14th
April
2008
Game 13: Hey wait, is 13 lucky? how about 11
posted in 2008 season |Detroit 11
Twins 9
Holy crap.
Recap:
- Jeremy Bonderman and Bobby Seay got help from three errors and basically gave away the ballgame.
- The Tigers committed three errors — including an ugly one by Clete Thomas in the outfield and some scary third-basing by Miguel Cabrera.
- Bonderman gave up 7 runs, 4 earned. Bobby Seay didn’t help any.
- But the offense wasn’t going to have any of that, obviously, and fought back from 5-0 and 9-4 deficits.
- The 3 through 6 batters had a combined 10 hits and 7 runs.
- Carlos Guillen had three RBIs.
- So did Pudge Rodriguez, who had a homer — assisted by the Twins right fielder’s glove — and a triple, and scored the go-ahead run on a Jacque Jones sac during the Tigers six-run eighth inning.
- That inning was awesome, if you don’t mind me saying!
- Several runs scored under the watch of Twins star setup man Pat Neshak, who doesn’t have many of those meltdowns.
- Clete Thomas hit a triple that gave him at least a puncher’s chance at an in-the-park home run. The wise thing was obviously not to try scoring, but the rook displayed some serious wheels on the bases.
Analysis
- Today was a nice do-or-die game. The team got behind, and it came back. Then it got behind again. Did it play out the game? No. It came back. I don’t know that they’ve displayed that fight in all of the earlier games.
- The key was the middle of the order finally hitting like it was expected to. We can’t expect every single player in the lineup to hit every night, but more often than not, enough of those guys should be on their game to score a fair amount of runs. If the middle of the order is breaking out of their slump, we’re going to see a lot more games with 6 or 7 runs scored and a lot less with 0.
- But the pitching still has to improve, and I’d like to see a game or two in a row with no defensive blowups.
- I’d also like to see the Tigers stop the bleeding at one or two runs more often. They give up too many big innings.
- You’re probably going to hear a lot about 2006, because obviously, that’s the parallel we’re hoping for and, right now, there is some pattern following going on.
- The storyline: Tigers lose. Tigers are blase. Jim Leyland rants. Tigers come-from-behind next game to win. Tigers win the pennant.
- Oh yeah, I’m missing something in the middle. A long season. Regardless of what we thought two weeks ago or we thought two days ago or we thought two hours ago, there’s still a long seaso to go.
- So my advice is, don’t put too much weight on one come-from-behind victory. That makes for compelling TV drama and easy copy to write and happy players for the night and all that. But in the grand scheme, I’m just going to go with Jim Leyland’s even-keel mood.
- If this team is good enough, it will be playing meaningful games in September regardless of tonight’s outcome.
- But I’m sure as hell going to enjoy it anyway and hope for a sweep tomorrow.
The one thing that really struck me after the game was…..Pudge! The last time that I really remember Pudge getting a big hit and being that excited was the first road trip of last season when he hit the go ahead homer against KC. It was good to see.
Yeah. He really played with passion and it seemed to spread. They needed that.
Can you really call two games a sweep? Considering the way things have gone this year I guess it’s only fair to call it a sweep.
This was the sort of win I envisioned us getting when we made the offseason moves. This team should score that much and should never be counted out of any game. It just started to feel like they would never hit like that. Good times.