Click if you dare! It’s mostly an answer to Ian posting the Bay City Rollers last week.

Tigers 3
Cardinals 2

Recap:

• OK, despite that Fernando tie-in, what’s most important first is the Tigers won on a walk-off, er, walk, in the 10th inning. Clete Thomas watched a pitch go by on a 3-2 count — a brave choice given the umpire had a pretty big strike zone in the game — for the walk that drove in the game-ending run.
• Strangely, it was the second run-walked-in by Thomas that game. Seriously. Check the box score pbp.
• In the 9th, Gary Sheffield hit a game-tying home run of his own.
• All the Tigers pitchers did amazing. Nate Robertson allowed one run in 6-1/3 innings.
• But Fernando! Two games after he melted down, he was definitely on top of his game. He threw 11 strikes in 15 pitches. In that time, he got 5 outs and stranded one of Robertson’s runners at third base after taking over with just one out in the inning.
• Todd Jones gave up a runner in the ninth and looked like he might get his first loss before Sheffield’s homer.
• Bobby Seay pitched an easy 10th.
• The Tigers won a fifth straight series and have taken 12 of 15 now.

Analysis:

• I’ve said it more than once but I’ll say it again: this winning this is SO much more fun than losing.
• Unfortunately the Twins are winning a LOT 9 straight. The White Sox have been doing some winning of their own, too. But it’s not yet the All-Star game. The Tigers are just two games under .500 and may (should) close that gap this weekend. So it’s not yet time to watch the standings, tempting as it is.
• Strong pitching performance all around against a pretty good team and, oh yeah, Albert Pujols went 4-for-4 for the Cardinals. Gotta be happy about that.
• But you REALLY have to be happy with Rodney’s performance. When he came back and struggled in his first two appearances, and struggled mightily, it was disconcerting, for the fans and certainly for Rodney. He, like Joel Zumaya, pretty much have to resemble 2006 form for the Tigers to have their best shot at winning the division and making the playoffs. It’s good to see he has it in him. He also had a 1-2-3 appearance on Tuesday. Definitely a good sign to see him repeat his showing.
• Gary Sheffield gets pretty close to direct credit for the past two wins. He really does seem to look like the Sheffield we saw pre-injury last season. It’s a little early to proclaim it for sure, and I won’t. But, you know, he’s playing pretty good, and that’s a good thing.

Detroit 6, St. Louis 3

Too bad the World Series wasn’t the best of nine. We’d have a pretty interesting game coming up. But alas, it is four. The Cardinals are forever the World Series champions. You can’t take that away from them. But the Tigers did sweep the three-game series in convincing fashion against a banged up St. Louis club.

This time, it was a come-from-behind, if you check the stats book. The Cardinals did have a lead for a half inning before Detroit took care of things. Justin Verlander pitched eight mostly strong innings, striking out few but getting the job done for his fifth win of the season.

Brandon Inge’s two-run homer in the bottom of the fifth put the Tigers over the top. Mike Rabelo and Sean Casey added three runs in the sixth. Neifi Perez drove in Curtis Granderson in the first inning after Grandy tripled.

Just from the names mentioned, you can tell this was the “B” team lineup. That gave some regulars extra rest time in the day game-following night game, as the Tigers already had Monday off. I wasn’t too worried about the lineup, they were facing a Cardinals squad having some tough luck lately. If needed, I’m sure Jim Leyland would have started inserting regulars in the later innings. Fortunately, no one was needed, they got their full rest. Mike Rabelo had the only two-hit game. Craig Monroe got on base twice with walks.

This 28-14 sweep of the Cards in front of sell-out Comerica Park crowds came a few months late, but felt good nonetheless. It put Detroit a nice 11 games over .500 and left them tied for first place with the Indians, who also won. Given the injuries and stumbles along the way, this is a pretty good place to be.

Detroit 8, St. Louis 7

Just a quick one tonight. Nate Robertson was so-so. He only gave up two runs, but he only lasted five innings. And that was the problem. The Detroit bullpen is, how do we put it? Shakey? Bad? Ugly? Scary? Awful? Annoying? I’m not sure. All of those, really.

Saturday, it allowed five runs. Friday, four. Thursday, Wil Ledezma blew Chad Durbin’s lead and lost.

On and on and on and on, it’s nothing short of frustrating. It’s just a darn good thing this Tigers offense can score a lot, or rather than being in a first-place tie with the Cleveland Indians in the A.L. Central, they’d be mired in the midst of the division closer to .500. They can’t keep winning like this.

The bullpen has to improve, or they’re going to start to stumble.

