the latest in RotT BlogNews

Just a couple of things Roar of the Tigers had been up to lately out there in the vast reaches of the Internet.

Thing the First:

Old Time Family Baseball has been running a blogathon. He blogged for 24 hours straight yesterday, and today has turned the site over to a series of guest posts so he can get some sleep.

The point? To fill the Tumblrs with all manner of baseball facts, fictions, weirdnesses and wonders. Also, to raise money for Doctors Without Borders, a cause arguably more important than, say, love poems about Vin Scully. If you haven’t already, you should totally go give them some money.

I will have a guest post going live there at some point today. The image up top is a little preview. You can keep an eye on OTFB, or just wait until I see it post and update this post with a direct link, but either way, seriously– go help make this baseball blogathon a thing of success and beauty.

ETA: Here’s the post! Go look, go donate!

Thing the Second:

The Society for American Baseball Research (which most of you may know as SABR) has an ongoing Baseball Biography Project. A while back, one of their biographers got in touch with me because of an image he had seen on this very website. He liked it so much, for some unspeakably deranged reason, that he wanted to use it for the SABR profile of that player.

And now the Roar of the Tigers touch shall forever be upon the history of LimaTime.

Paws help us all.

eta: Thing the Third:

Joel Zumaya has signed a deal with the Twinkies. As Jason Beck correctly points out, Target Field was where he threw the pitch that broke his arm and murdered his Tigers career once and for all. Fun memories, I’m sure!

Given the amount of time and hope the Tigers invested in him, it would be difficult to see Zoom come back 100%, or even 90%, with Minnesota. But we should remember that Zoom staying healthy for a full season now is about as likely as the life of a mayfly is long.

8 Nights of Jewish Tigers– Night Three

For the third night of Chanukah we have the… er, OK, he was here more recently than Kapler, but for the sake of this thing we’ll call him the sort-of third most recent Jewish Tiger.

Brad Ausmus

Ausmus played for the Tigers during part of the ’96 season, and returned to play again in 1999 and 2000. In ’99 he went to the All Star Game, and he won Gold Gloves in 2001 and 2002 as a catcher with the Astros. He’s never been an overpowering offensive force (as is true with most catchers not named “Pudge” or “Varitek”) but he hit over .265 in both of his full seasons with the Tigers, which isn’t bad (compared to, say… Vance).

Now 36, Ausmus is on the downward slide of catcherdom, and his arm isn’t nearly what it used to be. His reactions behind the plate are still supposedly pretty good, though, and his ability to work with his pitchers is highly and widely praised. He is (or perhaps by now was) pretty speedy for a catcher, stealing 16 bases in 1991 and becoming the first Tiger catcher since Bruce Kimm (’76) to hit in the leadoff spot (it was only for a few games).

Ausmus was attending Dartmouth when he was drafted by the Yankees, but refused to sign unless they agreed to let him take classes while in the minors (his initial balking may have also had something to do with the fact that he was a lifelong, diehard Red Sox fan). In ’91 he graduated with a degree in Government, making him one of the relatively few major leaguers to actually have completed college degrees, especially in real subjects that aren’t “general studies” or “kinesiology” or “beer” (Michigan State only).

It’s unclear whether he’s a practicing Jew (either religiously or ‘culturally’), but in any event he was born into a mixed marriage: his mother is Jewish and his father is not. He may have been bar mitzvahed, or he may not have been, but according to Jewish law, it’s the religion of the mother that hereditarily determines the religion of the child, so, practicing or not, Ausmus is in fact technically Jewish.