooling and the Cubs rebuilding (again), the Reds appear to be next in line to the the power at the top of the NL Central.

But it’s fun to dream about Fielder, isn’t it? I’d love to be wrong.The comments in that piece are particularly amazing, moving from …

… to …

Fielder has spent each season since 2006, his first full year in the majors, bouncing back-and-forth between pretty good and elite. He has never had two consecutive seasons one would consider elite in his six full years with the Brewers. He has never been bad, he just sometimes is much better. The problem is, with his defensive issues, he needs to be ridiculous at the plate to be considered one of the most productive first basemen. Using the various iterations of wins above replacement -- courtesy of Baseball-Reference, Fangraphs, and Baseball Prospectus, respectively -- we can see how inconsistent Fielder has been in terms of value:

WAR isn’t everything, in the sense we haven’t nailed things down to a point of accuracy where its word is gospel. But there are some dramatic shifts in value represented here, across all three systems, and it’s not because of massive fluctuations in his defense (the least-reliable portion of any WAR system): Fielder’s power shifts dramatically up and down each year, as we can see by looking at his Isolated Power (slugging percentage minus batting average, in order to achieve exactly what the name implies):

If you haven’t heard, Prince Fielder has a unique body for a professional baseball player. But forget about that for a bit. Assume that he’s just a player. You don’t have to pretend he’s an Adonis, but you can pretend he’s built like your average slugger for this exercise. Other than Prince Fielder, there have been 25 players in baseball history who hit 200 or more home runs before they were 28. Twelve of them are in the Hall of Fame. Three or four will be.

The Prince Fielder deal could work out for the Tigers. It really could. It could also end with Fielder catching ablaze as he drifts over Lakehurst, New Jersey. Here are some different ways the Fielder contract could end, using the 200-homer/age-27 club as the set of comps.

Important reader poll.

You know you care. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be reading this. If you don’t care and are still reading this, I don’t know what your problem is but the problem is assuredly with you, and not this post. On we go!

That’s the sixth-lowest lefty home run factor in baseball. It’s also tied for the fifth-lowest overall lefty factor in baseball. Fielder’s shifting to a less friendly ballpark, and for whatever it’s worth he’s also shifting to what’s still thought to be the superior league. Fielder’s numbers should still be good, or great, but they should be a little lower.

Still, as obvious as that might be, somebody needs to go ahead and write it up at length, and that’s what Dave Cameron did over at FanGraphs. We’ll begin with the good:

We’ll follow with the bad:

It won’t be that easy. Here’s the situation for now, according to Jason Beck:

It’s honestly not that complicated, when you realize that Fielder and Cabrera are going to play every day. They’re Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera. The Tigers will find room. But Cabrera will get time at the hot corner, and you’ll want to pay close attention to how he does, since Martinez is under contract through 2014. A smooth adjustment would be a lot nicer than a less smooth and probable adjustment.

Twitter is the second-greatest baseball-related invention.

3. Bill James.

2. Twitter.

1. Striped socks.

The two Fielders have at times not been on speaking terms, but Cecil says that could be changing:

”We’re having a few chats. We’re doing a lot better than we were. Time heals all wounds, man. Everybody has to come back together at some point.

“I’m just happy for him. I think everybody was anxious for him to get signed.”For more on the Tigers, please visit our SB Nation site Bless You Boys.