Tiger Geist

Its an exciting feeling at the tigergeist household. Detroit makes its first trip to San Francisco… ever. (I think). Sure they visit Oakland every year.. but thats different. Oakland is way over there… across that bridge thingie. Sure the stadiums are only about..15 miles apart. But this morning has a different feel to it. The wife & I have been listening to a steady diet of White Stripes and the MC5 this morning; tomorrow we’ll pull out a little Iggy & the Stooges (Sorry Ted Nugent… you’re the motor city madman but a giant douche so you get no love). To top it off, my father is coming out to the city for work, and we’re sneaking him out to tuesday and wednesday’s game.

Its a good time for a road trip.. Detroit is hot and the NL West is not. However, they run into some stiff pitching competition… tonight is Tim Lincecum. He’s 9-1, strikes out a lot, has a funky delivery… and he’s the MAN around here. With SF’s weak team, they don’t advertise Giants games. They advertise TIM LINCECUM games. Check out craigslist in the bay area, and thats how all the tickets are listed. Its almost a Mark Fidrych, without the sesame street references. So if Justin Verlander wants to be an elite pitcher, tonight’s his night to outshine the NL’s best young pitcher.

For the series, I see a hard-fought, low scoring one. SF doesn’t score a lot of runs, but they have some excellent pitching, both starters and relievers***. I also LOVE national league games.. the strategy behind the double switches, run generators (bunts, hit and run, etc) makes the game more interesting. Something that helps detroit is they’ve started their winning streak by playing a lot of different players, so i imagine nearly the entire roster will get significant innings this week. Jeff Larish might see a start at first against a right hander even… the horror!!

For the team, its exciting to see how well they’re playing. Everyone seems to be making contributions — Thames apparently enjoys making me look bad and continues to crush the ball; Clevelen is hitting mediocre but making up for it with excellent defense; Guillen is settling in at third; Cabrera is settling in while in the batter’s box; Inge is settling in behind the plate; the pitchers are learning how to throw strikes again.

In the long run, a split of this road trip would keep them at 5 games under .500, and keep them in excellent position to get to .500 by the all star break. If that happens, it’ll be an exciting August.

*** Wednesday Detroit goes up against Barry Zito. They might score 15 runs against him.

Another note: I wasn’t going to tonight’s game at first, but I realized I couldn’t miss Verlander and Lincecum, both capable of tossing a no-no. Its almost the anniversary of Justin’s no-hitter game… a game where a little part of me dies inside every time I think about it. Read about it here.