2009 Season, Game Post

Game 2009.137: Tigers at Royals

96 Comments

PREGAME: Sorry for the lack of blogging this weekend. I went up north for a few days and my internet connectivity was severely limited. I was able to get the game posts up, and that was about it. I didn’t miss much did I?

Rick Porcello gets his chance to keep the winning streak alive as the Tigers are 6-for-September. I’ve gotten used to the magic number trickling down each day, and yesterday that didn’t happen. Two such days would threaten to disrupt my good mood.

Bruce Chen starts for the Royals. Chen started once against the Tigers and they torched him for 7 runs and chased him in the 5th inning. He also faced them in relief and fanned 3 in 2 innings allowing just an unearned run. I’m hoping for more of the former than the latter.

Detroit vs. Kansas City – September 8, 2009 | MLB.com: Gameday

POSTGAME: All good things must come to an end, but they shouldn’t come to an end when you’re playing a last place team, and you have a 3 run lead. But come to an end they did on the backs of some adventurous outfield defense and some control issues in the bullpen.

Clete Thomas missed a foul ball in the corner that would have preserved a 1 run lead which would become a 1 run deficit. Ryan Raburn misjudged a fly ball and played it into a double. Bobby Seay hit a guy. Jeremy Bonderman walked Yuniesky Betancourt. Yep.

The Tigers got some timely hits but didn’t really crush the ball. Marcus Thames had an infield single. Aubrey Huff blooped one just over the infield. But 5 runs should have been enough.

Rick Porcello didn’t have his characteristic ground ball inducing repertoire working. Too many of the balls were hit well to the outfield. It happens.

  • Raburn did have the one misplay in the outfield, but he also did have 3 hits, including a homer. He also threw out a guy at the plate and made a very nice running catch to end an inning and leave the bases loaded. His positives far outweighed the one negative.
  • Thames with a sacrifice fly, and the Tigers are finding out how to score runnners from third with less than 2 outs.
  • Nate Robertson being used out of the bullpen was odd. The Tigers had burned through both lefties which I get, but why not activate Clay Rapada as a 3rd lefty?

96 thoughts on “Game 2009.137: Tigers at Royals”

    1. OK, I’ll chime in with a “me too,” although it beats me how y’all know..it’s not even listed on baseball-reference.com

  2. Tigers lineup, featuring Raburn (Rayburn?) leading off and playing CF:

    1.Ryan Raburn, CF
    2.Placido Polanco, 2B
    3.Magglio Ordonez, RF
    4.Miguel Cabrera, 1B
    5.Marcus Thames, LF
    6.Aubrey Huff, DH
    7.Brandon Inge, 3B
    8.Gerald Laird, C
    9.Adam Everett, SS

  3. Whoa! Was that a pink backpack I just saw an unknown Tiger wearing in the Dugout on the pre-game show? Did anyone see it? Which Tiger was it?

    1. That was part of Rodney’s league-imposed punishment 🙂

      The suspension was one thing but he’s definitely appealing the pink backpack

        1. Rod and Mario were getting a chuckle out of the pink backpack a while back. I like the stories that personalize the team and wish we’d hear more of them. Did you hear the one about Aubrey Huff and his thong underwear?

          2. I did like the story how when Fu-Te Ni first came up Inge took one of the Vote For Inge All-Star posters and changed it to Vote For Ni and stuck it on his locker, I’m sure that was probably a big deal to him as far as feeling like part of the team…Inge is good at that kind of thing; it’s nice to watch him clown around with Cabrera, who seemed a bit isolated last season…

    2. Well Sunday he saved our bacon. I really like and want Brandon to do better in the avg dept, but I guess at this point “we got what we got” especially with a 5M/y contract. Nothing to trade for and we ant eating it.

      I have resigned my self to brace for his at bats

  5. I’ve read a lot of things…this is something I don’t think I’ve seen in print before now:

    “M. Thames singled to first”

  6. By the way, that last comment was a joke. Just thought I’d make that clear before the Inge mob comes after me with torches ablaze.

  7. Stephen ………. so far its me you Coleman and Linda Lou. Billfer is out having cake on his second or third 29th birthday.

    We had a guy that used to post here that was an staunch Inge guy.

    So it looks like you safe for now, until Coleman wows you with a baseball stat

    1. Yeah, celery cake with yogurt frosting no doubt 🙂

      If Stephen gets out of control I’ll have to pull out an Inge runner-on-3rd or game-winning hit stat or something….

  8. How about this: according to AccuScore the Tigers’ chances of making the playoffs went from 79.9% last week up to 92.7%…

    In other words if we don’t make it now we’re in Mets territory or worse. Those are better odds than either Boston or LAA.

  9. Scoreboard update:

    Toronto has scored 6 in the 6th to go up 6-3…

    White Sox down 7-0 in the 3rd.

    1. Lovin that……… I really want to skip a day of work and drive to the D on 10/1 see them close it out against the twins, eat downtown and drive home listening to Johnny Cash the whole way.

      2. What goes up must come down… because even though ski lifts go up, ski slopes come right back down.

  15. Man I would so love the Huffthonger to get a walk here, and give Stephen another shot at Inge grandslammery

  17. Defensively the Tiger’s outfielders tonight scare me.

    Nice to here the White Sox and Twins are losing.

