Daily Jolt: Can Tigers Roar Again?

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.

The Tigers came into 2009 with a shot at redemption. Two weeks into the season, they at least seem to have the shape of a chance to accomplish that. Expectations were sky high for Detroit last year after a pair of trades brought All-Stars Miguel Cabrera, Dontrelle Willis and Edgar Renteria to the Motor City.

Those additions had some talking heads hailing the Tigers as a modern day Murderer's Row and dreaming of a 1,000-run season, but the funny thing about scooping up All-Stars is that they aren't always playing at that level when they arrive in their new team's clubhouse.

Two years removed from a trip to the World Series, Detroit wound up finishing in dead last in the AL Central in 2008, its fate sealed by injuries and, most of all, a paper-thin pitching staff.

So general manager Dave Dombrowski went back to work this winter. He traded for catcher Gerald Laird, freeing up Brandon Inge to return to third base. He signed defensive wizard Adam Everett to platoon at shortstop with Ramon Santiago. He jettisoned Gary Sheffield toward the end of spring training. He also nabbed Edwin Jackson in a trade with the Rays over the winter. Most curiously, he showed enormous faith in 20-year-old pitcher Rick Porcello, making him the team's fifth starter after 125 innings in the minor leagues.

Paying special attention to pitching and defense has become a bit of a fad in the wake of the Rays' World Series run last year, and Dombrowski's moves seem to reflect that trend.

Cabrera and Renteria composed the left side of Detroit's infield at the beginning of last season. You don't have to be a scout or a professional talent evaluator to know that Inge, Everett and Santiago will probably turn a whole lot more balls in play into outs. The Tigers have to hope that shift in emphasis will turn a defense that ranked 24th in the majors in defensive efficiency (the rate of balls in play turned into outs) according to Baseball Prospectus into one of the best in baseball.

As for the pitching, the Tigers have moved away from the soft-tossers and injury-prone hurlers that made 2008 such an adventure.

Neither Jackson nor Porcello have shown a consistent ability to miss bats yet, but Jackson has performed well in two starts so far for Detroit, and Porcello is bubbling over with talent.

He shut down the Mariners -- another AL club looking for redemption -- over seven innings Sunday afternoon, recording his first major league win and securing a victory in the weekend series for the Tigers. He only recorded three strikeouts, but 14 of the 21 outs he got came either via the whiff or a groundball, and he could have gone further, throwing 56 of 86 pitches for strikes.

The Tigers rode talented but unproven arms -- names we know well now like Justin Verlander and Joel Zumaya -- and a superb defense all the way to the Fall Classic in 2006. Three years later they seem to be returning to that formula.

Of course, they still have prolific offensive stars like Cabrera and Curtis Granderson too.

All those things might not be enough to get them back to the playoffs this year, but, at least early on, it seems like it will be enough to avert the constant calamities that seemed to plague them during all of last year. In a division that is completely wide open, it could take them very far.