Damn Yankees

As the baseball season winds down, I'm beginning to make peace with a Tiger-less postseason, but a shred of hope remains. They are 5.5 games behind the Indians in the A.L. Central, but the way the Indians are playing I'm not counting on a division win. No, the realistic expectation is the wild card, but the front-runners in that position, by 4 games, are the dastardly Yankees.

The Yankees seemed dead in June, struggling to be a .500 club. They are on a roll now, ripping off seven straight, beating the teams they should be able to beat. I had much more hope after the Tigers took 3 of 4 from the Yankees a few weeks ago, capping it off with a 16-0 drubbing. Watching that game was almost as good as sex. But the Tigers dropped their next two games to the Royals!

The Yanks have a pretty soft schedule down the road. They have a big 3-game series against the Red Sox (hopefully the Red Sox will bury any chance of a Yankee division win) but then play no one but Blue Jays, Devil Rays, and Orioles. The Tigers have to play home-on-home series against the Indians and Twins. It doesn't look good.

The bugaboo this year has been injuries to the pitching staff, and this is just one of those things that happen in baseball. Last year they got through the season without major injuries, but this year, ow! Rogers, Robertson, Bonderman, all hurt at one time or another, and even the Triple-A call-ups got hurt. The bullpen was decimated by injuries to Rodney and Zumaya, and Todd Jones blew a few games in spectacular fashion (I'm sure I could go through the season and find games the Tigers led by a good margin and then lost that would make up those 4 games). But, what are you gonna do?

Miracles have happened, as recently as twenty years ago, when the Tigers were down to the Blue Jays by six with a week to go. The Blue Jays lost all six games while the Tigers did the opposite, culminating in a winner-take-all game on the last day of the seasons that the Tigers won 1-0 behind Frank Tanana. The problem this year is that the Tigers do not play the Yankees anymore, and relying on Tampa and Baltimore to do their dirty work seems futile.

Oh well. At least this October I won't be staying up all hours, watching games while chewing on my thumbnail, afraid to move position lest I jinx the team. Instead I will be rooting for the Indians, Red Sox or Angels to dispose of the villainous Bronx Bombers and then go on to win the Series (nothing against the NL clubs, but I usually root for the American League in the Series, unless of course it is the Yankees).