    Also anybody else notice how big the home plate umpire is? When Thames questioned that ball that was called a strike, the guy is huge.

  19. You want to know who I’m not calling? Sam Bernstein. You want to know who I’m definitely not calling? Sam Bernstein’s cross-eyed offspring. You want to know who I am calling? Ghostbusters.

  22. Can Rodney call off the appeal and count tonight as one of the games? What’s the deadline for that?

  23. Holy crap the defense is awful tonight. There should be at least two errors on our outfielders. Jeesh…

    1. Well, Porcello only has himself to blame for the sac fly he set up with his wild pitch.

      By the way the Royals are the only team with fewer sac flies than Detroit.

          3. He’s an eye specialist, and all the pro athletes “trust their eyes to Dr. Rahmani.” We have to watch and listen to it (commercial) all the time.

          4. Ah, thanks, we have one of those out here, Dr. Heiser with his laser vision surgery, listen to how it helped the backup long snapper for the 49ers!

  28. I’m surprised JL had Porcello come out for the 7th. Hopefully the bullpen can keep things locked down.

  29. Wow, pinch-hitting for Josh Anderson, that’s a big mistake, cause…oh nevermind, I guess the Royals have figured it out…

  34. True story: I yelled louder at the TV when Clete Thomas watched the ball slice right by him than I have at any point since an attempted 1-3 putout in October 2006.

  35. Nothing’s worse than giving up the lead with the bottom of the order coming up to respond.

    Here’s to some more 9th inning heroics.

  37. Why is Robertson warming up? I was hoping he’d replace Garage Sale Galarraga in the rotation. AG hasn’t done anything to warrant getting another start.

  38. I do not get Ribertson pitching either. Dan Dickerson suggested that it may be a bullpen session. Isn’t he staring on Friday?

  39. A couple of questions:

    Why did he PH with Santiago when Guillen is available?

    WHy didn’t he bring Lyon in in the 7th inning to get the last out and then pitch the 8th?

      1. He rested yesterday. WE are in the middle of a pennant race, you do NOT arbitrarily rest your best reliever in this situation.

        1. Depends on what their plan for Rodney is. Lyon may be slated to throw 5 innings over the course of the next five nights. Regardless, though, you can’t win squat without some help from the middle of your rotation. Given the current reliever workload paradigm, there will always be more high-leverage situations than there will be relievers qualified and avaible to handle them.

          None of us have access to meaningfully question individual decisions and you’ll fail miserably if you try to make a case that our most productive relievers are being under-utilized.

  40. Geez, does Curtis have a difficult time picking up pitches this year? He has been swinging at balls and taking strikes for a while now. Not that he has ever had great plate discipline, but this year seems especially bad. What happened?

      1. He guesses a lot. It’s apparent that it’s his biggest flaw as a hitter. Not sure if you can learn to stop guessing, but if he did…look out.

  41. Its tough to be mad about this one, even if we did have a 5-2 lead in the fifth inning, because of the huge road sweep of the Rays. After three dramatic road wins against the defending AL champs I’m not going to get steamed about this one. The good news is that Minnesota and Chicago also lost, meaning that we still enjoy the 6.5 and 7.5 game leads respectively that we started out with this morning. The added bonus being that one more game peels off the schedule for all three teams and the Tigers odds of winning the division get slightly stronger even on a night where we lose. Magic number is now 19.

    If Verlander can come out and give us a strong performance (and hopefully his 17th win) tomorrow, the magic number will shrink to at least 18 and counting depending on the result in TOR tomorrow night. If anyone had said last Friday morning before the trip started that we’d be 3-1 on this trip going into tomorrow’s game, there probably isn’t a man among us who wouldn’t have taken it. We’ve got our ace going tomorrow. If he pitches like he is capable of and we continue to hit we will all have a happy Wednesday night. Go Tigers!

    1. You guys realize it’s not really a pennant race when no other team in the division is above .500, right?

      1. You realize that the race for the AL pennant hasn’t even started due to the fact that there is only one AL champion, right?

        Right now it might be more appropriately termed we are in a -“race” for the playoffs.

          1. Do they actually still make pennants? I still remember having my ’72 Tigers pennant on a little wooden stick…

            They used to fly pennants at stadiums, but at some point they started using flags instead (square instead of tapered)…

  42. Two campers are walking through the woods when a huge brown bear suddenly appears in the clearing about 50 feet in front of them.

    The bear sees the campers and begins to head toward them. The first guys drops his backpack, digs out a pair of sneakers, and frantically begins to put them on.

    The second guys says, “What are you doing? Sneakers won’t help you outrun that bear.” “I don’t need to outrun the bear,” the first guy says. “I just need to outrun you.”

    1. This guy walks into a bar with an alligator on a leash. The bouncer says, whoa hold on, you’re gonna have to leave, you can’t come in here with an alligator.

      “But it’s a tame alligator,” the guy says…

      …oh wait, I can’t tell that one here, oops.

  43. I thought Robertson was back in the rotation. With Gagaragga demoted to mop up, who is our 5th starter?

    1. Agreed, very confused when I saw Nate coming into the game. I can’t find any explanation for this, and hardly a word of it in the News or Free Press, which I thought was strange considering how well he was pitching in a starting role.

      Billfer, please help us make sense of this!!!

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