The opening lines of the mlb.com story (hilariously titled "Tigers acquire infielder Huff from O's") say it all:

Finally, the Tigers found help at the plate on the trade market. In turn, Aubrey Huff found arguably his best chance to finally get to the postseason.

The Tigers added the bat they've been seeking and arguably needing for most of the summer, acquiring Huff from the Orioles on Monday for Class A right-hander Brett Jacobson.

The hope from there is that he can provide a spark for an offense that has struggled to score runs for most of the season...

I don't know much about Jacobsen -- he's a former college closer from Vanderbilt whose development hit a hiccup this year. I'm sure you can read about him elsewhere.

My curiousity was aroused because I have no idea why the Tigers felt they needed to make this trade. Yes, they're in the thick of a playoff race,  but Huff can barely play anywhere on defense at this point. He used to be a bad 3B, then he was a terrible OF, and now he's a below average 1B who is mostly cut out to DH. That's why the "infielder" in the mlb.com headline is so funny -- it makes it sound like he could play 2B or 3B or something. I guess he could stand ouit by second base or something and hope there aren't any grounders during the game.

The Tigers don't exactly have an obvious place for him to play elsewhere, with Carlos Guillen coming off of the DL and playing 1B or DH, although the plan was to have him play LF when the year started. Those are Huff's "positions." Oh, and then there's Miguel Cabrera. And Detroit's seemingly endless stream of bench DH/OFs from Triple-A. Let's just stipulate that Huff's alleged "versatility" on defense isn't gong to justify him getting on the field.

But we should also note that his horrible year with the bat so far (.253/.321/.405 for a .307 wOBA) for the Orioles isn't destiny. We want to know what Huff can be expected to do going forward by incorporating past data. So, back to the handy ZiPS in-season updated projections at FanGraphs to see how Huff's projected 2009 performance for the rest of the season compares to his competitors for playing time in Detroit  to see if we can understand the justification for this trade.

Here are the wOBAs projected by ZiPS RoS at this time for Huff and the rest of the Motor City 1B/DH/LF/RF mafia going forward, listed from best to worst:

I'll give Dave Dombrowski this: Huff's probably a better hitter than Clete Thomas.

I put Cabrera on there just to revel in his awesomeness. But look at that chart. If Cabrera is at 1B or DH, then there are three slots realistically left: LF, RF, and the 1B/DH spot unoccupied. And the Tigers have three guys for those spots who project as better hitters than Huff: Ordonez, Guillen, and Thames.* Heck, Ryan Raburn is almost as good with the bat and he can run a bit and play defense and at a much lower price.

* I've liked Thames ever since I watched him hit his first home run in the majors off of Randy Johnson at Yankee Stadium on the first pitch he saw.

But maybe Huff is being brought in as a platoon guy. I've spent too much time on this minor move at it is, so I'm not going to estimate specific platoon splits for each of these guys, but I'll just apply a standard splits to each player (here is an article on estimating platoon skills). Huff is a left-handed hitter, so we'll just estimate platoon skills against RHPs.

Huff only moves up one spot, but I guess he makes it into the "mix" as a possible platoon partner for Thames. But how much of a difference is there between just playing Thames or using Larish as his DH platoon partner, really? Given these projections and estimated splits, and assuming equally terrible outfield defense (as bad as Thames is, Huff hasn't played in the OF since 2006), let's check it out.

We can use the same method used to convert wOBA to runs above average (called wRAA at FanGraphs) to get wOBA runs (wRAA, which is just a form of linear weights) above Thames (wRAT) vs. RHP . The Tigers have 45 or so games remaining. The average AL player gets about 4.3 plate appearances per game in the American League. 4.3 x 45 = ~194 plate appearances. About two thirds of those will be against RHP, whic is bout 130 plate appearances. Sooo.... (Huff vs. RHP - Thames vs LHP) x 130 = projected offensive runs gained by this trade. Let's show our work using the wOBA-to-runs formula:

((.343-.335)/1.2) x 130 = 086666667 wRAT

Rounding up, then, this trade projects to gain the Tigers 1 run in their push for the playoffs if they platoon Huff properly with Marcus Thames.

Kudos, Tigers. Here's to assuming the Orioles picked up almost all of Huf's salary and that Brett Jacobsen never amounts to anything.