OGT: Atlanta Braves @ Detroit Tigers, 1:05PM, ESPN - 3/20/2012

[GF-22a]

Jurrijens and verlander on the mound for today's game (on espn)

[ChrisBrown]

Jurrjens and Verlander are the starters.

Raburn just hit a 2-run bomb, his 6th of the Spring. Tigers up 3-0 after 2.

[GF-22a]

Thanks for making this... I was tired of posting about the game in other threads

[ChrisBrown]

Interesting situation here. Verlander pitching to Chipper Jones with the bases loaded and no one out.

[GF-22a]

Bet verlander goes 1-2-3 after that last bad inning

[Ryedog]

Raburn is swinging a hot stick! Hope it keeps up when it counts!

[GF-22a]

Anyone remember what the braves were asking for when jurrjens was being shopped?

[ChrisBrown]

Those sorts of things are always whispers, but they wanted good young positions players or prospects.

Turns out that Verlander is still a good pitcher.

[ChrisBrown]

elmon blows

[General283]

Those sorts of things are always whispers, but they wanted good young positions players or prospects.

Turns out that Verlander is still a good pitcher.

Interesting. All we wanted for him was an over-the-hill player with a limited bat and no range that didn't want to be on an AL ballclub

[SportsFromA2]

What we learned: While Ryan Raburn and Delmon Young have been belting balls all spring, the common refrain has been that they’ve been feasting on early spring pitching, when hurlers are usually focusing on their fastballs and rarely mixing in their good secondary pitches. Raburn’s sixth home run of the spring came on a breaking ball from Jair Jurrjens, whose rough spring continued. Young’s ball came on a pitch with more velocity on it.

Either way, their hitting is starting to outgrow the early spring training phrase.

“I don’t know how to explain it. It just seems like Delmon and Raburn get a good pitch to hit, they hit it pretty hard and a lot of times pretty far,” Leyland said. “But I don’t really know how to explain it.”

Hey, it’s only spring training: Justin Verlander said Tuesday was his first real jam in which he had the situation to try to gear up his fastball. He got it up to 96 mph on the radar gun at Joker Marchant Stadium, maybe another tick on other scouting guns.

“The velocity was getting up there, and that’s the first time it’s done that,” Verlander said. “A little harder to control for me, but the more I do it, the better it’ll get.”

At some point, that fastball will gear up to the upper 90s. It’s not there yet, but that’s not something he’s trying to get there at this point in the spring.

The highlight play you saw: Not really a highlight, but you saw a lot of the Lakeland grounds crew working on the mound. Both Verlander and Jurrjens pointed around their landing spots on the front of the dirt.

“It caused a little bit of issues,” Verlander said. “I felt like that might have led to some of the walks. A couple walks, I was slipping a little bit. Obviously, it was a bit more of a problem for Jair than it was for myself.”

At one point between innings, they were both around the mound looking at the trouble spot.

“I was telling him he was doing it, and he was telling me I was doing it, creating that big old hole,” Verlander said. “But I don’t create much of a hole when I pitch, if any of a hole. That’s what I was telling him. … It was weird, because I think them fixing it might have caused more a problem for him, because then his original hole wasn’t there anymore. That’s when he started slipping, I think.”

http://beck.mlblogs.com/2012/03/21/w...at-third-base/