This game comes down to a pitch right down the middle that was called a ball with Podsednik at the plate. His walk set up the bases-clearing double by Cintron, who sucks to high heaven against every team in baseball except the Tigers, against whom he is sort of like a young Rogers Hornsby.

That pitch was right down the middle. The umpiring in major league baseball has been shit for at least a couple of years now, and I have seen more bad calls this year than I’ve probaby seen cumulatively in my entire life of watching baseball.

Good thing Thames isn’t playing. Why would you play a guy who is slugging .574 and sharing the team lead in home runs with a player who has come to the plate 120 more times?

Why, to play Craig Monroe, of course! Craig Monroe, who despite his current streak has an OPS of .800 and has drawn 19 walks this season. It might have helped when he swung at ball four in the second inning and popped up, right before Inge did exactly the same thing.

This team doesn’t know how to get on base, the pitchers are coming back to earth, and about 6 dozen tactical errors are made every week by our mystical manager who is supposedly responsible for our success this year. I’m sure it has nothing to do with our obscene record on 1-run games, which is falling fast.

No one addressed the problems this team has, and no one is going to address them until it is way too late. This is painful to watch, and I’m going to have to listen to the comparisons for the rest of my life, whenever a team blows a big lead.

“It’s reminiscent of the ’64 Phillies, the ’69 Cubs, and the ’06 Tigers,” is what they’ll say, and everyone will look around wondering the the hell happened and calling it bad luck. What it will be is a good luck not capitalized on.

This sucks.

I still have faith that they’re going to end up at least in the playoffs, but I think we can all officially call off the 1984 comparisons at this point–especially if they somehow end up facing the White Sox in the playoffs. There’s just a mental block there, and I think–as someone pointed out on this blog recently, I can’t remember who–that it’s a managerial problem when it comes to that. Listening to Jim Leyland talk over and over about how the series with Chicago “aren’t rivalry series,” only to see the Tigers get knocked around for three or four straight games, is eerily reminiscent of the John Cooper days at Ohio State. His stubborn refusal to recognize the Michigan rivalry went hand-in-hand with his abysmal record against U of M; those losses probably cost OSU a national title or two, and eventually resulted in Cooper’s firing. Obviously comparing Ohio State-Michigan to Tigers-White Sox is a stretch, but it’s a display of how the concept of rivalry and added competition can really benefit a team–and of course the flipside of that is that the “just another game” philosophy (or “just another series” in this case) can have disastrous consequences.

Mark,

Yeah we might still make the playoofs but the point is that when you are 40 games over .500 and 10 games up in the division you dont just make the playoffs…you put the division away. the tigers faced the two teams that are directly behind them in the divsion. they could have put it away. this series against the black sox was horrific. they played like shit…as if this was just another series. Hey I wonder where they got that idea??? oh yeah, their manager has been yelling at the media not to put importance on this series. The sox took it seriously and handed us our hat. Unfortunatly i have to live in this city and have to listen to thousands off assholes chant Detroit Sucks!!!

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I agree with both you and Dan in this instance. I was just trying to point out what I thought was an interesting historical parallel. I hate the White Sox, my brother and my parents back in Detroit hate the White Sox, my friends from the D hate the White Sox. . .so why should anyone pretend this is “just another series?” Play up to it!