The Tigers released Erie third baseman, Santo De Leon, in order to make room for Audy Ciriaco, who is coming off the disabled list. Hearing this news today made me realize there were other moves that have gone unreported here. Thankfully, Tigstown.com is quite comprehensive in covering the Tigers’ moves so I can catch you up if you haven’t already gone straight to the source (which is what I recommend if you’re looking for timely reporting on these things).

Let’s not glaze over the Ciriaco/De Leon news, though. De Leon’s release comes after almost seven years in the Tiger organization. After spending a year in the Dominican Summer League, he came over to the GCL as a 20-year old. In 483 minor league games, he’s compiled a line of .263/.292/.383 with more than six times as many strikeouts as walks.

His best showing came in 2008, when he was first promoted to Erie for about half the season and proceeded to hit .278/.305/.479 in 169 at bats. Even then, he was striking out four times as often as he walked, though. In 2009, he took a step backward and it seemed to be clear his 2008 success was the kind of fluky results you can sometimes get in half a season.

I’m back from vacation, and it always strikes me how difficult it is to catch up from a little more than a week away from the minor league teams. I’m not going to try to catch up with a recap, even though I’ll start back up with the weekly recaps next weekend. What I am going to do is take a look at each team and point out a positive and a negative among the position players and pitchers for each team.

This is the last of the minor league team previews. Thanks one last time to Tigstown.com for providing a central spot for finding all these rosters. Before we get going on looking at Mud Hens, I also wanted to take the opportunity to let readers know I'm going to be on vacation starting Friday and ending next Saturday. I'm going to San Francisco and will likely go see Lincecum pitch, but that's not going to have much to do with the Tigers or their farm.

I expect to come back refreshed and ready to dig into the seasons of the Tigers and their prospects. I'm confident you'll find plenty of quality posts from other Tiger bloggers listed on the right of this page (and others who aren't yet) in my absence and thank you for your patience. On to the preview.

This is the third in a series of posts looking at the rosters of the Tigers' minor league squads. I was hoping to get all four finished before the minor league Opening Day tomorrow, but you may have to wait an extra day for the look at the Toledo team. As for Erie, read on.

Here's a continuation in a series of posts where I look at the Opening Day rosters of the Tigers' various minor league teams. Again, thanks to Tigstown.com for providing these first (as far as I can tell).

Over the next four days, I’m going to take a look at the opening day roster of each of the Tigers’ four full season minor league squads. We’ll start with the Whitecaps, whose roster I first saw reported at Tigstown.com and has been verified through releases to the traditional media.

It took the Tigers less than 12 hours to completely nuke my guess at how the full season squads’ rosters would shake out. Subscribers to the newsletter already know this, but let’s just say my guesses are likely to turn out about as well as my NCAA brackets - where I was 0 for 4 in guessing the Final Four teams.

We’re getting to the point of the offseason where if you miss a day, you can miss a lot. I didn’t post yesterday and the Tigers very nearly finalized their roster for Opening Day. Nate Robertson was shipped out, and with Zach Miner and Bobby Seay on the disabled list, that appears to mean both the rotation and bullpen are known.

Of course, to get to this point where all but a few t’s are crossed, there were some reassignments needed. In addition to trading Robertson to the Marlins, the Tigers needed to continue sending players down. The players sent down the last few days included (on Saturday) Daniel Schlereth, Wilkin Ramirez, Phil Dumatrait, Enrique Gonzalez, Max St. Pierre, (on Tuesday) Brent Dlugach, Robinzon Diaz, Jeff Larish, Josh Rainwater and Robbie Weinhardt. Schlereth, Ramirez and Dlugach were all optioned to Toledo and the others were just re-assigned to minor league camp.

I know I said I was going to break the relievers down into lefties and right-handers, but there just aren’t enough lefty relief prospects to generate a post. The relievers, therefore, are being crammed into one post. Keep in mind that some of the Tiger prospects who turn out to be their best relief pitchers at the major league level may be starting right now. (Ages are as of 4/1/10)

Daniel Schlereth, LHP, Mobile (AA)/Reno (AAA)/Arizona
23, 6’0”, 210