Then the wheels started to fall off. Inge broke his hand. Magglio broke his ankle. Guillen pulled a calf muscle. Boesch^ started reading his scouting reports from last year and regressed to being a marginal prospect. I think Leyland got EXTRA black lung. Everyone was falling apart.
^ Another bad sign - in my complicated but insanely addictive fantasy baseball keeper league, I was quick to snap up Boesch, and he helped me to get into first place. I also signed him to a two year contract extension, right in the midst of his downward spiral. ^^
^^ I probably can't steal Joe Posnanski's Posterisk so this can be...the Procaret? Work in progress.
Up until this point, I was all about following the Tigers. The soundtrack for my days at work was 97.1 FM. I was lathered up. Then the losses started coming...and kept coming...my friend and I took our annual summer baseball trip, this year to Boston, and we got to see two walk off Red Sox wins.
When I came back from Boston, Detroit sports talk radio was replaced by the iPod. Watching Tigers games on MLB.tv was replaced by catching a couple minutes of the radio broadcast, if that. Like Joe Pos (brilliantly) wrote about the Mariners, we should have seen this coming. (Easy to see it coming after the fact, but still.) The Tigers pulled this in 2007. At the All Star break, they were in 1st place. A second half fade later, and Detroit was on the outside of the playoffs, looking in. Repeat in 2009 (see: game 163). Repeat in 2010 (see: now). Even in 2006, Detroit managed to blow the division by getting swept by the (adopted home town) Royals. Why the second half swoons? Why the 'bad luck'?
The Central Division has something to do with it. Since the teams are so (polite) evenly matched, or if you prefer (harsh), crappy, every team feels like they are in it. Even KC had a brief hot streak in 2009 and led the division by 3 games! They rode that momentum of hope the whole year. Every minute bit of success in this division will bring people jumping on the bandwagon, when really, a bad (or average) week will bring any team back to the pack.
I think one downfall of the Tigers is their poor road record. Good teams win on the road, at least SOME. This year, it is also their poor intra-division record. Good teams win against there division, usually a LOT.
This year there were a couple rookies (Jackson, Boesch) playing well to start the season, a veteran (Magglio) playing way above his last dismal year, another (Damon) holding his own, and a stud (Cabrera) in the hunt for the triple crown. That masked the lack of production from SS, 2B, C, and 3B. Take away even one of these performers - let alone 3 or 4 - and it goes downhill quickly.
I looked at the Red Sox lineup while we were in Boston, and mentally replaced all of their injured All Stars. Even with 3 missing perennial All Stars, there were 6 legitimate major leaguers. The Tigers? Busta Rhymes at second. Batting thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiird - anyone? Hey, out there in the bleachers, you with the Tigers hat - are you wearing cleats? No? Okay, I guess Raburn will have to do.
Anyway, if the Tigers reel off 5 straight wins, 10 of 12, and are looking at a sub-3 game deficit heading into September, I'll be back on board. Until then, it's Snow Patrol and Fall Out Boy.
2 comments:
It's hard to even pretend the Tigers are still in it. I disagree with the idea that we should have seen this all coming at the beginning of the season. We looked as good as the Twins or White Sox, I think. I would blame our recent decline on the fact that we had so many injuries at the same time. We lack Yankees-style depth, so we can't have 3 key players out at the same time.
The fact that the guys we brought up to fill in weren't that good suggests we've been trading away too many prospects in the last few years. %
% This is my own version of the Posterisk or Procaret. It's called the Kuzcentage. I will use it whenever a parenthetical comment doesn't quite fit in the main text. Kuzcentage sounds a little like Kucinich, unfortunately.
Depth is an issue, but maybe more so is Dombrowski's overvaluing of the minor league talent. He has said there are some obscene number of major league ready arms in the minors, like 20 or something. For every deal that worked out - Andrew Miller, Cameron Maybin - you've got Jair Jurrjens for Renteria and who knows what other deals we've passed on to keep our talent.
Falling out of the race could be a blessing in disguise - Boesch is hitting a little more now that he has less pressure, Leyland can tinker with the lineup to fine tune it for next year, and management won't make any hasty decisions going for it (like letting Magglio's option vest last year).
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