I could talk about what an amazing game it was last night, but why when you can see the heart-break in just two and a half minutes? Detroit battled their asses off, Minnesota did too, and Randy Marsh missed a critical call. In the end, maybe the best team won, but I can’t ask for a better effort out of the Tigers. Detroit left it all out there. As Brandon Inge said after the game, “in no way, shape or form will I say we should’ve done more in this game. We did all we could.”
I want to address the season as a whole. The majority of sports writers and some Detroit fans are running around, tweeting, yelling, writing, etc., that the Tigers have completed one of the worst MLB collapses ever and choked away the AL Central.
The Tigers did not choke anything away this season. I repeat, they DID NOT CHOKE.
Sure, they lost a division lead. Yes, maybe, they could have closed it out. But they, 100 percent, did not “choke.”
Detroit wasn’t predicted to do anything this season. Your World Wide Leader in Sports, ESPN projected them to finish dead last in the AL Central. Sporting News picked them to finish last. Every analyst, but one, on the MLB Network projected them to finish in 2nd or worse (citation: great memory). I could cite a hundred other blogs and websites that have Detroit finishing near the bottom of the division.
As a die-hard fan I could see things that these so called “experts” couldn’t, but my pre-season projection still didn’t have the Tigers winning a division. Sadly, I had the Tigers finishing right where they did, just two games worse than they really were.
So the fact that the Tigers were in first place at all was an overachievement all along. They exceeded expectations and a team that exceeds expectations can’t choke.
It might be helpful to know what the word “choke” means in the world of sports. Choke has plenty of definitions. In fact, there are about 18 of them on Dictionary.com. Only two of them seem to stick out to me as being relevant to sports.
8. Sports. to grip (a bat, racket, or the like) farther than usual from the end of the handle; shorten one’s grip on (often fol. by up).
and
to become too tense or nervous to perform well: Our team began to choke up in the last inning.
The second one is obviously the one we’d look at here. Did the Tigers become too tense or nervous to perform well down the stretch? It’s doubtful that they fell into a nervous fit because they found themselves in first place. Also, they didn’t perform that poorly down the stretch. They finished their Sept/Oct schedule with a winning record of 17-16, which is just the 2nd time in the past decade that the Tigers have had a winning finish to their season. So to that, I’d say the Tigers finished strong, relative to what they’ve done in the past.
To me, choke has always meant that if a team should win, is about to win, and fails to win, they have choked. That pretty much cuts out the underdog in any equation, which the Tigers clearly were coming into the season. An underdog cannot choke.
Most will argue that the Tigers were not the underdog when they were up three games in the division with four games left in the regular season. The same people, using my definition of choke, will say they should have won at that point, were about to win, and failed to win it, and thus, choked. No other team in MLB history has lost a division when up three games with four to go (and to that I’d like to see just how many times a team has led by just three games with four to go because I’ve yet to see it).
But, still, not so fast. One of those games was against the Twins, who won (splitting the four game series with the Tigers), making it much easier to come back from the three game deficit. After that series, the Tigers were up just two with three to play. The Tigers had a home series against the White Sox and the Twins had a home series against the Royals.
The Twins had a chance to sweep the Royals, the bottom dwellers in the AL Central, while the Tigers were playing a White Sox team that tanked at the end despite enhancing their roster by adding instant ace Jake Peavy and Alex Rios. It didn’t help the Tigers’ cause that the White Sox approached the series like it was the playoffs because Ozzie Guillen wanted to stick it to Detroit (and he did by getting swept by the Twins two weeks before and then having his team try their asses off against Detroit — pushed Peavy’s start back, had them steal more bases against a statistically better defensive catcher, etc.). Meanwhile, the Royals didn’t give two poops about their series with the Twins and completely rolled over and played dead.
The Tigers were who they were this season. They left runners in scoring position all season long, they had great pitching, and timely plays in the games they did win (see Granderson saving a walk-off and a number of comebacks that put them amongst top five in all of baseball), but they were flat out just not a playoff team. The fact that they were in first place for five months was probably more due to the fact that they were playing in a suspect division, with no clear 1st place team. Detroit won more games in 2007 and finished eight, EIGHT!, games back of first place.
No clear first place team existed until the Twins decided to break away from the pack. Contrary to what some are saying, the Tigers didn’t choke this division away, the Twins won it. In their final 21 games, the Twins went 17-4, the best record in baseball over the last month and a winning percentage better than any team in baseball. The next best record in baseball was the Reds at 14-6 and the Yankees were third at 12-8.
You can’t blame the Tigers for being who they were and the way the Tigers went out last night, leaving everything out on the field at the end of a five hour marathon.
The Tigers didn’t choke, people…. they. just. got. beat.
Lastly, I’d like to say thanks to the Tigers for giving me a winning season to follow along. They had one hell of a season given the preseason expectations. And I’m proud as hell at the way they went out — with a damn good fight.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
