Jim Leyland
The World Series will commence in a few days and Tiger fans will wonder why their team isn’t out on the field.
It’s not for a lack of starting pitching. The rotation was brilliant. Aside from one stinker by Anibal Sanchez, this was as dominant a performance by any group of hurlers in recent memory.
Consider this mind-boggling statistic: the Boston Red Sox did not score a single run during innings 1-5 in the first four games of this series. That’s right. Games 1, 2, 3, and 4; the Sox were blanked completely until at least the sixth frame.
You’d think that would have led to an easy four-game sweep by the Tigers. You’d be mistaken.
Baseball is a different type of game. Defense doesn’t translate to offense. In basketball or football, you can create turnovers, force missed opportunities, and it might lead directly to an easy basket or a short field. There are no such short cuts in baseball.
You Need Hits
You can get 1-2-3 innings ‘till the cows come home. It’s not going to help one iota when you go to pick up the lumber for your turn at the dish.
Why were runs so hard to come by? Wasn’t this one of the better offensive clubs throughout the year?
Let’s give the Boston arms some of that credit. The Sox boast a very solid quartet on the hill. But there is no Justin Verlander or Max Scherzer in that dugout. It’s more of a “keep you in the game” crew; not a “shut you down every night” crew. Or so we thought.
The Tigers found out very quickly in these playoffs what life is like without a fully functional Miguel Cabrera. He was rarely a factor, or at least a positive one. His late-game strikeout was disastrous in Game 3, and his baserunning/fielding/late-game double play was crushing in Game 5.
We will remember this season for many things, but to me, the overriding storyline will always be why the team’s most prized asset was cared for so recklessly in the last 30-40 days of the year.
The games carried little to no importance. The team’s need for Cabrera to be strong and able come playoff time mattered a great deal.
The decisions that were made by the organization reflected a completely disparate view of the situation, and frankly, one that many fans still have a very hard time understanding.
Fielder Lost His Mojo
Cabrera’s partner-in-crime, Prince Fielder, lost all of his mojo by season’s end. But it wasn’t just the well-chronicled lack of home runs or RBIs from Prince that was so troubling. It was his complete inability to even elevate the ball out of the infield.
Typically when an elite player falls into a slump, he makes plenty of outs, but in a variety of ways; some silly looking strikeouts, a few weak pop ups, and just to show how rough things have gotten, a handful of well-struck balls that seem to have GPS tracking directly to one of the eight glove men around the diamond.
This was an entirely different kind of fall from grace. There was no variety, no color, no story arc; just an endless slew of weak rollers to the right side of the infield, many on the very first offering he saw. With Cabrera hobbling, the Tigers needed Fielder to be ’79 Willie Stargell. Instead, they got some depressing version of a late-career Mo Vaughn.
That the Tigers came as close to an American League pennant as they did with Cabrera/Fielder providing so little is a testament to just how overpowering their starting pitching was.
And no Tigers farewell piece would be complete without the requisite critique of Jim Leyland. Now I am not in the “We lost the series because of the manager” camp. There were simply too many regular contributors struggling individually to lay it all at the manager’s feet. But I did find a number of the moves made during this final series to be questionable, to say the least.
Let’s start with this fact: the Tigers lost this series because of their offense. It is not debatable. In fact, throughout the playoff run, the pitching was superb, and the hitting was sporadic.
In such circumstances, you would think the main decision maker would turn over every rock in looking for a spark or solution. The fans could at least take some solace in knowing that the leader did absolutely everything in his power to get the offense going. Leyland never went to such lengths.
The Avila Factor
Brayan Pena was one of the bright spots in the Tigers’ lineup throughout the year, and he couldn’t sniff one start during the playoffs? Even with Alex Avila scuffling and getting dinged up on a nightly basis? I can’t wrap my head around that one. You saw John Farrell mix in David Ross behind the plate for his troops, and it worked out very nicely.
Yes, I understand Avila might be marginally better on defense. That in no way is a justifiable explanation for why a .227 hitter starts all 11 games while a switch-hitting .297 batter rides the pine.
The most maddening aspect of these playoffs from a managerial standpoint were the inexplicable defensive substitutions in games still very much in doubt.
In the clincher on Saturday night, Leyland removed Jhonny Peralta from the game in just the 6th inning with the Tigers clinging to a one-run lead. Had Peralta done anything of worth in that game? No. Was he still one of the most important Tigers in the lineup? Yes. Could you afford to take him out with so much time still left, and with Detroit’s offense as starved as they were for production? Absolutely not.
If Leyland was that fearful of Peralta spending one more minute in left field (where things were fairly uneventful for the most part), he could have simply moved Jhonny back to shortstop and inserted Don Kelly for Jose Iglesias.
In a post season defined by astronomical strikeout totals from the Tigers’ pitchers and the extreme difficulty with which the team tried to push across runs, logical thinking would suggest that small gains in the field would be sacrificed without a second thought in exchange for any possible advantage that might be brought to the offense. Leyland managed this pivotal game as if the opposite were true.
The handling of Drew Smyly also raised some eyebrows. The young lefty was quite possibly the most valuable man out of the bullpen this summer. He finished 6 and 0, tossing 76 innings, a healthy total for a southpaw reliever in today’s game.
Smyly Was Great
Yet, in three of his four appearances against Boston, Leyland summoned Smyly for one batter and one batter only. If you’re going to lose a game or series, you’d like to do it with your top guns firing the bullets. Smyly was integral all season long, yet was relegated to Paul Assenmacher status when the stakes were highest.
I will forever believe that the even-keeled Smyly could have wiggled his way out of the series-changing 8th inning in Game Two, given the opportunity. Instead, Leyland managed that frame schizophrenically, using a new pitcher for each hitter in a game his squad led comfortably by four runs.
Ultimately, it’s just another season without a title. It doesn’t mean it’s a complete failure; after all, only one of 30 teams in baseball gets to go home happy.
But the end is never easy, particularly with a group that possessed very real championship potential.
Justin Verlander had shaken off the 2013 cobwebs and looked like his old self again. Scherzer carried his dominant regular season right into the playoffs. Having a pair of aces firing on all cylinders in October is a rare thing. It’s wise to take full advantage when the opportunity presents itself.
Unfortunately, things don’t always go as planned.
The middle of the order lost its thunder, and along with it, the basic understanding of how to travel (or not to) from third base to home plate. Miguel ran when he should have stayed, Prince froze when he should have run, and the Tigers’ slickest fielder (Iglesias) recorded no outs when he could have had two.
T.S. Eliot once predicted that the world’s end will come, “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
A painfully fitting way to describe the sad, punchless conclusion to this 2013 Tigers’ campaign.
