It's all my fault...
I got lazy.
I got bored.
No one was reading this at all. I had been writing about the Tigers for almost two months and only had 52 page hits. I never meant to stop. I just got busy with work and other things and I stopped writing--something I vowed not to do.
And the Tigers have won only five games since.
Luckily, they have only dropped four games to the Twins and two to the White Sox in this disasterous stretch, but looking at that, it is all but obvious that the race should be all but over right now.
The Tigers haven't been awful, save for a game against the Twins and a few bad innings sprinkled in here and there, but they haven't been great either. Actually, aside from their pitching, they haven't been great all season. Ordonez' numbers are way down from a few years ago. Pudge has low power numbers, and they're even lower when you consider that he had 5 RBI in three different games, leaving him with only forty for the rest of the season.
Their leadoff hitter is hitting .260 and leads the team in strikeouts. No matter who plays first base cannot get a big hit when it is needed, it seems. Their third baseman can't hit .250 and always takes a first pitch fastball for a strike, getting behind in the count. The second baseman and the shortstop have nagging injuries that will likely make them not the same for the rest of the year, and they dumped their one-time all-star with no apparrent warning.
This sounds like a sub .500 team when you add that all up. Somehow, however, the Tigers are still in first place, and Baseball Prospectus has them still at a 96% chance to make the playoffs. Everything seems okay. Any and every Tiger fan would have taken a two game lead on September 11 had it been offered at the beginning of the season, so let's not concentrate on what the Tigers have done over the last month, which is lose, but let's concentrate on where they are, and where they can go.
I stopped writing and the Tigers stopped playing. So, I will do my best to do this almost every day until the end of the season. I will continue to work as the Tigers should as well. The season's not over, and they are still in better shape than the competition.
So what if it is not going to be as easy as earlier expected. When the Tigers got up 10 games, it was widely thought that no one would catch them. Well, they are catchable, but not caught yet. They are still in first place with none left against Minnesota. If they can be in first place after playing Chicago next week, it will look even better.
Now is not a time to give up, but to realize all that this team of would-be-Yankee-backups can still make the playoffs. At that time, records don't matter. Sure it would be nice to get home-field advantage, but most series are over by game six anyway, so it really won't matter in the long run. However, if you take records into account, the Tigers are better on the road than at home anyway.
Unless they can win five of six and start putting this thing away...
