Windsor: Tigers are frustrating, but we can't look away
By now, it's easy to see the Tigers are not the team that started 11-2. But they also aren't the team that lost eight straight this month.
They are worse.
If you care about them anyway — because .500 baseball gets you nothing but frustration. They don't win enough to truly enjoy them, and they don't lose enough to move on with the rest of your summer.
So you keep coming back, only to watch a .159-hitting, bottom-of-the-order second baseman rip a hanging slider in the 10th inning for a three-run, tie-busting triple Thursday at Comerica Park. Off a reliever you wanted gone a season ago.
Thanks, Joba Chamberlain.
That's what you want to say to him, isn't it?
You want to flip off the television or turn off the radio and step out into the rest of your Thursday afternoon. But you can't and — against your better judgment — you hang around for the bottom of the 10th.
Because, you know, it's baseball.
But it only gets worse.
When Miguel Cabrera gets intentionally walked to load the bases and all the Tigers need is a measly hit to win, that's when you realize Victor Martinez isn't in the on-deck circle.
He's sitting on the bench. Martinez singled with two outs in the ninth, and manager Brad Ausmus pulled him for pinch-runner Josh Wilson in case Yoenis Cespedes doubled.
Cespedes popped out. Wilson jogged back to the dugout.
Wilson returned to the spotlight an inning later, now batting in Martinez's spot with a chance to win the game.
He struck out.
Ouch!
Hey, the team feels it, too. You could hear it after the latest demoralizing loss, 8-7, to the middling Chicago White Sox.
First in the pointed tone of Ausmus' postgame news conference — yanking Martinez for Wilson wasn't the only move that backfired, and then in the tone of some of the players.
"Let's have this conversation at the end of September and we'll see what happens," Chamberlain said after he was asked about the team's inconsistency.
Fair enough. It is a 162-game season.
Ian Kinsler showed frustration as well. When told that fans can't figure out the team's uneven performance, he said: "They're entitled to their opinion. If they want to root for someone else they think is more consistent, that is fine. You know we need as many as we can get."
Surely Kinsler wishes he phrased that a little differently. But his expression is a result of the team's play and reaction to its results.
Look, it wasn't just the call to pinch-run for Martinez that decided the game. Rajai Davis took an awkward angle on a ball to centerfield that led to two runs. The Tigers left 12 runners on base. And Kinsler couldn't lay down a crucial bunt in the sixth.
They had chances. They couldn't grab them.
It has been the story of the season.
Bruce Rondon returns to give a boost to the bullpen — he reached 101 m.p.h. and struck out the only two batters he faced. But Justin Verlander missed a start the day before.
Martinez gives a jolt to the lineup, but he isn't available with the bases loaded and the game on the line.
Ausmus figured the game would either be won or lost by then. The odds beat him. But, hey, managers gamble and lose all the time.
The issue here is that the team lacks something consistently dynamic.
Win two. Lose four. Win three. Lose two.
At some point, this percentage has to change.
Or the tone will get worse.
From everywhere.
http://www.freep.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2015/06/25/detroit-tigers-record/29310315/