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Weekly Beef — Watching the Tigers’ ship sink

By: Jacob Carpenter Posted: 09/03/08 8:13pm

Call me a fair-weather baseball fan (guilty as charged), but somewhere in the past month, I lost interest in the Detroit Tigers.

If there’s anything I learned from baseball in the past few years, it’s that there’s nothing quite like late summer evenings watching a divisional race wind down with your hometown team fighting for a playoff spot.

Now, I’m learning how little I care about a team 10 games below .500 fighting to secure third place with the Cleveland Indians.

Outside of Chicago and Minneapolis, nobody is happy with the Tigers’ performance this year. We are seeing the effects of putting a greater priority on hitting rather than pitching (trading steady, if not unspectacular, pitcher Jair Jurrjens for pop-less Edgar Renteria comes to mind).

Maybe this beef is more with myself for giving up and not having true Tiger stripes, but it also has to do with a team that came in with expectations that could fill Comerica Park. They were supposed to approach 1,000 runs scored, win the AL Central in a runaway and have solid pitching throughout.

Instead, they need to average 13 runs per game the rest of the year to reach 1,000 runs, need a time machine to go back about one month to have an outside shot at a divisional title and need Nate Robertson and Justin Verlander to remember what it was like to pitch in 2007 to come remotely close to a decent starting lineup.

Changes have to be on the horizon for the Tigers. General Manager Dave Dombrowski won’t idly stand by and watch this sinking ship go down without trying to plug holes and bail out water.

To take a line from the great Lawrence Peter Berra, baseball is 90 percent pitching. The other half is hitting. Take note, Dombrowski.

Maybe this time next year the hot dogs will taste a little crisper, the crack of the bat will sound a little sweeter and the outfield grass will be a little greener as the Tigers march toward October.

Until then, I’ll stand and watch as the bandwagon I just jumped off of rides into the sunset.

Maybe next year.

The Huddle

Sports reporter Jacob Carpenter examines sports issues from the past and present.

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