Tigers 14, Cards 4

Andrew Miller pitched like we all hoped. Maybe he didn’t come out the unstoppable ace that it’s easy to imagine him as. But ask the Cardinals about that. 6 innings, 4 hits, most importantly, no runs. And yet, the first major league start for 21-year-old lefty Miller was almost overshadowed by the amazing hitting performance the Tigers put on.

14 runs, seven nine in the fifth inning alone, made this game a laugher almost the whole time.

Who did well? Who didn’t?! Magglio and Sheff both homered. Placido Polanco didn’t, but went 3-for-4, as did Carlos Guillen. What about Sean Casey? All this AL pitching must have made him better when he saw National Leaguers again. He had four hits and two RBIs.

When all was said and done, the Tigers crossed from 40 to 41 games — something I nearly missed — and have scored 223 runs, which leads baseball. Of course, Jason Grilli watched his ERA go above 7, too, as he allowed three runs in another bad outing. While I hate to think ill of 2006 Tigers, I think it’s about time Jason Grilli’s career be continued elsewhere. He’s not pitching like someone on a contender should.

As for Miller, he’ll be sent back to Erie as soon as Jeremy Bonderman is ready to pitch again, probably his next scheduled start. But you’ve got to hope the Tigers’ brass is trying to find a way to get Miller back to The Show soon, because he’s too good to go without for long.

The Tigers look to continue extracting World Series revenge with a Saturday evening game. I should have the time to do some recaps of stuff on Sunday.

Box

Cardinals at Tigers, 7 p.m.
TV: FSN
Pitching: Andrew Miller (0-0, -.– ERA) vs Braden Looper (5-2, 2.29 ERA)

The World Series rematch begins today in Detroit; Andrew Miller takes the mound for the first time as an MLB starter; what more could you ask for to shake off a doubleheader loss and get excited for baseball again?

Looper has had an incredible season so far. I’m not sure why. But reading Get Up, Baby!, it looks like he’s got a good splitter, a tailing fastball and both are  tough on lefties. Good thing we don’t have many.

I don’t think we need to rehash Andrew Miller a whole lot more: Just say he forces grounders, he’s got a good strikeout pitch, a mid-high 90s fastball and a beautiful slider. Hopefully there are few jitters and he’s fun to watch.

St. Louis 5. Detroit 4.

I’d like to say there’s some reason to be optimistic. But really, there’s not. The Cardinals just seem to be playing with much more poise, and the Tigers seem to have all but lost any of that cool poise we saw most of the season. I just don’t see them coming back to win the World Series from a 3-1 deficit and no poise.

When we talk about stats, and we pretend there’s no such thing as clutch because it varies from year to year, it sounds good. It sounds logical. It sounds right. But it also sounds like playing the game inside a microchip. The guys playing the game for real in the Detroit uniform are falling short of what we’ve come to expect of them, and they’re doing it in ways we never could have imagined. Mental mistakes. Physical mistakes. Sure, some of it was forced by St. Louis, some was forced by the playing conditions (which were the same for both teams), and some was just random luck of the baseball going to an inch too far or not far enough. But maybe it’s also a sign of being a young team on a very big stage no one expected them to reach.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. I just don’t see any reason to believe this is going to be a repeat of 1968 with three straight victories. Sure, anything is possible. But probable? No.

Maybe I’ll have something more to say tomorrow. Tonight, I have nothing else to add.

Okay, let’s just start with the hat-tipping, because frankly, I think it’s due in this case. Chris Carpenter was simply amazing. He led the Cards to a 5-0 victory for a 2-1 series lead. The Tigers didn’t get very deep in the counts, but he didn’t really give them any chance to work a count even WHEN they tried. (Which wasn’t always, let’s be fair here).

Carpenter aside, St. Louis pitchers couldn’t hold the Tigers to the paltry number they have without some help. The batters just haven’t been patient. They’re not known for being patient, but they’ve been even worse than normal, as Bilfer points out. Today, the first six batters reached base approximately zero times, give or take zero. Curtis Granderson, Placido Polanco and Pudge Rodriguez are 0-for-the-World-Series. I just don’t mean hitless. They haven’t touched first base safely. Granderson and Pudge have both grounded into a double play, too. Magglio Ordonez at least has a number on the board: .200. Basically, if you’re looking for any good news at all, if you looked at those numbers and knew the Tigers played three games, you’d assume they were down, 0-3. But it’s only 1-2. Not the ideal position, But certainly not the end of the world.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the batters have to break out of the slump. There’s no guarantees of that. You hope the batters get back into it, but just because they haven’t been hitting doesn’t mean they have to start hitting. If pressed, I’d say this is probably the low point for the team. It certainly feels like a low point. But can we say for sure it will be a low point and not a low plateau? Certainly not. It’s pretty awful. It’s got Jim Leyland talking about lineup changes.

