Mariano the Tiger
Inspired by my post about Mariano’s potential trade to the Tigers, Grand Cards investigates exactly what such a thing would have meant:
Let’s say that trade goes through and Rivera becomes a Tiger in 1995. Other than altering the course of NY Yankees history, what does it do for the Tigers? For Rivera?
I started to jump to conclusions i.e., no way Rivera reaches 500 saves, it makes no difference to the Tigers who suffered from poor pitching, hitting and defense in addition to closer issues (although Todd Jones was more than serviceable in his better years), they would have screwed it up and traded Rivera in 1999 for Sterling Hitchcock, so why bother etc.
However, I thought that I would pull a few numbers to see what I could make of it.
Click through for the data.
Interesting stuff, but I would be more interested (but, still, not interested enough to do it myself) to see what it would have hypothetically done to the Yankees.
Agree with breaker; the meat and potatoes of such a trade would have been the effect on the mutha..er…Yankees, not the Tigers…
Maybe they would have returned him to being a starting pitcher? As good as he’s been as a reliever imagine if he could have cut it as starter?