i'm definitely not a student of baseball and i definitely am a bandwagon ass-cat when it comes to the tigers. but i've following them with enthusiasm all season. i like their players and i like their manager and i like what i have been told which is that there is a lot of effort and a lot of selflessness on the team (kinda like the 04 pistons).

i've been watching more of their games of late and i see that their pitchers still seem to be pretty effective (though verlander seems less so). but as you say, their hitting seems to be getting worse. earlier in some other thread, darth pointed out to me that pitchers do get tired as the season wears on. does that happen to hitters too? i would have thought that as the season wears on the advantage would swing to the batter a little bit since a) the pitchers do get tired and b) batters have had more of an opportunity to see pitchers. Is this not the case?

i also wonder if it could be that the tigers players (many of whom are fairly young, right?) are starting to get a little bit tight, concerned, self-doubting... i'm less concerned with something like a 5 game losing streak than i am with a more sustained slide to 500 or sub 500 ball. since the 5 game losing streak i think they are only 3 and 3 (or something like that) and their games don't have that feeling (very vague and impressionistic i know) that they're gonna win it.

two nights ago, when monroe tripled to lead off the 9th and young, maglio, and guillen only needed to hit the ball into the outfield but couldn't really seemed to me to signal some sort of sea change.

maybe somebody who is more of a student of the game than i could offer some sense of what might be going on...i'd sure like them, even if they don't beat texas tomorrow, to win a few from the white sox who seem so smug in relation to the tigers (and i guess with reason since they've pretty much cleaned our clock all year).