I gotta admit, my perception was that the Tigers really jerked Turnbull around but reading this it feels like he bore more than his share of the blame, with his agent (guess who?) also lingering behind the battle over service time.
Recapping all that occurred last season gets convoluted. The Tigers tried to option Turnbull in May after he had posted a 7.26 ERA in seven starts. Turnbull then told the team he was pitching through an injury. After an unusual back-and-forth, the Tigers had Turnbull â who had hired Scott Boras to represent him as this unfolded â see additional doctors. The team eventually agreed to rescind the option.
Turnbull waited until the end of the season to publicly state he had fractured his neck and torn ligaments around his C6 vertebrae after dodging a line drive earlier in the season against the Boston Red Sox.
A similar dilemma arose in August when the Tigers optioned Turnbull at the end of his minor-league rehab assignment. Turnbull said he was pitching with a toenail avulsion. By November, Turnbull had turned to the Major League Baseball Players Association to file a grievance. The Tigers agreed to grant him a full year of service time.
âI feel like thereâs probably not much (I would have done) different last year,â Turnbull said. âA lot of things were out of my hands, out of my control. Didnât really have a lot of say in a lot of stuff that went down last year. ⌠Everything, all the drama or whatever it was, a lot of the negative press and things like that, nobody knows the real story. No one knows, really, what happened. But it was definitely not the spin that was maybe told on me. ⌠I donât really care too much about how that was framed and stuff and what some people may think or whatever.