Those are some good points, and when it comes to patience and discipline a couple things are at work.

One thing is swinging at strikes versus swinging at pitches you can hit. I think part of the Tigers problem isn’t that they are swining at pitches out of the strike zone. It’s that they’re going after pitches they can’t do much with. When you’re down 2 strikes in the count you don’t have a choice. But early on you don’t have to swing at the first strike you see.

Second, the problem becomes much exaggerated when they don’t hit the pitches they’re swining at well. If they’re getting hits on first pitch fastballs, nobody cares. There’s something to being aggressive with fastballs early in the count, but when the entire team isn’t driving those balls on one night, you have a disaster.

The Tigers saw 91 pitches and only swung at 42. That doesn’t sound too “hacky” to me, although I admittedly don’t know what the usual percentage is.

The Tigers’ batters swung at only 6 of the 29 first pitches they saw. Of the 23 they took, 14 were balls, so Carpenter was trying to get them to bite on first pitches out of the zone, but they weren’t going for them for the most part.

The Tigers’ batters swung and missed only 7 times all night, and 6 of those were strike three pitches. That’s understandable since if you kind of have to swing at close pitches with two strikes against you. (I know; at least a couple of those third strike pitches weren’t strikes)

I think the Tigers’ bigger problem is that they have trouble identifying hittable pitches. Consider that of the 49 pitches they watched, 20 were called strikes. I’d love to see those 20 pitches compared to the 42 they swung at. My guess is that Tiger batters go up there thinking they’re going to work the count in such and such a way, and end up being mechanical and predictable as far as what pitches they swing at, and what pitches they don’t. In other words, they’re trying to be patient for patience sake, rather than being patient in order to make sure they’re swinging at the pitches they can do the most damage with.

Of course, Carpenter had a lot to do with this since he seemed to be making his pitches almost all night.

I have to wonder if, when Zumaya lined up third base in his sights, he surprised Inge to the point that it threw his own timing off enough in the execution to bring disaster.

I’ve seen that happen before.

Better late than never…

The problem with that stat in this World Series is twofold -

1. Our offense generated 2 runs in Game 1, 3 runs in Game 2, and 0 Runs in Game 3.

2. Our Pitching gave up 7 runs in the Game 1 loss and 5 runs last night.

Can you imagine if Todd Jones had not pulled out the save in Game 2 with the bases jammed? Wow. It would all be over but the crying right about now.

Current MVP of the series for the Tigers?

Co-MVP Award goes to Rogers & Jones.

Yikes. We need some offense.

Tigers through three games: .185/.227/.293
Cardinals through three games: .196/.304/.320

If Bonderman comes out throwing strikes tonight (or tomorrow night), I think the game will swing to us.

This Tiger offense has been ridiculously streaky all year and they hit rough patches that lasted well longer than 7 games. So I’m pretty concerned with what I’m seeing. The one game we did win was due to another Kenny masterpiece as our offense failed to knock in a ton of men on base. Were our bats going well we would’ve scored at least six runs in game 2.

I was really hoping the Tigers would come in and keep the pedal down, because the Cards arms were tired coming in on the heels of a 7 game series. Instead, we’ve hardly even seen their bullpen. We need to make their pitchers work a little, and we certainly didn’t come close to doing that last night.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to tonight’s 11 run outburst.

Go Tigers!

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