PREGAME: The Tigers haven’t had so much fun playing the AL East this year. A split of a 4 game set with the Orioles has been the highlight. And they’ve only taken 1 of 4 against the Yankees. The one they did take though was started by Justin Verlander and C.C. Sabathia. Verlander shut down the Yankees at the end of April as he outdueled Sabathia (4 runs in 8 inning complete game).
Sabathia’s strikeout numbers are down this year and are a rather pedestrian 6.7 per 9 innings. But he has a 1.153 WHIP because he isn’t walking many or allowing many hits either.
Okay, let’s win today to erase my bad feelings about a second half fade.
Guillen being sore after yesterdays game, cause for concern, or just normal soreness after not swinging a bat for a while? I hope DD is on top of things.
Inge doesn’t have the greatest history against CC (then again, it’s hard to know what value to place on that since he’s been exceeding his history by so much). Still, batting 7th?? The team RBI leader? I’m just not getting these batting orders…
Two early chances to score, zippo to show for it. Nah, we don’t need a bat, Guillen will be like a trade acquisition ((eye rolls)). Please Dave, address this while we are in contention. I guarantee there’s a GM out there who’d be willing to give up a bat for Zumaya. He’s got too much POTENTIAL for all of the other 29 GM s to pass on. There is one sucker in every crowd, work the room Mr. D.
EDIT: Just read the “Zumaya placed on DL” story on front page. Ooops. I guess I should’ve checked in on the front page before making this post. 🙂
Trading Zumaya away would be a stupid move.
What would be stupid about it? He’s teased for 3 years now, oozing with potential. He is inconsistent when healthy, and often injured. Why is keeping him the “smart ” move? I guarantee there is at least one GM out there that feels the same way you do about Zumaya (drunk with the possibilities of what could be).
he’s Matt Anderson all over again…100 mph and nothing to show for it..2006 was a long time ago!!
Ugh. Sabathia clearly doesn’t have his best stuff and we are not taking advantage of it.
Maggs at 2nd with no outs. Maggs at 2nd with 3 outs. Bleh.
Good to see Verlander pitching great still. On the other hand, the offense has been abysmal.
Good thing Inge is batting 7th or he would have been up with a runner on 3rd less than 2 out, and spoiled the 0-0 game…
That pitch to nail Texiera was beautiful…
No runs today and we know e jax won’t get any tomorrow. The boys need some home cookin as rod would say
At the game, looked like swisher interfered with everett…curious what it looked like on tv
He timed it so he would be right in front of him when he went for the ball
Yay for our useless and worthless offense for wasting yet another great start by one of our pitchers….Can we get serious and find some offense please DD? If we wait for Guillen to return, we may be out of first place.
Just as I figured Thames would hit one with no one on base…
Magglio is useless
He set up second and third with one out earlier in the game with a double, much more than the rest of this team has done.
Also he was on 2nd with no outs with a walk and advancing on a passed ball, and was left there.
This sucks. I wish we would’ve held Verlander and Jackson back for the winnable games at home vs.Seattle. I had a bad feeling about this series the moment we went on the AS break. Tomorrow’s game is pretty big now, hopefully our ladies swinging the bats will take their skirts off and actually score some runs (by that I mean 5 or more) for E-Jax but I’m not counting on it.
5 …you are asking for a miracle!
With the short rf why not ph Clete for rayburn?
because rayburn has hit righties as well as lefties this year.
The ph spot Clete should have come in for would have been for Laird.
What a shame….Thus begins the second half fade to irrelevance. I hope I’m wrong, but history is on my side.
Fix this offense, for crying out loud. We can’t keep wasting solid starts from JV, EJ and the crew…
06…07….08…09…..second half
Lynn Henning had a nice article talking about how the fades are just getting old, and it is time for Detroit fix it now. You could probably throw 2005 in with that list, because they were at .500 at the break and then fell off in the second half…
Calm down boys. Just two games, on the road, versus the Yankees. I really like our team. We’ll be alright.