The defense has been awful, too. Okay, that’s probably an overstatement. The defense by pitchers not named Kenny Rogers has been awful. Today, it didn’t seem like the team defense was all that bad. Certainly, it didn’t feel like typical Tigers defense, but you can’t really point and say it stunk. Joel Zumaya’s errant throw when attempting to get the lead runner at third? That was awful. Certainly, St. Louis has played better. There were a few times the Tigers got nice contact, but the Cards’ stepped up and made the plays. They are continuing that run of extremely good defense — way over their regular season heads. But again, there’s no rule that says that has to end. Maybe it ends. Maybe it doesn’t.

Finally, I’ll say Tigers pitching has been decent. Not perfect. But I thought Nate Robertson did a nice job and came pretty close to getting out of the game unscathed after loading the bases with no outs. He allowed two runs in five innings. Zumaya caused his own two unearned runs. He did seem to be rusty. Fernando Rodney just seemed to be Fernando Rodney. Usually good, but not always.

The problem isn’t that they lost. With Carpenter on the mound, it’s going to be a tough game to win. But like Saturday, the depressing factor was how they lost. After falling behind in a close game, the Tigers just seem to have a mental lapse here, a physical lapse there, and suddenly, there’s no way they can get back in the game.

But I’m not throwing in the towel. At this point, it could be a 3-0 Cardinals lead. St. Louis has been the better team in the Series. Detroit has had underperforming defense, awful offense, and pitching that could be better. But the Tigrer are only down 2-1 in the Series? That doesn’t sound like it’s time to worry yet. It sounds like if they play Tigers baseball, they claw right back into things. And if they don’t, we’ll just be stuck congratulating St. Louis on a job well done before the weekend.

(Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Kenny Rogers threw his 23rd straight scoreless inning and a third scoreless game. He was asked about the feat and had one response: He’s no Christy Mathewson (who threw 27). But he is Kenny Rogers, and that’s pretty good in the post season in 2006. So 23, 23, 23 consecutive scoreless innings in the postseason for Rogers, and the Tigers are heading to St. Louis with a 1-1 series split after a 3-1 victory.

KEN-NY! KEN-NY! KEN-NY!

The AP article mentioned: “Rogers became only the second pitcher to have three scoreless starts in a single postseason. Christy Mathewson had three complete-game shutouts (27 innings) for the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1905 World Series.”

“Dirtgate” is going to be talked about more than anyone will want to hear I’m sure. I look at it this way: Rogers pitched better when his hand was clean than when it was dirty. That really shuts the cover on the book for me. His second through eighth innings were better than the first. The Cardinals were a bit annoyed at the moment, but they let it drop. I hope the media follow suit. Now I see how the White Sox must have felt last October.

These looked a lot more like the Tigers we’re used to. That’s good, and that’s bad. The good was the double plays turned, the fine defensive plays by Curtis Granderson, Craig Monroe and Magglio Ordonez in the outfield. The cool defense in the middle infield. We got a homer by Monroe — who is going to be known for being a capable power hitter in the national media after the five home runs October he’s hit so far — timely hitting by Sean Casey, and Carlos Gullen was great. Two interesting notes from the Elias Sports Bureau:

Craig Monroe became the fifth player to hit a home run in each of his first two World Series games. …

The Tigers have hit at least one home run in each of their 10 postseason games this year. Only two other teams did so in their first 10 games in any postseason. The Blue Jays homered in their first 10 games in 1992, and the Astros homered in their first 12 in 2004.

On the flip side, there was that whole thing with loading the bases with no outs and putting a goose-egg on the scoreboard. And, of course, Todd Jones made the ninth interesting WAY, WAY, WAY too interesting, as he is wont to do. He’s done it once each playoff series (and many times during the year) and rebounded to pitch fine. That, too, is Tigers baseball. Just Tigers baseball we havent’ seen in awhile.

So now we move to St. Louis. If they take care of their home field, Comerica Park has seen its last of the Fall Classic. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. We saw the worst of the Tigers Saturday. We just hope to see the best of them in the coming days. I think when Detroit plays its game, it’s good enough to come out of this. Which isn’t to imply anything bad about the Cardinals. They’re a fine team. But I think the Tigers are a better one. I don’t know if Nate Robertson is going to outduel Chris Carpenter Tuesday — but he doesn’t have to. He just has to keep it close, and certainly that he can do that. I am sure Detroit will take one, possibly two, and have a chance to close this out at Comerica Park.

Admit it. Yeah, it would be fun to cruise to a World Series victory in four games. But having some drama, both on-field and off, makes this pretty enjoyable, too.

