By Matt Wallace

Coming into the 2008 season, the Mud Hens were hopeful for a fourth consecutive trip to the postseason and, early in the season, Toledo seemed to be well on its way to reaching that goal. All the way up to the All-Star break, the Hens were either in first place or one good series away from first. Later in the year, the club barely managed to play .500 ball and would finish the season a distant second to Louisville. At first glance, the parent Tigers’ struggles and subsequent need for assistance from their Triple A affiliate could be used as an excuse for the Mud Hens’ second half woes, but that conclusion bears further analysis.

When the season began, a fourth-straight trip to the International League playoffs was anything but a given. The Mud Hens were bringing back just one member of their 2007 rotation, right-handed sinker-slider pitcher Virgil Vasquez, who would turn 26 in June. Vasquez had pitched well in Toledo in 2007 but was bombed in his brief appearances with Detroit. The other four rotation slots gave plenty of cause for doubt. Eddie Bonine, who would turn 27 in June, had won Detroit’s minor league Pitcher of the Year Award in 2007 by going 14-5, 3.90 with the Erie SeaWolves. Nevertheless, the big right-hander (6-foot-5, 220 pounds) was only in Toledo because Jordan Tata was hurt and Yorman Bazardo—both of who threw harder than Bonine and were regarded as better pitching prospects—had gone north with the Tigers in March.

The rest of Toledo’s rotation consisted of left-hander Macay McBride, righty Armando Galarraga, and righty Christopher Lambert. McBride, 25, had appeared in 38 games in relief with Atlanta and Detroit in 2007; he was testing whether a return to the rotation would recapture his success from earlier days. Galarraga, 26, had been traded to the Tigers in February after the pitching-starved Texas Rangers had grown impatient with his inability to match results with potential. Lambert came to Detroit in the trade that sent veteran Mike Maroth to the St. Louis Cardinals in midseason 2007. However, the 25-year-old had never enjoyed much success in the minors despite being a first-round draft pick by the Cardinals in 2004 out of Boston College.

It was difficult to know what to expect from this group of starters, but they seemed rock solid when compared to the unsettled situation in the Toledo bullpen. That’s not to say there wasn’t talent in the bullpen, it was just that Detroit’s bullpen was full of question marks and it seemed likely the big club would borrow heavily from Toledo until the Tigers found a mix they liked.

Behind the pitchers, there was also a lot of turnover from the 2007 squad. Third baseman Mike Hessman, catcher Dane Sardinha, and outfielders Timo Perez and Brent Clevlen were holdovers from a year earlier, but the rest of the expected regulars were coming up from Double A. Sardinha would be sharing the catching duties with Nick Trzesniak while Jeff Larish, one of Detroit’s top power-hitting prospects, would be stepping in as the team’s first baseman.

Clevlen and Perez were joined in the Mud Hens’ outfield by Matt Joyce and Clete Thomas, with both of the newcomers bringing athleticism and excellent defense. Helping fill out the rest of the lineup for the Hens were middle infielders Erick Almonte and Mike Hollimon. These two were crucial to Erie’s making the 2007 Eastern League playoffs and were already familiar to Toledo fans because of late-season call-ups that year.

Overall, the group showed a lot of promise, but it was uncertain how well they would perform at the Triple A level. The 2007 Mud Hens had made it to the postseason by putting up the second-most runs in the league and with the way the pitching staff was shaping up, it seemed reasonable to expect similar output would be needed in ’08

Whatever doubts there may have been about this group’s ability to compete at this level didn’t last long. Despite very active roster movement by the struggling Tigers—almost from day one of the new season—the Mud Hens jumped out of the gate quickly. That was despite Hollimon being hurt and Thomas starting the season in Detroit to fill in for the injured Curtis Granderson. Once those two joined the Toledo team, things really took off. When Hollimon returned from his injury, the Mud Hens were 10-8 and a game-and-a-half out of first. Thomas returned from his initial big-league stint a couple days after Hollimon; one month after skipper Larry Parrish was able to pencil those two into the lineup every day, the Hens stood at 33-17, five games ahead of the Louisville Bats.

What was most impressive about where Toledo stood 50 games into the season was how it had achieved a .660 winning percentage despite the roster volatility caused by the Tigers. McBride was lost for the season after pitching only one inning in his first start. The hard-throwing Galarraga looked as if he might become the team’s best starter, but he was quickly snatched up by Detroit after only two starts. The bullpen had to struggle to find their roles as the Tigers sent down and called up guys like Bazardo, Francis Beltran, Clay Rapada, and Francisco Cruceta.

Roster issues weren’t limited to the pitching staff, either. Thomas and Hollimon joined the team later than expected then almost immediately after the Hens were able to add Thomas, they lost Matt Joyce to a call-up. These were all major challenges to the Hens’ success, but in the first half the club was able to find guys who could fill the voids.

When McBride went down, Jeremy Johnson jumped into the rotation and, while his 4.96 ERA and 1.58 WHIP were hardly spectacular, Johnson managed to go 5-3 on the season. It was harder to replace Galarraga, but the Mud Hens were able to do so because Eddie Bonine and Chris Lambert were 8-0 and 5-1, respectively. The efforts of the two right-handers went a long way toward the starting staff’s composite ERA of 3.87 to that point.

When you consider the team as a whole was allowing only 4.2 runs per game, it was clear that the bullpen was pulling its weight as well. Relievers who weren’t on the shuttle bus between Detroit and Toledo turned in quality innings and were a large part of the team’s early pitching success. That included hurlers Ian Ostlund, Blaine Neal and, to a lesser extent, Preston Larrison. The pitchers had solid defense behind them as well.

