Just landed in Boston for the start of a three game series here against the Red Sox. Should be an interesting series. The Sox have to be gassed with all of the travel, including the opening series in Japan, they have endured. It is also their home opener tomorrow which carries extra stress. Here is hoping the Tigers can take advantage of a tired Boston team and play well at Fenway. Boston didn't look too good against the Jays.
The road may be just what the Tigers need. Hopefully starting tomorrow afternoon, the bats come alive and we can forget about this start. The plane ride here was pretty normal. No sign that anyone is about to jump off a cliff. Here's hoping Kenny can get the ball rolling for the Tigs tomorrow.
I think this awful start for the Tigers is as clear a statement as any that Dave Dombrowski really hurt his team trading for Miguel Cabrera, and that's because it prevented him from upgrading the pitching staff.
Say what you will about the past of Dontrelle Willis, but he is just not a good pitcher anymore. There has been a steady decline in all of his peripherals since 2005, especially in WHIP. His walk rate has gone up, and his strikeout rate has gone down.
The Tigers' offense was second-best in the AL last year. Dombrowski should have taken Maybin and some of the other players he sent to Florida, and called up Billy Beane in Oakland and tried to work out a deal for Dan Haren. Or he could have called Andy MacPhail in Baltimore to see what it'd take to get Erik Bedard.
Justin Verlander is the only part of the Tigers' rotation they can reasonably rely on. They have no one in the bullpen you really feel comfortable with.
Teams with shaky pitching staffs rarely even make the playoffs, let alone win a series. This is the bed Dombrowski has made for his team and now they must lie in it.
True, he pulled a "yankee" giving away the farm team for high priced FA's hitters.
While Haren or Bydard would have been wise, our pitching hasnt been the surprise so far. Its been shaky at times, but thats what everyone was worried about. The talk was the hitting would bail out any toubled pitching, but the hittings just not there yet.
The key right now is if Kenny Rogers can stay healthy all year. Tigers need him to be if they are thinking play-offs, which obviosly they are.
My car mechanic once told me years ago: "If it aint broke, don't tinker with it. If she runs okay, and you try to make it run even better, you almost always screw everything up".
All these off season changes appear to have dissolved team chemistry, and in doing so, "screwed things up".
Mario Impemba is in his seventh season as play-by-play announcer on FSN Detroit’s Emmy-winning Tigers coverage.
In addition to Tigers duties, he has done play-by-play on FSN's coverage of MHSAA football and basketball championship games, as well as CCHA hockey and college basketball. In the off-season, he is the radio and television voice of Oakland University Golden Grizzlies basketball.
Before joining the FSN broadcast team, he spent the previous seven seasons as the radio voice of the then-Anaheim Angels and served as a fill-in TV play-by-play announcer during his final three years in Anaheim.
Check out more about the craft of baseball broadcasting at his website, thesoundofbas eball.com.
