There is some good news that came out of this weekend.  If your goal is still to win the AL Central (mine is), you got the best case scenario over in Chicago with the Twins in town.  The Twins took two of three so even though the Tigers dropped two of three to Indians, the Tigers only lost a half game in the standings.

Curtis Granderson hit his first homerun since July 29th today to lead off the game.  He’s now only hit two homeruns since June 23rd so he’s been in a pretty extended slump.  Granderson also saw his batting average bottom out at .259 yesterday before getting a little pop today with two hits.  This is a guy who looked like he was going to score a 100 runs easy.  Now it looks like he might not even get to 85.

Is it irony that the Tigers won today and Neifi Perez was out of the lineup.  Pat Caputo piped in on Friday about how Omar Infante was getting the shaft and while he’s probably a few days too late, at least he’s mentioning it.  Perez is four for twenty three and all four hits have been singles.  He’s scored one run and drove in one.  The only reason he won’t cost us many games is, there’s not that many games left for him to play in.  Hopefully Leyland will wake up to this and we’ll see more Infante going forward.

That’s five pretty good starts in a row for Kenny Rogers.  I think we can put his whole second half jinx to rest.

The Tigers won their 82nd game today, so they’ve now guaranteed themselves a winning season.  The last time that happened was 13 years ago back in 1993.  Cecil Fielder was still hitting homeruns, Sparky Anderson was still the coach and Kirk Gibson, Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker all still played for the team.  I see only two players on that team that are still active.  Chris Gomez has bounced around and he’s now playing for the Orioles and then David Wells is probably in his final season with the Red Sox.

The Tigers have tomorrow off.  And then in a best case scenario, we’ll be seeing a preview of the ALCS when the Tigers travel to Yankee Stadium to take on the Bronx Bombers.  It looks like Andrew Miller is going to get called up for the trip so that’ll be quite an interesting trial by fire.  The Yankees are only three back in the loss column from the Tigers for the best record in baseball.

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