Detroit extends winning streak; careful with praise
Minus Fernando Rodney, a pretty solid all around game by Detroit today… on the road and against a good team.
About that Rodney… the ball tossing incident after the game didn’t make much sense. Rodney says it was nothing. Fine.. but really dumb. About his performance… i’m going to chalk it up to over-use. Two games in Cleveland, plus another warm-up for a pitcher who needs a lot of time to warm up, followed by a close game in Tampa. That’s the danger of running your closer out nearly every game in a series against a bad team. This was probably a decent night to have Lyon close out the game; they’ve probably lost Rodney for the rest of the series.
Back to what I mentioned yesterday… Leyland has to keep his bullpen rested for the stretch run. The team doesn’t score enough runs to expect that anything but a close game in the playoffs. The counter obviously is Detroit needs to make the playoffs before they need to worry about the bullpen situation. But Leyland has to be smarter in his use of Rodney (and Seay) — there are only two off days between now and the last game on October 4th.
Interesting note: Watching the ninth on the iphone mlb app (which has been updated again and now suddenly has video issues, go figure), i had to listen to the Tampa Bay announcers. With Pena up to bat, Rodney was ahead 1-2 when he and Avila (recently inserted into the game) couldn’t agree on their signs, and Avila ran out to the mound. The color commentator mentioned that it was a count that Rodney could throw either pitch… but now that they met on the mound, Pena probably would sit on the fastball so they couldn’t throw it (stating that with so much time to think, Pena wouldn’t be fooled by the fastball, where he might have been lost if they didn’t run into sign problems). Rodney throws a fastball, and Pean singles in a run. Smart guy.
Verlander was outstanding. They brought up some stats during the game about the potential AL Cy-Young candidates. Here’s my plea: Please lets not talk about this Cy-Young thing until after the season. Same goes for rookie of the year, MVP, etc etc. There’s been some weird jinx’ing going on in Detroit lately. MVP talk for Miguel Cabrera was quickly met with Cabrera going 0-11 in his next three games (August 28 – 30). An article describing Ryan Perry’s late inning role and statistics since his re-call was met with Perry giving up three earned runs the next day. So… you’ve been warned. Let’s enjoy this month and worry about the awards later.