Garret Craig

The Motor City Kitties are making a run at last place in the division, and nobody seems to care. Is it honestly 7-1 in the 2nd inning when Justin Verlander, your “staff ace”, started the game? Oh, wait, make that 8 to 1.

2 errors, in 1 2/3 innings? And that doesn’t include Magglio Ordonez watching a line drive fall 2 feet in front of him without making anything remotely related to an effort, or Placido Polanco watching his ground ball roll down the 3rd base line from the batters box as he was thrown out by 90 feet, or Miguel Cabrera dropping a foul pop-out.

The Tigers were supposed to have the day off today. They’ll get a day off anyways! They’re only here to watch the Yankees trot around the bases!

And the crowd goes wild! Gary Sheffield leads off the bottom half of the 2nd inning with another team-trademarked SOLO HOME RUN. Hey look! They stranded the bases loaded with one out! Surprise!

I don’t know what else to say, other than you should at least TRY when there is 40,000+ in attendance on a Monday afternoon for a sub-.500 baseball team.

I’ll get you some interesting stats later this week…

Justin Verlander went 5 2/3 innings Sunday night on ESPN in the Detroit Tigers 6-2 loss to the Angels, giving up 6 “earned” runs on 7 hits, 4 walks, and 3 k’s. Impressive? Not statistically, but at least two of those “earned” runs can not realistically be faulted to Verlander, the first of which came on an RBI triple on a playable fly ball that was misplayed by Magglio Ordonez in right field.

No, if you watched the first five innings of the game, you would have seen glimpses of the Justin Verlander that we saw in the 06 and 07 seasons, who had his velocity back and was pitching consistent high-90’s with his fastball.

Verlander had good control of most of his pitches, especially his curve-ball (which was ’stellar’). He threw 57 strikes and 45 balls (Most of which were pitched in the 6th inning collapse) while giving up 4 walks in the game.

Then again, it is the stats that count for tonight, so we’ll see if the Tigers can recover and get back on track Tuesday night when Kenny Rogers faces the dangerous New York Yankees.