Tiger Beat: Tigers Show Up, Pirates Forfeit (Basically)

Tigers W 6-2
Tigers W 4-3
Tigers W 4-3, sweep Pirates, 33-29 overall, 2.5 GB of Twins
With pirate booty like this running around Pittsburgh, its no wonder the Pirates aren't focused on baseball. And although this sweep of the Pirates is awesome and yes we're now only two games behind the Twins again, the question is: "Should we really get excited about sweeping the Pirates?" I mean, shouldn't we assume we're going to sweep the Pirates? At 23-40, the Pirates are hardly formidable foes. If they were any worse, you would actually expect them to have wooden legs and hooks instead of hands... It took a walk off home run in the tenth on Saturday (by Guillen, who is batting just .206 at home this season but .326 away... that doesn't make sense...) and a 3-run blast in the 8th yesterday by Cabrera ( it was his MLB leading 19th homer of the season) just to get by. Shouldn't we be smoking these guys? Yes we've been slumping a bit... We just lost two series against the White Sox and Royals, losing 2 out of 3 to each, so maybe this is just the start of a streak, but it didn't really inspire me. And guess what else? It wasn't even our starting pitchers' fault! They pitched well! (6 runs in three games over 22 innings, Ill take it) It's our bats. They've gone completely dead. Cabrera went 2-12 in the series and the team went 6 for 30 with runners in scoring position! Lets go dudes! Except for my boy Boesch that is. It seems like every time he steps up to the plate, hes knocking guys in. Yeah he slumped there for a week or two, but he's back, and its good to see him. Boesch is tied for second on the team in HRs and is third for RBIs behind Mags and Cabrera (However, Mags has 50 more plate appearances and Cabrera has 75!) His slugging percentage is 20 points lower than Cabreras (still a monstrous .625) but his batting average is 15 points higher. The dude is proving to be invaluable.

So in order to get our guys as pumped up as Boesch and myself, I've included the speech about baseball from the end of Field of Dreams below. If you can watch this and not want to go out and hit some line drives for RBI's, then I don't really want to be your friend, and neither does Brennan Boesch. (We couldn't afford the license for the Jimmy EJ [that's what James Earl Jones likes to be called... trust me] clip, so we got this guy who went to the Field of Dreams house instead... He's got a deep voice too though so...)