This Tigers team has been the antithesis of the myth that Momentum Matters. The previous game they nearly lost in the 9th, letting the Sox tie it up before Miguel Cabrera delivered the walkoff hit. They got shut out the game before that, also lost the game before THAT, and then won the 2 games before that, scoring 3 runs and 10 runs. Under the microscope, one game has little in common with the next. Ausmus himself commented recently on what a rollercoaster this season has been.
It has been a weird season. With both Verlander and Cabrera recovering from surgeries in the offseason, neither could do their normal physical prep for the regular season. Verlander especially does a lot of strength building in the offseason. I'm more ready to attribute the drop in his fastball to that than to his career falling off the cliff. Even crazier, the Tigers' 2nd best hitter (after Victor Martinez, who's been NUTS) is... J.D. Martinez? Yup, he's hitting 8 points higher than Miguel, has an OPS of .928 to Miguel's .888, and he has the same number of homers despite Miguel getting 168 more ABs. J.D. might be the single weirdest thing about this weird season.
Joe Nathan went from being pretty good last year to pretty bad. That's kind of weird, although it feels like the Tigers' closer spot has been hexed since... I can't remember when. Mike Henneman maybe (dude had a seriously cleft chin, stuff of legends). Anyway, Nathan's ERA climbed 3.59 points from last year (it's like Nathan's ERA got hungry and ate Joba Chamberlain's ERA), and his WHIP is the highest it's ever been since the Giants tried him out as a starter at the beginning of his career. This is also pretty crazy. Nathan was a Tiger killer with the Twins and Rangers, and now he's a Tiger killer with the Tigers.
Rajai Davis is crazy. He's basically a platoon player who steals bases and does little else, except he's kind of hit for average this year and matched a career high in HR. He's 33 and this is only the 3rd time in his career that he's gone over 400 ABs. He could very well finish with career highs in R & RBI as well, and he's the Tiger's 6th best hitter, despite normally batting 9th.
This season has been crazy. The Tigers have swept Baltimore & Boston back-to-back on the road, then in turn got swept by Cleveland in Cleveland and lost 3 out of 4 to Texas at home. The first half featured big winning streaks and losing streaks, the second half has been mostly a couple here, a couple there. There was a 10th inning loss & a 19th inning loss in back-to-back games in Toronto. If you tried to get a feel for this team by charting wins and losses, you'd go nuts. So yeah, it's been a weird, wild & crazy season...
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Speaking of crazy, ESPN just suspended Bill Simmons for 3 WEEKS!!! for using strong language while being critical of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Reportedly he can't even use facebook or twitter during his suspension. This seemed a bit hypocritical of ESPN, since this is hardly the first time Simmons has dropped an eff bomb on his podcast, and uncensored curse words appear from time to time in articles on the Grantland website (The This is Katie F---ing Ledecky article comes to mind).
The Big Lead had a conspiracy theory take on the suspension that unwinds this particular knot - that Simmons wasn't suspended for language or calling Goodell a liar, but for calling out his network. Apparently this has some merit, and it makes more sense than saying he's out for using the "f word". He challenged somebody to punish him for calling Goddell out, saying, "Please, call me and say I’m in trouble. I dare you."
This was the big no-no, but will it be the one that makes Simmons finally break from ESPN? He's been suspended twice before for making negative comments about ESPN or saying things publicly, but those were both twitter-only bans. Well, since ESPN is the best thing to happen to the Sports Guy, my guess is he sticks and writes a wry "well that was dumb of me" column, since leaving ESPN would lose him his platform to appear on TV, radio, online, and to produce documentaries. Putting all of that in jeopardy was pretty dumb.
At the same time, the way ESPN chose to punish this insubordination was so over the top that people can't help but come to the conclusion that the network is trying to back up and protect the NFL commissioner. Whether that's true or not, Goodell is poison right now and this issue hits too close. Drew Brees and other Saints players have pointed out the double standards of his punishment of Saints' HC Sean Payton for Bounty-gate and his own excuses in the Ray Rice situation. Goodell's press conference was an unmitigated disaster in which he said a lot of words with no substance behind them. John Oliver nailed him better than anybody, so I'll let him take over:
The Washington Post asked the question did Goodell actually lie, or simply "misinform and misdirect"? And is there really a difference? Dress it up all you like, a lie is a lie. A misdirection or an intent to mislead is a lie. An evasion of the truth is a lie. Well, when directly asked about what he knew before the 2nd Ray Rice video was release, Goodell claimed ambiguity, that Rice was ambiguous about what had happened in the elevator. Was Goodell lying? Apparently yes. Was Simmons guilty of a "vicious, personal attack" on Goodell, as ESPN claims? Yes, but that's what he does ALL THE TIME! And he happened to be right about it.
ESPN suspending Simmons muddies the waters, and the network is unintentionally (or intentionally) allying itself with the NFL against Roger Goodell's critics, which include one Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Is ESPN more in bed with the NFL than they claim to be? Or is this merely a company chastising one of its employees for insubordination? Since previous instances of "back talk" were punished with a week-long twitter ban, there seems to be more at work here.
Put simply, Goodell's actions demand outrage. His standards for acceptable behavior are flexible, depending on who is involved, and his allotment of punishments appears equally arbitrary. He clearly lied about his knowledge of the Ray Rice incident. He had Janay Rice give her own account in a room full of men, with her abuser AND her abuser's employer in the room. Then he gave a press conference that did nothing to explain what he (and the NFL) would actually change, and was more like an athlete's apology presser than anything else, except he didn't really own up to anything.
Simmons expressed his outrage in a venue created for him to express outrage, among other things, and got suspended for it. So was his daring ESPN to punish him some kind of petulant "big-timing" on the part of the Sports Guy? Or was he trying to call attention to a state of hypocrisy in ESPN?
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