Headed to the Ballpark tonight to make sure the Twinkies don’t gain any ground.
At least we don’t have to worry about Bonderman, Kenny Rogers, or Nate Robertson disappearing in the 2nd half again. I mainly blame those 3 for the teams previous 2nd half slides. I’m glad that this team is nothing like the past teams. We have a good solid defense to fall back on and a pretty good starting rotation. We don’t have to rely on slug feasts every other game. We’re going to win more games than not just as long as Verlander, Jackson, Porcello, and Galarraga stay healthy.
I like our chances of going to the playoffs more than any other team in this division.
And what’s going to happen if we make it to the playoffs? We’ll be going through the Yankees or Red Sox in the first round.
We can always root for a couple nine inning perfect games from JV and Jax and hope we don’t need the extra inning or two before we score a run. But then again you need to win three games to advance.
Come on. If you can’t win given a pitching preformance like yesterday from your starting pitcher, I don’t know exactly when you can win. It may be good enough to win the division (and that’s a huge question mark) and it may be good enough going against teams that throw out AAA pitchers to this feeble lineup, but it just ain’t gonna cut it against the Yankees/Red Sox et. al.
There is no killer instinct on this team. CC was on the ropes in the early innings, and the Tigers just couldn’t capitialize or take him out of the game. Good teams capitialize.
Geez, it’s just 1 game and another tight 1 run game at that. The Tigers are 13-13 in one run games this year. So it’s not like we never win close games. Also it was a road game vs the highest scoring team in the the league and against one of the best pitchers in baseball. The odds were stacked against us, but we lost 2-1. We were just one swing of the bat away from winning the game. It could of went either way. Both of these games in NY could of went either way.
I would understand the complaining and unhappiness if we were in last place and on the verge of having a fire sale. This is what baseball fans and Tiger fans like myself dream about. It’s the golden chance to make it to the playoffs. To have games that matter come August and September. The stretch run is the most glorious part of the regular season if your team is in the hunt. It don’t get much better than this. I’m going to soak it in all I can. If you can’t enjoy how the Tigers are playing right now, then you probably never will.
Tigers are 1-20 with RISP the last two games.
Anyone have stats on the percentage of solo home runs the Tigers hit? It seems like it’s about 75% but I’m guessing somewhere around 55-60%. What is the league average for solo shots? Billfer, any stats on this?
Strangely enough, I’m willing to bet their % isn’t all that remarkable. I was looking at RISP stats and kind of ran into this in the other direction. Consider these numbers DET has with RISP:
OBP: .358 Rank: 8th AL Avg: .358
OPS: .816 Rank: 3rd AL Avg: .779
Yes, believe it or not, DET has the 3rd best AL OPS with RISP, behind BAL and BOS. With an average (exactly) OBP, how is this possible?
HR with RISP:
DET: 28 Rank: 1st AL Avg: 22 (Inge has the most with 5; Cabrera/Granderson 4)
And there you go. That’s the Tiger way of advancing runners – hit a home run. So while there may be a lot of solo shots, nobody hits more HR with RISP than Detroit does.
DET HR (updated with today’s HR):
Total: 106
Bases empty: 59 (56%)
AL HR (through yesterday): 1409
Bases empty: 822 (58%)
The Tigers have a LOWER than average % of solo home runs.
Thanks guys. I appreciate the numbers. I can’t believe their percentage is lower than the league average.
The Yankees have really exposed the Tigers anemic offense. Watching these last two games I wondered that if we made it to the playoffs, how would we ever get past these teams in the East?
Sabathia pitches that way vs every team. NY’s scored just 2 runs against us. I guess we shutdown and exposed their heavy hitting monster of a line-up…… All we needed was one clutch hit to win the game. Still lots of important games to be played. I don’t understand why people are waving a white flag already.
Good stuff Coleman. Thanks for pulling the strings.
Not to worry friends. We have a good enough team.
See updated comment – Tigers have lower than average solo home run %. I admit I would not have guessed this before looking at the numbers.