Jupiter, Fla. — If you don’t know by now how valuable Andrew Romine is to the Tigers, you should listen to manager Brad Ausmus talk about him.
“People don’t understand,” Ausmus said before the game here Tuesday. “There are so many numbers out there in today’s game — OPS, ERA-plus, all that stuff. But guys like Romine can be the difference between a winning team and a non-winning team, a losing team.
“They can do so much and they give the manager a lot of flexibility in terms of resting players, pinch-running for players, defending for players — he’s an insurance policy late in games if something were to happen to any of the position players.