Detroit pitching stymies Braves
posted in 2006-07 offseason, Atlanta Braves |Tigers 5, Braves 0
It’s kind of hard to wrap your mind around: Detroit allowed 1 run to Atlanta in a 3-game series. Dang. That’s pretty dominant. Andrew Miller and Chad Durbin teamed up for today’s shutout. I get the feeling from watching the games that the Braves’ offensive struggles contributed to that, but I give the Tigers credit for not opening the door to let the Braves out of their slump.
ESPN always gets a bit too excited over everything. Well, Joe Morgan. And today’s excitement from Joe Morgan was Andrew Miller relying on the fast ball. Morgan liked the fastball, but he pointed out repeatedly, Miller didn’t really want to try out any other pitch with it working so well. Fortunately that didn’t bite young Andrew. I do kind of wonder where that great slider disappeared to. But he was locating a fastball with movement quite well. He put a few batters on base with stumbles in location, but mostly, when the bat hit the ball, the Braves didn’t get much out of it.
Chad Durbin, for his part, showed exactly why he’s an asset in the bullpen. Hopefully no one takes it as a demotion or insult. With the bullpen’s struggles as they were the first two and a half months of the season, Durbin needed to provide some stability. Tonight, he did that. It’s just the continued progress of the pitching staff. That, and Durbin got an RBI with a sac fly.
The offense struggled a bit after all the ESPN hype, but eventually settled in and scored four runs in the sixth inning of Braves starter Chuck James. Pretty much routine. The Tigers batters just kept taking what was given to them and turning it into hits. Enough of those and you score some runs.
In all, a pretty routine game…circa 2006. Will there be more of those in the Tigers’ future? We can only hope.
The Tigers ended interleague play with a 14-4 record, tied for best in baseball with the Angels. They went 8-for-9 on the road trip and have won seven straight. I’m going to miss playing in the NL parks. But Texas brings its awful pitching to town for a four-game series starting Monday night.
By the way, did you notice all the “Let’s go Ti-gers” chants? Man. There were a lot. I’d love to hear from someone who was there, but on TV, it seemed like the cheers were as loud when the Tigers did something good as when the Braves did. And those chants came through quite well. Considering I had to put up with the annoying Tomahawk Chop and accompanying, er, chant, it was nice to hear Tigers fans showing them up.
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