The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Phil Coke = Hot Mess.

So, our team just finished the dreaded West Coast road trip, and there was so much of a confusing mixture of good, bad, and ugly that we had to break it down here at April in the D. Read on!

The Good
-Miguel Cabrera, Brennan Boesch, and Jose Valverde kick ass. We're really really hoping/praying Brennan keeps this up all year long. Is that so much to ask?! As far as Cabrera goes, we would lose almost every game without him. That much is obvious. And Valverde, despite giving up his first run of the year, is 2-0 and 4/4 for saves. Plus he struck out Milton Bradley twice (and his dancing got a death stare). Do your thang, Papa.

-Max Scherzer, as Mario Impemba pointed out, has been on the mound for 4 out of 9 of the Tigers' wins. That stat right there says enough about how good he's been. IT'S THE EYES. Speaking of Mario...

-Mario and Rod take over Twitter. Nothing delights us more than logging on to Twitter and seeing Mario's tame, boring tweets juxtaposed with one of Rod's exclamation point-filled ones. It's like hearing them on TV, only with a behind-the-scenes feel.

-Scott Sizemore is hitting .375 with an OPS of .991. It's soooo great that he's on our team, we really need him!...Oh, wait. He's not. This needs to be fixed.

-Minnesota and Chicago are sucking even worse than we are. Gotta love it.

-Bromances. See our last post for more on this.

-And, finally, rumbling out of the West with a winning record. We feel like that hardly ever happens.

The Bad
-Staying up until 1:30 a.m. watching the boys slug it out every night was not so fun the next morning. Most of the time it was worth it, but other times? Not so much. The things we do for our Tigers...

-V-Mart's new stint on the disabled list was probably a good idea in the long run, but we desperately need him back. Not just for his accordion playing skills, but also for his bat, which we really need.

-Austin Jackson is slumping, that's no secret. He showed signs of life on Wednesday's game, but the Tigers need to get him hitting, since he really is our team's catalyst. Maybe Lloyd McClendon could wake up long enough to help him out...

-Kansas City and Cleveland are atop the AL Central. Kansas City and Cleveland. Is this real life??
The Ugly
-Phil Coke looked like an ace in his previous two starts. Tuesday night he looked like a white version of Dontrelle Willis, complete with the mania. We hope this is just a bump in the road, but that was seriously the ugliest game pitched all year.

-That pitch...only Justin Verlander would throw a ball that literally didn't exist in the baseball world. It was so confusing that Rod and Mario were talking about it for not just the rest of the game, but for days afterwards. Crazy.

-Our bullpen, save for Valverde and Joaquin Benoit, is erratic at best and cataclysmic at worst. It's good that Enrique Gonzalez is gone, but the Saucy Aussie needs to go as well.

-We're going to guess V-Mart getting nailed in the crotch by Valverde's pitch probably contributed to his groin injury. Yikes. Heal fast, Victor...


After a much need off-day, our boys are back in the D taking on the slumping White Sox and...the Mariners. We need these wins.