Sports Talk Radio Caller in the top of the 9th inning:
Troy Percival is awful! There is no way that we should have ever traded Ugueth Urbina. He was the only reliever worth anything in the bullpen, and what do we have now? A slap hitting second baseman. Yeah, Polanco’s been pretty good but it doesn’t mean anything if your bullpen is blowing the games. But part of this has to go on Trammell. Once again, he failed to take out a reliever before he gave up a home run. Everybody who was watching could tell Percival had nothing. I was watching the game with my buddy and I told him, here comes a change up that’s going to end up in the seats. It was so obvious. And look at the number of runners the offense left on base, this should have been a blowout. Once again, no clutch hitting whatsoever. Every time this team gets close to .500 they find a way to screw it up. This team sucks!

Sports Talk Radio Caller 20 minutes later:
Great win today! Yeah, Percival struggled, but his teammates picked him up. Where would we be without Polanco? Dombrowski continues to build this team into a winner. What a great trade. This team is really coming together. It was really nice to see some clutch hitting late in the game. We’ve gotta keep this going in Minnesota. Go Tigers!

The emotions of a sports fan – ya gotta love it.

In any case it was a great series and a great homestand. Let’s take a look at what happened and what might happen next:

Gettin’ on and Gettin’ in
Trammell used almost the same lineup in each game. The top 7 spots remained the same throughout the homestand, with Giarrantano, Infante, Gomez, and Logan alternating in the bottom two spots. Here’s what the top 7 in the lineup did:

      OBP    SLG
#1    429    720
#2    444    560
#3    231    217
#4    400    727
#5    417    522
#6    333    571
#7    333    609

That’s some pretty impressive balance and performance throughout the lineup – with one glaring exception. A slumping Dmitri Young probably kept the offense from being even more potent. Am I worried about Dmitri? Not really. Could he use a day off, or should he switch places with Pudge in the lineup? It might not be a bad idea.

The team still struck out 38 times against 16 walks, but they seemed to be in more hitters counts, and seemed to be hitting more line drives to all fields.

Wake up call
I don’t know if this was a case of a “wake-up call,” or simply a case of a player getting extra time to straighten things out, but Omar Infante looked like a different hitter. In two days he raised his OPS 58 points. Even he can sustain this against Minnesota, it may take the pressure off the Tigers to rush Carlos Guillen back (despite reports Guillen will be ready on Thursday).

Speed Differential
I don’t know what, if anything, this means but the Tigers had six stolen bases in six attempts. San Diego and San Francisco had 0 stolen bases on 1 attempt.

One Last Thing
This isn’t related to this weekend series, but Sam from Blue Cats and Red Sox will be covering the Tigers for the Most Valuable Network. She’ll be joining the current Tiger bloggers to provide some entertaining commentary (and regular updates I hope!).