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"&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tigers fans have come to trust Dave Dombrowski, and to embrace the general manager\u2019s aggressive trading that almost always seems to work out. Last December, though, the man locally known as Dealin\u2019 Dave made a move that didn\u2019t sit right with his club\u2019s fans, as Steve McCatty saw first hand.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;McCatty was born in Detroit and still lives there over the winter. On the evening of Dec. 2, a Monday, he was volunteering at Lutheran High Northwest, which his children had attended, moving tables and other furniture from here to there. All of a sudden, someone looked up from his smartphone, with his eyes wide, and soon the news was bubbling through the school\u2019s halls: The Tigers had traded Doug Fister to the Nationals for three players, headlined by the lefthanded pitching prospect Robbie Ray. \"They were upset,\" McCatty said of the other parents. \"I was happy. Everybody else there wasn\u2019t.\"\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For most of the year, McCatty serves as the Nationals\u2019 pitching coach, and now, unexpectedly, he had a new piece to work with \u2014 a big piece, as the 30-year-old Fister stands 6-foot-8. Since the Tigers acquired him from the Mariners in 2011, he had gone 32-20 with a 3.29 ERA; of the eight playoff games he started, Detroit won six of them. He was the type of pitcher who would try to track down even the foulest of balls \u2014 by the time one lands in the upper deck, you\u2019ll usually find Fister at the dugout\u2019s railing, peering up at it \u2014 and who would, perhaps foolishly, stay in a World Series game after a line drive had ricocheted off his skull, as happened against the Giants in 2012.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;He seemed, in other words, to be just the sort of pitcher who might continue to play a steady role in a Tigers rotation stocked with Cy Young winners, and at a relatively bargain rate: He is making $7.2 million this year and won\u2019t become a free agent until after next season. But Dombrowski traded him, and Tuesday night was one on which both he and the parents of Lutheran High Northwest might have wished that he had not. \"You can\u2019t knock the rotation Detroit has,\" said Nationals starter Gio Gonzalez. \"But it was fortunate that we got a nice jewel out of that treasure box.\"\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TAYLER: How injuries to Soria, Sanchez could sink Tigers in Central&lt;/strong&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the two weeks since Dombrowski acquired David Price from the Rays, his rotation has suffered twin blows in the form of injuries to Anibal Sanchez and Justin Verlander, and the Tigers have fallen out of first place in the AL Central. Dombrowski was forced to call up the 22-year-old Ray to start Tuesday night\u2019s game against Pittsburgh, and it didn\u2019t go particularly well. Ray allowed four runs over five innings \u2014 in five big league appearances, he\u2019s now 1-2 with a 5.31 ERA \u2014 and the Tigers lost their fourth straight.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In New York, meanwhile, Fister turned in the type of outing that has become standard for him in his first season with the first-place Nationals, pitching seven shutout innings in a 7-1 victory, thereby raising his record to 12-3 and lowering his ERA to 2.34. In the 17 starts Fister has made since debuting for Washington on May 9 (a strained lat caused him to miss the season\u2019s first month), he has ten times pitched at least seven innings while allowing two earned runs or fewer. In a rotation stocked with All-Stars and annual Cy Young contenders like Gonzalez, Stephen Strasburg and Jordan Zimmermann, Fister, so far, has the best bottom line.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u200B\u200BFister also stands out stylistically on a largely power pitching staff. Whereas Strasburg, Gonzalez and Zimmermann all rank in the league\u2019s top-35 in strikeout rate, Fister is 70th of the 77 pitchers who have worked more than 100 innings, at 5.6 whiffs per frame. Despite his height, Fister does not throw particularly hard (his fastball averages around 92 miles an hour), and must rely on a more cerebral approach. \"It just goes to show it\u2019s not all about power,\" said Gonzalez, who can throw 95 but who has uncharacteristically struggled at times this season, and has an ERA of 4.00. \"I need to start using that brain like he does.\"\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fister\u2019s success, on a technical level, stems from three central factors. One is his outstanding control: His walk rate of 1.1 per nine innings is third best in the league behind those of Hisashi Iwakuma and Phil Hughes. (\"He can throw the ball where he wants, when he wants,\" Zimmermann said.) A second is the quick pace with which he operates. According to FanGraphs, Fister averages just 18.9 seconds between pitches, making him the fourth-fastest worker in the league.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The third is his deceptive delivery. Opposing batters say that they perceive a spider-like whirl of lanky arms and legs, and then suddenly, the ball is on top of them. \"I\u2019m never exactly sure where the ball\u2019s at,\" said Mets outfielder Curtis Granderson. \"The way he moves his body around, you don\u2019t pick the ball up until a little later than normal.\"\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\"He\u2019s quick, and he\u2019s got a little funk,\" McCatty explained. \"He stays closed for a long time, and he releases the ball high, with some angle. It\u2019s hard for hitters to see. A guy that flies open with his arm, and you can see the ball way back at second base, that\u2019s easy to track.\"\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fister, of course, excels in other ways. He never panics with runners on base, and in fact strands 84.6 percent of them there \u2014 the league\u2019s second-best rate, and one that is particularly notable for a pitcher who can rarely extricate himself from an inning with a strikeout. He is also an excellent fielder, one of three finalists for last year\u2019s AL Gold Glove at his position.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;He is, in other words, precisely the kind of eminently reliable starter than any genuine contender would like, as the Nationals have discovered. While Robbie Ray is very young and has years to equal or even surpass the player with whom Tigers fans will always connect him, so far the trade that brought him to Detroit seems to be bearing out their initial reaction to it: It was one trade too many.\r\n&lt;/p&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.si.com/mlb/2014/08/13/doug-fister-washington-nationals-detroit-tigers>