Just realized it’s been almost a month since I wrote a Tigers post. How have they fared since then?
Not well. They’ve won ten more games and lost twenty five. Their run production has disappeared to the point that they’ve been shut out a league leading 16 times. Oh, and they’re starting to return to the sloppy, stupid play that marked the last few seasons.
About the only pluses lately is the addition of some more good prospects that should help coming seasons, and having a manager that doesn’t watch his team stink up a ballpark, shrug his shoulders, and say, “it’s a long season and we might start winning, so I’m not going to do anything at all.”
Here is what Gardenhire had to say:
“What I can’t handle is sloppy,” he said. “That’s a donation. Just sloppy baseball. … Those are a couple things that we need to make changes in, the whole organization, the whole philosophy really has to come into play here. You have to play the game, no matter what the score is. We’re writing it all down. We’re going to have to change. This is my first time doing this with this organization and there’s going to be changes all the way up and down.”
If Gardenhire can get rid of that “What, me worry?” attitude that flourished under his predecessor, this season’s ugliness wlll be worth it.
Let’s see, last time I did a Tigers post it was Father’s Day and they’d just won again to get their record to 36-37. How have they been this last week and a half?
Yep, that’s right, in the six games they’ve had since then, the Tigers have lost every single one of them. They got the Buckeye sweep losing twice to Cincinnati and three times to Cleveland and they’ve lost the first to Oakland.
The Red’s and A’s games were close, but the Tribe series had a combined score of 26-3. Now that we’re almost through June it looks like the Tigers days of sneaking in some wins against the better teams might be over. If they can’t beat the mid and bottom tier teams either, then there’s nowhere to go but down.
The Detroit Tigers managed a sweep of the Chicago White Sox this Father’s Day weekend thanks to timely homeruns by Nick Castellanos. He had been in a funk the past week or so with only one hit in 21 late appearances. On Saturday he knocked two over the fence and added a third on Sunday.
The win was the Tigers fifth in a row and seventh win out of their last ten games. It also put them one game below .500 at 36-37. With two games coming up against the Cincinnati Reds they just might enter the rarefied air of having won more games than they’ve lost…. or they might start another five game losing streak. It’s been that kind of season.
Stuck below .500, your new young players struggling for consistency with, your ace pitcher struggling to look mediocre…. what else could go wrong?
How about your star hitter having to sit out the rest of the year because his left bicep blew out on a routine swing?
I haven’t seen anything like what happened to Miguel Cabrera since Billy Sims made a routine cut and permanently blew his knee out.
Miggy sure still has the heart to play baseball forever, but ultimately time seems to have caught up to him physically.