The Toledo offense was carrying its share of the load, too. Joyce was hitting .286 with six home runs and a .533 slugging percentage when he was called up to Detroit. The rest of the lineup was so hot, though, that it barely missed a beat when Joyce received his promotion: the Hens’ hitters were mashing International League pitching to the tune of 5.4 runs per game. Hessman was leading the way with 19 homers and an OPS of almost 1.100. Close on his heels was Jeff Larish with 15 homers, 41 RBIs, and a .585 slugging percentage. Clevlen was hitting well (.300 with 23 extra-base hits) for the first time in two years, and Almonte had an OPS near .850. Throw in Hollimon’s .600+ slugging percentage and it made for some nervous visiting pitchers sitting in Fifth Third Field’s visiting bullpen.

As well as things were going 50 games into the season, the Hens dropped six of their next seven games and were tied for first by Louisville. Perhaps even worse was that slugger Jeff Larish had been called up to fill in for Detroit’s injured DH Gary Sheffield. The day after Larish was called up, so was Clete Thomas but at least Thomas’s call-up meant the Hens received Joyce back from the Tigers.

A week later, the Bengals’ struggles really put a dent in the Mud Hens’ lineup. Hollimon and Clevlen were called up on the same day, to be replaced with Max Leon and Wilkin Ramirez from Erie. Combine that with the Hens trying to replace Larish—first with Ryan Roberson and then with veteran minor league free agent Fernando Seguignol—and nobody would have been surprised that the Hens went 13-13 while Larish was in Detroit. The surprise, however, was that over that time their offense was still scoring better than five runs per game.

On the mound, the Toledo pitching rotation had undergone quite a change as well. Vasquez and Lambert were still taking the ball every fifth day, but they were now joined by Yorman Bazardo, Lauren Gagnier, and Anastacio Martinez. Bonine, one of the team’s best starters, was called up as the Tigers tried to fill the rotation spots left open by Jeremy Bonderman’s season-ending injury and Dontrelle Willis’s inexplicable control issues.

Even with the Hens losing Larish, Hollimon, Clevlen, Bonine, and Casey Fossum due to injuries and poor performances in Detroit, the Hens were still able to cope. With all that talent lost to The Show, Toledo’s main obstacle was a run of bad luck.

From the time Toledo was 33-17 and five games ahead of Louisville to the All-Star break, the club managed only a 22-26 record, yet the number of runs they scored over those forty-eight games (239) compared to the number of runs they allowed (218) suggests their record should have been more like 26-22.

With a little better luck, the Hens would have had a pretty firm grasp on first place at the midsummer break. Yet the Hens’ season was not lost despite all their roster turmoil, and they were just a game out of first with a 55-43 record. In the second half, it became clear that promotions to the majors were not what did in this team. The Tigers largely left Toledo’s roster alone after mid-July, but the Hens would never regain first place and never catch Louisville.

The big problem was how returning players performed when they came back to Toledo from Detroit. Before he was called up, Larish was hitting .277 with 16 home runs. After the lefty-swinging slugger returned, he hit only .223 with five homers in close to the same number of at-bats. A similar affliction struck both Hollimon and Clevlen. Before his callup, Hollimon was hitting close to .250 with 12 homers, with half his hits going for extra bases. When the switch-hitter came back, he hit a pitiful .163 with three homers in 147 at-bats. Clevlen was killing the ball to the tune of a .324 BA, 13 homers, and a .620 slugging percentage when Detroit called him up. After returning just two weeks later, the right-handed hitter hit .243, poked just nine home runs, and slugged only .395 the rest of the way. Looking at the difference in production from those three key players goes a long way toward explaining why the Hens’ fortunes went south.

The coup de grace for the Mud Hens was the loss of another big bat. When Mike Hessman left to play for the U.S. Olympic team in China on July 28, the Hens were 59-50 and trailed the Bats by only four games. When the big bopper returned to the lineup for on August 26, the Mud Hens had fallen to 71-66 and 14 games back. The team that had averaged 5.1 runs per game before Hessman went to Beijing managed only 3.6 per game while he was gone.

Combine that putrid offensive production with a struggling starting rotation and you have the final explanation for the team falling quickly out of contention. After a brief stint with the Tigers, finesse pitcher Eddie Bonine was ineffective with Toledo before going down with a shoulder injury. Virgil Vasquez (12-12, 4.81) and especially Yorman Bazardo (4-13, 6.72) were disappointments; ultimately their poor seasons ended their time in the Detroit organization.

Chris Lambert and righty Anastacio Martinez were the two called upon most often to fill out the rotation in the season’s second half. Lambert didn’t finish as strong as he started, but he still put posted a 12-8 record with a 3.50 ERA and a team-high 124 strikeouts. The 29-year-old Martinez was hammered in the fifth spot, going 2-7 with a 5.29 ERA.

Looking back on Toledo’s 2008 season, one thing stands out. The Mud Hens bad fortune was not as closely tied to their parent Tigers’ season-long struggles as one might have expected. Ultimately, what doomed Toledo to a 75-69 finish (.521), 13 games behind Louisville in the International League’s West Division, was an over-reliance on key players that were pretty long in the tooth by 2008, even for Triple A. That weakness was an organizational problem and not Toledo’s fault, of course. The fact that the Tigers released so many of the Mud Hens’ regulars after the season ended speaks volumes.