Baseball is back, and so are we! As the regular season has finally gotten underway, the three of us think it's high time to resume writing on this blog regularly. With the added stress of school, work, family, and other stressors, we haven't gotten to see as much baseball as we would like. That is about to change.
After the first week of baseball, our boys are 4-3. Not great, you say? We beg to differ. This season we have made a solemn vow--we are NOT gonna let the haterz get us down. How quickly people forget what happened last season! A shitty first 2/3rds of the season and almost everyone was checking out, and then BOOM! Our Tigers were World Series bound. So even if we DON'T do as well in April (in the D! [!!!!!]) as everyone thinks we should, who the hell cares? It's one month! That being said, 4-3 ain't all that bad, folks, and we'll tell ya why.
This top 5 (Austin Jackson, Torii Hunter, Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, Victor Martinez) is the best we've ever seen on our team. When they're on, they're on, and it has been evidenced very early in the season that they can be hard--if not impossible--to stop. Save for V-Mart, who we are expecting to take a little more time to get going (he HAS been gone for a year) the Fab Five have already made their mark.
Ajax is the catalyst for this group, and whenever he gets on base their is a high likelihood that the Tigers will score. Torii has been extremely impressive in his first week as a Tiger, hitting .424 and scoring 4 runs. While we obviously don't expect him to keep up with that BA number, we do think he is going to fit in quite nicely in the D. And don't even get us started on his bromance with Austin!
And then there's our big boys, the dynamic duo of Miguel & Prince. If we're perfectly honest here, we think both have the potential to win an MVP award. Seriously. The potential of their numbers has grown exponentially thanks to V-Mart's intimidating presence. In our minds, Triple Crown King Miguel has a great shot a repeating by simply coming close to the numbers he did last year. We're not saying he will win the Triple Crown again, but we are saying he should be plenty of folks' pre-season pick for MVP.
As far as starting pitching go, we're willing to overlook a few bumps in April! All these group of fine (and we mean fine) gentlemen need are a few outings under their belts and they can get back to kicking ass and taking names like they did in the postseason. Why, look at Anibal Sanchez! His outing today against the better-than-average Toronto Blue Jay offense was outstanding. We predict by May/June JV & Co. will be utterly dominant.
And then we come to our bullpen.
This, as we have said before, is clearly going to be a trouble spot--our only real trouble spot, hopefully--this year. While we are confident in Drew Smyly, Al Alburquerque, Joaquin Benoit and Octavio Dotel, we honestly have not a clue what is to happen with our closing spot. True, the club did sign Jose Valverde, but we wouldn't call ourselves (or the rest of the Tigers fanbase) big fans of that move. Hopefully the team can figure out this issue sooner rather than later, or it could end up costing us more than a few games.
So for now, before people get too caught up in the stress and worry of will-the-or-won't-they-be-good-enough-to-make-the-playoffs-gahhh-help!!, relax and enjoy this lovely season of April in the D. IOnce again, it's going to be a fun and exciting year. We just know it.
PS-Congrats to Alex Avila and his wife on the birth of their first child!!!!! We remember when Alex was just a yougin' making his first start in the bigs....*sniff sniff*
