2008 Season

The 5th Inning – 2008

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Last year Sam Hoff started breaking down the season into 18 games segments, each representing 1/9th of the season, or an “inning.” Here is the 5th inning report. Sam sent this to me Thursday morning, but I haven’t had a chance to post until now.

The 5th Inning is over.

Each 18 games represent 1 inning of a baseball season. The Tigers record for the first 5 innings in 2008:

                                                            Starters:         Bullpen:
    W-L   RS –RA     HR-SB-AVG/OBA/SLG    W-L-IP-   ERA     W-L-S-ERA
1:  6-12  74 -112    15-10-262/345/404    3-9- 96.2-5.96    3-3-3-5.28 
2:  9-9   98 -87     21- 6-261/350/426    5-8-105.2-5.11    4-1-2-3.61
3:  8-10  89 -75     19- 2-275/326/442    8-5-109.2-4.19    0-5-4-3.83
4:  11-7  85 -74     19- 8-268/350/416    8-4-113.0-3.27    3-3-5-5.17
4:  12-6  86 -78     25- 6-297/347/476    6-4-106.1-4.23    6-2-6-3.43

The 5th inning found the Tigers put up their best record since the 4th inning of 2007 (13-5). The Tigers won a lot of close games having a 6-1 record in one run games and a 3-1 record in two run games. Not surprisingly, the bullpen put up their best numbers of the year. Despite the performance in the inning, the Tigers lost ground to red hot the White Sox (now 7 games back).

Justin Verlander is back to his old self (3-0-3.00era and 26Ks in 24 innings). Nate Robertson (1-1-4.26), Armando Galarraga (0-0-4.32) and the demoted Eddie Bodine (1-1-4.22) were all serviceable. Kenny Rogers (1-2-5.68era) may be a concern as elbow and age issues make you feel a cliff is coming sometime in the near future.

In the Bullpen, Jones continues to gets saves (4 total) and allow stupidly high totals (15 runners in 8.1). Bobby Seay (6 innings) and Aquino Lopez (3 innings) were unscored upon. Zumaya (1.93era – 19 runners in 9.1) and the demoted Miner (1.23era – 13 runners in 7.1) were both lucky. Rodney (5.14era – 8 runners in 7.0) had a 5.14era and a big loss. Dolsi (4.50era) and Fossum (4.22era) were serviceable in long relief.

The Hitters were a bit perplexing in the fact that they hit a lot of homeruns, batted 296, and were patient at the plate could not manage more than 86 runs. On a positive note, they were only shut out once and did not skew the numbers with a big blowout (the most they scored in a single game was 9).

The offense are being lead by the Mudhens. Holliman, Joyce, Raburn, Larrish, and Thomas were a combined 4-13-306/390/556. Granderson is scorching 1-6-438/487/616. Cabrera had six of the 25 homers hit by Tigers while only striking out 9 times.

Go Tigers!

2 thoughts on “The 5th Inning – 2008”

  2. I suggest we put all the interleague games in a separate inning; it is, after all, an 18 game “diversion” from the AL pennant races. Make it the 5th inning. Then we could just ignore it when making comparisons to innings 1-4 and 6-9. Lumping those IL games in with AL games really skews the stats in my opinion. It would help dispel the illusion that the team is playing “great”, when in reality those IL games don’t bear any resemblance to the performance against purely AL competition.

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