7/3/2013

Oh the pain of pissing away the A.L. Central, or is that a kidney stone, nope it's the A.L. Central. I assumed history books have shown it's well within anyone's reach to lay siege to Detroit yet some perverse modern legend exists (Sporting News 2013 Baseball pre-season edition, page 48 "Tigers: the division should be a formality, just as it should have been last season") that they're some kind of untameable beast destined to overwhelm the thought process. I think its the same Tiger team which just one year ago trailed the wretched White Sox by 3 with 15 to go. Where have they improved? Max Scherzer's leap forward, impressive though it may be, has clearly been mitigated by Verlander's regression... oh wait Kait upton, nevermind, but those in the know insist they remain the team to beat so I rode out to Target Field to pay mid-June homage to little caesar's greasy buffet and all I got for my money was Rick Porcello, Anibal Sanchez (placed on IR after game 2) and Doug Fister. That's what the Tigers, a team with no defense or bullpen, threw at us over a 3 game series.Concede to that? Is anyone under the impression that ragged back-end has a combined career winning percentage over 50? As I write this it stands at .4863013 and more disturbing is the fact that Rick Porcello & his lifetime ERA of 4.63 has the best record of the three (Porcello 52 - 48, Sanchez 54 - 56, Fister 36 - 46). Concession speeches should never be made they demean us all and so does any notion implying any title is automatic especially after I watched them leave Minneapolis and stagger back to what remains of Detroit for a 10 game home stand (6/17 - 6/27) where twice the length of their vaunted rotation gave up 64 runs in a pitcher-friendly ballpark proving once again that like Ron Gardenhire the best thing going for them is the unbalanced schedule. The White Sox have no future, no present and their past is shady. The Royals seem intent upon never growing up. And win or lose it will always stink in the city of Cleveland. It's the black & blue division where we reside and every year that goes by I feel myself sinking a little bit deeper into it, a semi-vegetable state from which I can no longer see an escape.