End of the line for the D-Train?

The Detroit Tigers on Sunday designated Dontrelle Willis for assignment. You probably know the drill: He came off the roster immediately, and the team has 10 days to dispose of his contract —by trade, release or assignment to a minor league team.

Nothing too surprising here. Willis was once a star — entertaining and effective, a 22-game winner in '06 for the Florida Marlins — but his career went sour after that, and despite all the hopeful talk this spring about his comeback (including a pretty strong start against the Twins), he was still walking six men per nine innings this year.

What will happen, of course, is that Willis will clear waivers — nobody's going to pick up what remains of his $12 million salary for this season. The Tigers apparently will then release him rather than assign him to a minor league team — Willis would have the right to refuse such an assignment anyway — and pay him off, and Willis will be free to sign elsewhere.

Can he be fixed by somebody else? I doubt it ... but it would sure be interesting to see what the LaRussa-Duncan School for Failed Veterans can make of him in St. Louis.

Derailed by the D-Train

Generally, one game doesn't mean all that much. But it's possible that Thursday's will loom large as the one that signified that Dontrelle Willis (above) is back on track.

The D-Train worked six shutout innings, walking just two, fanning six and allowing a mere four hits, all singles. He wiped out two of the baserunners with ground-ball double plays and a third with a strikeout-caught stealing DP.

He threw 101 pitches, 57 of them for strikes. Not a great percentage, but workable.

One game doesn't mean he's back to his Florida Marlins form — he has, for the season, walked 10 and struck out nine in 18 innings — but he certainly wasn't the train wreck he's been since joining the Tigers two-plus years ago.

Other notes:

• Carl Pavano pitched well, but his inability to hold runners burned him. The stolen base in the first inning, coupled with reserve catcher Drew Butera's poor throw, resulted in the first Detroit run. Young Butera would do well to realize: If slothful Magglio Ordonez can steal off Pavano, there's no point in throwing on Austin Jackson.
• Dan Gladden, in a rambling monologue on the evils of pitch counts and newspapers, called Jim Leyland "Sparky Anderson" and Justin Verlander "Jim Leyland." I was hoping he'd have cause to drag old Sparky back into his rant and call him "Verlander" just to complete the circle, but the inning didn't last long enough.
• Then there's to good part of Gladden as a broadcaster, the concise, often sarcastic encapsulation of a player. Like his take on Ordonez: "He doesn't like to chase fly balls."

Around the division: Tigers

The Twins enter today with a 6-2 record. So do the Tigers.

Detroit's 6-2 record, however, comes against softer competition, at least on paper. The Twins have played the Angels (four games), the White Sox (three games) and the Red Sox (one game); the Tigers have played Kansas City (five games) and Cleveland (three games).

Of course, one plays the schedule they're given, and the Tigers have won the games they've been scheduled to play.

But they can't feel all that good about Dontrelle Willis at this point. The D-Train (above) made his second start Tuesday — both against Kansas City — and while he hasn't walked the ball park either time, his command has been poor. On Tuesday he continually fell behind in the count, and even against the weak-hitting Royals, that's no way to pitch.

He didn't get tagged with the loss because the Tigers beat up on the Royals bullpen for six runs in the seventh inning. Late comebacks have been a regular feature of the Detroit season so far.

This may say something about their hitters. Or it may say more about the relief pitchers for Kansas City and Cleveland. And it may say something about the Detroit starters, who were supposed to be one of their strong points.

Notes, quotes and comments

The above photo is from Wednesday night — Thursday morning here. Nick Punto high-fives Jon Rauch's elbow.

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The White Sox made a conscious decision this off season to de-emphasize power and focus more on baserunning and contact. The general assumption is that this was largely Ozzie Guillen's concept — he's been talking for years about wanting more players he can hit-and-run with — but whether it's his idea or Ken Williams', that's direction they took.

Which is one of the reasons Jim Thome is a Minnesota Twin this season.

