I finally found baseball fan friends in Michigan! Today, four of us drove to Detroit to catch the battle for the American League Central. Sadly (for me), this battle did not involve the Twins, who are currently floundering in fourth place. But it was still a nice night for a sold out game, even if the home team didn’t win.
We missed the top of the first because of traffic. Now that Comerica sells out, the single lane off-ramp to the stadium isn’t enough to deal with the 20,000+ cars all trying to get to the game at the same time and we didn’t quite make it. Lucky for us, the design of Comerica is such that while standing in the Will Call line, we were able to see the main scoreboard. Thus, I still managed to score the first inning, even though I didn’t actually see either of the two Indians homeruns. Unfortunately for the Tigers fans amongst us, this meant that we sat down at our seats with the home team already down by two. Detroit had a few offensive rallies after that, but they never caught up to Cleveland, who had a few more rallies of their own.
The defensive play of the game goes to Jason Michaels of Cleveland, who stole a three run homer from Craig Monroe in the third by leaping up over the left field wall and making the catch. Had he not jumped quite so high, we’d be talking about a different ball game.
The most-overrated player award goes to Gary Sheffield, who went 0-for-4. On at least two occasions, if he had lived up to his $28 million dollar paycheck and gotten a hit, the Tigers would have scored another run. I find it ironic that his at-bat song is “This is Why I’m Hot” — it should be “Tell Me Why I’m Not.” While Sheffield’s run-in with Chris House back in 2005 resulted in me getting excellent seats in Fenway for two games, that doesn’t mean I like him.