Tigers Minor League Baseball Blog

The Tigers announced that Larry Parrish will return as the Mud Hens manager in 2008 after missing the 2007 season after he had ankle surgery.  Mike Rojas took over the team in 2007 and for his efforts in guiding the Mud Hens to the playoffs in 2007, he was made the Tigers Minor League field coordinator.  It was also announced that A.J. Sager will be the Hens new pitching coach while Ray Burris will take over the vacancy left by Sager as the Seawolves pitching coach.  Anyway, it’s a nice column by Jason Beck going through who will be coaching where through the Tigers’ farm system.

Jeff Sackman, who’s the developer of the excellent website Minor League Splits, recently ranked the organizations.  He did it for one of the books he wrote in so the column is light on details (as far as why the Tigers rank how they do, he does a nice job of explaining his methodology), but the Tigers fared much better on this list.  While they didn’t make the top five in either pitching or hitting, their composite put them at seventh overall.   They’re just behind the Twins and just ahead of the Mets.  The Indians come out at number two so the AL Central is pretty well represented. 

Kevin Goldstein recently took a high level look at all of the minor league systems in baseball and the Tigers came in at the middle of the pack.  They barely made the top half with a 15th ranking.  They finished tenth in position players and 21st in pitching.

No major surprise here.  Once you get past Andrew Miller and Cameron Maybin, things thin out pretty quick.  The Tigers do have some interesting guys out there besides those guys like Gorkys Hernandez and Jair Jurrjens, but not a lot of potential studs.