Today is The Day!

The proverbial "wire"...

157 down, 5 to go.

What an awesome year this has been to be a Tigers' fan! According to my handy, dandy calendar the Tigers have been in first place since the end of April and have owned it all by themselves since May.

This is not a "blow your doors off" type of team. As we sit mid-way through the "most important series since 1987" I want to look at what we have in front of us.

Pitching: according to baseball-reference.com the team ERA for the Tigers is 4.27. They give up an average of 4.54 runs per game according to my numbers. I have mentioned this on a couple of the BYB game threads, but the Tigers have allowed 2 runs or less in 26% (41) of their games so far this year! In fact, so far this year they have allowed only 713 runs. The only team in the American League who is better is the Boston Red Sox (709). The Tigers hold their opponents to few runs consistently (with 9 shutouts so far).

The other piece of that puzzle is the defense. Again the Tigers have made huge improvements this year. Looking at Fangraphs you can see that in 2009 the Tigers are rated 3rd best team in Major League Baseball. In 2008 they were 26th! This was the drum I was beating last year: the pitchers couldn't trust the defense to make outs, so the starters had to make extra outs too often. This gave more and more opportunities to the opponents to score runs. This year that is not true at all. It simply makes the great starting pitchers and relievers more effective.

I give all of the credit on this to Dave Dombrowski. In 2008 he tried to win with another "murderers row". He traded off defense for runs. It didn't work at all. The Tigers scores lots of runs, but allowed so many more that they finished last in the AL Central. DD took his lumps and fixed it. He dumped Renteria and got Adam Everett. He got Gerald Laird, who is simply amazing on defense. He put Inge back at 3rd. Add that to the always awesome Placido Polanco and the ever improving Miguel Cabrera at 1st and we have a very solid infield making tons of amazing plays all year. The outfield is a little more porous. Magglio is not a fast as he used to be, so Clete Thomas has had lots of defensive playing time in RF. Guillen has settled in at LH now that he is no longer hurt. Granderson is not as purely awesome as he has been, but he is still an outstanding CF.

As far as scoring... well, as I said above- Dombrowski has now set up a lower scoring but better fielding team. So the Tigers have scored 722 runs this season so far. This is definitely worse than anyone expected from them, but it has been consistent. We can look at injuries and off years and age and all sorts of issues that effect hitting a baseball to the right spot consistently, but after 157 games we know what we have. The Tigers have scored 2 runs or less in 45 games (29%). This puts them right in the middle of the pack for runs (15th). Compare this to last year when they scored 821 (4th).

The important thing is that right now, as I wrap up my lunch break, they are in 1st place on September 30th. They have a 2 game lead over the Twins with 5 games left to play. They are a good team in a very weak division. They have every reason to be confident that they will win the AL Central, the pitching is there and the defense is there. They need to score some more runs, just one run more than their opponents for the last 5 games.