I fondly remember Jeff Weaver. He was, after all, the only starting pitcher who the Tigers could really trust on the mound. He was the guy who many Tigers fans assumed the team would be built around. So I’m not surprised with all the hype surrounding his return to Detroit to pitch in the World Series. I suspect he’s still pretty popular with fans and he’ll receive a polite applause. Yeah, we’d like him to lose. But we’d like him to do well when he’s not playing the Tigers. He remembers his time with the Tigers as fondly. He told the Freep:

This is where it started for me, so I have nothing but good things to say,” Weaver said Saturday. “I always look forward to coming back here. The fans have been great to me. It will always be a spot in my heart.”

I remember him as being pretty firey. That, and we had his photo next to Eminem’s at my college paper because they looked like twins. [Hey, Weav..er...Eminem did the pregame music]. But now he’s got a few more years and some perspective after being a guy who didn’t make it with several MLB teams despite his talent.

In 2002, he was traded for Carlos Pena, Franklyn German and a player-to-be-named-later. That was sad. To me, that just furthered the disappointment because the Tigers were continuing to suck harder, and they were doing so without my favorite pitcher. What we didn’t know then, we know now. Two guys didn’t pan out, but the guy who did would eventually make it all worth while. Dave Dombrowski may not make trades fans like at the time, but he does make trades that work out well in the end. Still, it was a sad couple of years. In the meantime, I was glad that he would get a chance to try his pitching talent out on the big stage of New York, and in the playoffs. It didn’t really turn out positive for Weaver either at the time. But eventually, it all came around.

Maybe Todd Jones was confused when he made his comments. I was shocked when Jones was quoted as having “no love lost” for Weaver. Moreso that Jones would speak about an opponent like that than anything. The Weaver I remember doesn’t really seem like the type of guy Jones would have wanted to hang out with. But the “never panned out” in Detroit comment by Jones also caught me by surprised. I was really disappointed in the comments.

But how did Weaver deal with the situation Saturday?

“If that’s the case, I would figure that some of it got twisted. Todd Jones is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever run across.

“If he’s got unkind words for me, I don’t know what they’re stemming from. It’s the World Series. Maybe he’s just trying to get a little jab in here and there.”

So, to me anyway, Weaver is a guy you still want to root for. I’ll admit that when he made his first start for the Cardinals — in a nationally televised game — I watched and rooted for him. I rooted for him in his playoff starts, too.

Good luck tonight, Jeff. Not too much luck. But I hope you receive a warm reception and pitch to your ability. I just hope Kenny Rogers pitches to his, too!

St. Louis starter Anthony Reyes threw 91 pitches, about the same as Justin Verlander (96). The only problem is, Reyes went into the ninth inning before being relieved with a five run lead. Verlander limped — not literally! — out of the game with no outs in the sixth and a four run gap, which Jason Grilli turned into a six-run deficit. St. Louis went on to win the first game of the World Series, 7-2.

Reyes threw well, for sure. Helped by the Tigers batters, certainly, but he made his own fortune. Bilfer points out that only Magglio Ordonez even went to a three-ball count. Hopefully that whole impatience thing is only here for a game after a long layoff. He threw 67 strikes in 91 pitches and didn’t allow a baserunner from the first inning until Carlos Guillen singled in the seventh.

Verlander, eh, he was not so great. Not real bad. He didn’t get himself into a lot of trouble, but he wasn’t too good. Six hits. Two walks. 59 strikes on 96 pitches. That doesn’t sound like a guy with eight strikeouts, does it? And yet it was. Just kind of demonstrates how strange lines are sometimes, I guess.

Oh well. All good seven-game postseason winning streaks must come to and end, right?

Seems like there was some Tigers rust. I missed a chunk of the game, but the chunk I did get to see wasn’t very pretty. Defense. Hitting. Not pretty. Three errors. Brandon Inge had a few stumbles. Outside of Verlander and Grilli, the pitching seemed fine. But a lead Cardinals lead at that point doesn’t necessarily give us a great judge of much. It didn’t seem like Tigers baseball. That’s a refrain you hear a lot, “We didn’t play our type of baseball.” Maybe tonight, even if the Tigers did play their baseball, it wouldn’t have mattered. But hopefully for the next four-to-six, we see the team we’re used to.

The Albert Pujols homer, that stunk. I mean, he did his job. He hit it great. But I’d rather have seen him standing idle on first base at the time. I guess that’s a personal flavor.

Other than that, not much comes to mind. Long day. Crappy game. I’m sure I’ll be more useful tomorrow. Don’t get too upset over this one. Of course you want to win Game 1, and you want to win games in your own stadium, but everything can change in day. The only thing that’s changed is that St. Louis has a 1-0 series lead. Otherwise, the Tigers maintain all the advantages they had before. Just gotta keep playing games and see if they win out.