Tigers’ rotation offers tall task for Giants,
Giants may have problems if expecting Series comeback
SAN FRANCIS CO Memo to the San Francisco Giants: Justin Verlander will pitch Game 5 of the World Series. You were in Cincinnati finishing off the first of your two win-three-or-gohome postseason comebacks, so you might not have noticed what the Detroit Tigers ace was doing across San Francisco Bay from your home park.
So, don’t count on winning this World Series after falling behind 3-1 as you did in the National League Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Verlander pitched a four-hit shutout with 11 strikeouts that night in Oakland, a closeout game that ended the A’s wild ride into the postseason. Now, he’ll pitch Game 1 Wednesday in San Francisco against a team that’s saved its thrills for the playoffs.
The Giants couldn’t come into the Series any hotter, having outscored St. Louis 20-1 over the final three games. San Francisco entered the NLCS on a similar high after winning the last three games of its NL Division Series vs. the Cincinnati Reds.
Still, until the Tigers prove otherwise, playing beats sitting. Recent history is clear on that and Detroit hasn’t played since completing their ALCS sweep of the Yankees last Thursday.
So is manager Jim Leyland, whose team sat for a week waiting to play St. Louis in the 2006 World Series.
Those Tigers were remarkably sloppy against the Cardinals, committing eight errors in the five-game loss. Four of the errors were by pitchers, two by Verlander. The total damage was that eight of St. Louis’ 22 runs were unearned.
Sharpness can disappear in all aspects of the game, especially for hitters who can’t duplicate game conditions in batting practice. The 2006 Tigers hit .199 in their World Series.
The next year, the Colorado Rockies hit .218 while being swept by the Boston Red Sox after a nine-day wait. That was a Rockies team that had won 21 of 22 games before its layoff.
“I think you can get mentally rusty, too,” Leyland says. “You just had an emotional win like we had and you really got some adrenaline going. And then you sit around for five or six days, a week, that’s pretty tough. So I think it’s a combination of mental exhaustion as well as physical exhaustion and I think you lose that sharpness.”
So, the Tigers flew in minor leaguers from their instructional league team in Florida just so the hitters could face real pitching and the pitchers could throw to real hitters.
“We’re definitely trying something different this time around,” Leyland says. “I don’t know if it will work, but we’re trying something.”
That’s where Verlander can be the equalizer.
If he can slow down the Giants in Game 1, where he’ll likely face a revitalized Barry Zito, the Tigers have a chance to get reacquainted with game conditions and maybe even win a road game in the process.
The Detroit pitching — Verlander, Doug Fister, Anibal Sanchez and Max Scherzer — will face a schizophrenic Giants offense that needs to string together baserunners to score. They were last in baseball in home runs.
San Francisco is at its best offensively when it plays aggressively, a tactic that could work against a Detroit defense that’s not overly mobile with the exception of center fielder Austin Jackson.
The Giants came out aggressively Monday against a St. Louis team reeling after two decisive losses. After Angel Pagan led off the bottom of the first with a single, he went to third on a hit-and-run single by Marco Scutaro and scored on Pablo Sandoval’s tapper to the right of the mound. Pagan’s quick break off third base made Cardinals starter Kyle Lohse think better about throwing home.
The Cardinals never recovered, looking increasingly shaky in the field in the five-run third that put the game out of reach of a team that had finally run out of magic. That five-run inning was the biggest of the series for the Giants, who also had four four-run innings against St. Louis. That’s 21 of their 33 runs in the series.
Yet, the fourth through eighth hitters in the San Francisco batting order — that’s starting with NL MVP favorite Buster Posey — entered Game 7 a composite 18-for-101. Most of them contributed to Monday’s rout and fi- nally got over .200 as a group, but Posey is just 8-for-45 this postseason.
Still, he is Buster Posey. He is the best player in the San Francisco lineup. And he’ll have the added incentive of matching credentials with AL MVP favorite Miguel Cabrera.
And there’s 2011 AL MVP and Cy Young Award winner in Verlander, plus two-time NL Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum, who’s in line for a Game 2 start.
That’s one advantage the layoff gives Detroit – lining up its rotation.
Ryan Vogelsong and Matt Cain — the Giants’ best pitchers this postseason — were needed for the final two games of the NLCS so they won’t be available until Games 3 and 4.
Can the Giants make up the shortfall? That may be their biggest challenge yet.