So ... three games into the season, the Sox are 1-2, and Ozzie's take:

When we built this club, I didn't want people to strike out, and we did too much (Thursday). If they continue to strike out like that, then we find another approach. With the ballclub we have, we can't be striking out like that. If we continue to strike out like that, then that's the game we're going to have -- 3-0, 3-2, 4-3 -- the bullpen is going to lose the game because we strike out too much. And they can say whatever they want to say -- good pitching, cold weather, whatever it is. Too many strikeouts.

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Dontrelle Willis, sidelined for most of 2009 with a diagnosis of anxiety disorder, walked two men in the first inning Thursday but none in his next five innings. Has he beaten "The Thing"?

We can't be sure yet. This start was against Kansas City. The Royals have never been known to work counts, and K.C. manager Troy Hillman stacked his lineup with lefties. Willis got three double play grounders.

Jim Leyland's assessment: "It wasn't great, but it was OK."

The Tigers may need Willis to be a bit better than OK if they're going to contend.

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It took me a while to get my response to Rok Lesjak of Slovenian Baseball and Softball. (The "reply" address of his original e-mail just bounced back.) But I finally managed to get it through, and he responded much more rapidly than I did:

Baseball is not popular here, yet (Slovenia population is 2 million, small, highly developed country, with a lot of athletic potential ). And we are working on it. However, we play baseball here for 35 years now. In this period of time we established 7 fields, 4 of those you can "kind of" say that are baseball fields. But that's quite a achievement for 35 years if you take as a fact that we built these fields bare hand on a dumps of construction material, with financial budget app. 1000€ a year. Thats what we call " get to it with a heart ".

Around the AL Central

I sure picked a fine time to bench Jason Kubel in one of my fantasy leagues. A pair of three-run dingers in his first two at-bats this afternoon against the Indians.

* What's wrong with the Tribe? Lots of things, actually — like nine guys on the disabled list — but today's sore point is Fausto Carmona — who was a legit Cy Young candidate two seasons ago. He has now allowed nine homers in 60-plus innings with an ERA of 7.62.

He entered the game with a 6.60 ERA — tied with Francisco Liriano for next to worst in the AL among ERA qualifiers (41 pitchers). But ... Carmona has walked more men than he's struck out — for the second season in a row — while Liriano's ratio (28 walks, 50Ks), while not good, isn't horrendous. Ron Gardenhire sounds determined to keep Liriano in the rotation, and one can argue that one either way, but for Cleveland to keep running Carmona out there seems borderline suicidal.

The worst ERA, by the walk, belonged to Tampa Bay's Andy Sonnenstine (7.07).

* Dontrelle Willis made his fifth start Thursday for Detroit. Not good. He blew through the first two innings, walking one guy but throwing a DP ball, so just six hitters. But the third: He hit the first guy, walked the second, struck out the third. Then he issued three straight walks and got pulled. 53 pitches, 24 of them strikes.

There's a large reservoir of good will for Willis; it seems everybody around the game genuinely likes the guy. As a result, his comeback effort this year had gotten generally positive reviews -- positive in the form of "He's an acceptable back-of-the-rotation guy" assessments, which is considerably less than he used to be. Frankly, I haven't seen that. His ERA is in Carmona territory, and so is his walk/strikeout rate.

* Not only did Willis implode, Miguel Cabrera left the game early with a hamstring problem. The Tiger offense has struggled this year — it's the pitching that's carried them to the top of the AL Central — and they can ill afford to be without Cabrera for long.

* For a while, Kansas City was a sexy pick in the division. No more. The Royals are 3-11 in their last 14 games.

* This was Ozzie Guillen, manager of the Chicago White Sox, a couple of days about about Gordon Beckham, last summer's first-round pick: “He's a great player, he's going to be in the big leagues, he's going to be a big part of this organization pretty soon. But we don't have Beckham on our mind right now. I don't and I'm the one making the lineup. If we have Beckham here, we're in trouble.

“That kid needs to play. A lot of people say between Triple-A and the big leagues is one jump. It's a huge jump. In Triple-A you're going to face a good pitcher maybe once a week. Here, it’s every day.”

This afternoon, Beckham's playing third base for the White Sox. Just another example of a manager blowing smoke.