Oh for the days of Juan Samuel and Curtis Pride

The Tigers are terrible. Perpetually. Everyone knows this. They last over-.500 season was 1993, and their last good season was 1987...when they traded the 1996 NL Cy Young award winner--John Smoltz--to the Braves for Doyle Alexander, who gave Detroit 2 4.00 ERA seasons and then retired after the '89 season.

The ghost of Ty Cobb has since perched itself over the entire worthless metropolis, laughing.

I bring this up in light of the Tigers' most recent acquisitions, which were memorably one-linered in this story about the Marlins in Slate:

So, why don't more teams follow the Marlins' lead? The Tigers, for instance, could have received a bunch of quality players this winter for Ivan Rodriguez; instead, they signed Kenny Rogers and will miss the playoffs again.

We seem to be reamking ourselves as a poor man's Mets: Rodriguez; the permanent injury that is Magglio Ordonez; the Old Man's Club of Rogers and someone named Jamie Walker; the one-day wonder called Dmitri Young; and Craig Monroe. We now have two closers, in Troy Percival and Todd Jones, who absolutely no team is going to want in a trade, and we have Franklyn German and Marcus Thames.

Mike Illitch's pizzas might be hot and ready, but his baseball team is lousy.