Detroit Tigers, 34-35, 2 1/2 games behind Cleveland, Consecutive Interleague Series Won: 4.
You’re welcome Pirates fans, you’re welcome.
The Tigers head into Pittsburgh to close out an interleague swing that has seem them take series against the Pirates’ division rival Reds and Cardinals. The surprising Pirates are now just 2 games behind Central leading Cincinnati.
The Pirates open the series with the hot hand of A.J. Burnett, who has won 6 consecutive starts, beginning with a 5/19 victory over the Tigers in Detroit.
Doug Fister looks to continue his strong comeback and put Detroit back to the .500 mark. Following his thrilling 10th-inning walk off single, Quintin Berry gets the start in RF in place of the struggling Brennan Boesch. Boesch is 3-7 lifetime against Burnett, but playing Boesch would mean either sitting the Q-Berry, or sitting Young, and apparently we can’t spare his .615 OPS against RHP. Or maybe it’s his glove we can’t spare, I forget.
In other news, Wednesday may have seen Jake Westbrook stymie the Tiger offense, but it was a day to celebrate for Ryan Raburn. On Wednesday Raburn reached his 5-year service time milestone, which means that even though the Tigers still have one more option to send Raburn to Toledo, Raburn can decline to report, which would force the Tigers to either keep him on the roster or release him (and still be on the hook for his salary).
Stat of the Day: Prince Fielder leads all active players with 28 home runs against the Pirates, including 9 at PNC Park.
Today’s Player of the Pre-game: Prince Fielder. See above. And the last time Fielder faced Burnett he hit a 2-run HR–his only non-solo HR of the season.
Today’s Young Jacksonberry Lineup:
- Austin Jackson CF
- Quintin Berry RF
- Miguel Cabrera 3B
- Prince Fielder 1B
- Delmon Young LF
- Alex Avila C
- Jhonny Peralta SS
- Ramon Santiago 2B
- Doug Fister P
Clown show galore early in this game and Fister doesn’t appear to pitching at his normal level. Is he going to head back to the DL after this game?
I was down in Lakeland the days the Tigers worked on pitchers defense…All they needed there was a card table and a deck of cards. thats, how meaningful it was. End of the season there will be 20: pitchers errors cause nobody really cares….and beside the Tigers will score so many runs it won’t matter…right Jim
Tiger pitchers have been poor fielders for many years (or at least since Leyland has been manager, which seems like forever to me.) They must make more bad pickoff throws than any other team, and with 2 out and an 0-2 count on the batter isn’t an unheard of scenario. 20 errors by the pitchers is not an exaggeration, they have done just that within the last couple of years.
I can’t think of the right word for this game, but “underwhelming” comes close.
Underwhelming. The two game win streak comes to an end. And only two errors in this game? Such improvement must certainly predict that they can be at .500 as early as December.
I think I understand what Jim was saying when he said I need more “a-holes” This team loses games they should win and almost never wins any games that they should lose. Today, was a perfect example..Fister was off and AJ Burnett was great,but, because they commit errors on plays that are not even forced by them being difficult plays or speed…They spot a poor hitting team 2 runs for nothing. They then can’t get a big hit…They can keep muddling around, but, something needs to be done. They have to field the baseball like an average ML team (we know their range is limited, so they can’t kick around the ball) Today’s 2 errors early were a joke because they were such simple plays. A liitle league team could have kept two runs from scoring on that play…and the corner OF needs to be addressed. The record they have is a fair reflection of their team. Cabby and Fielder must be MVP caliber or this team can’t win, because 5-6-7 in the lineup are among the worst as far as production in all of baseball.