Sat out in the RF Grandstand seats yesterday. Took the whole family plus my 20 yr old daughter's boy friend - who had never been to professional baseball game. He's football guy - and had lots of questions about how far everything was from each other - like the bases are 90 feet apart - so that means 30 yrd sprints for baserunners and the all the way around the bags is the length of a football field from the back of each end zone to end zone. I'm not sure if he came away impressed with baseball or not - but I didn't come away impressed with ... nevermind...
The Chinese New Year pregame party was... bizarre. It was 15 minutes - and it felt like it went on for two hours with same song just blaring in our ears. My kids wanted to see a battle between the two different Tae Chi clans - but it didn't happen. I'm sure the Chinese in attendance appreciated Paws getting into the Tae Chi act. The best part was seeing Mags trying to warm up and do his sprints around the dragon dance guys.
OK the game - Bonderman was terrific. He was completely in command against a Tribe lineup that includes several tough LH sticks, so that was great to see. He ran into some trouble with the 3-5 in the 4th, but limited the damage and finished strong. Velocity was good, and changing speeds produced several bad swings. Couldn't have asked for anything better from him for a first start of a new season.
The bullpen set up nicely behind him, and Leyland pulled all the right strings. Having three lefties in the pen is really going to be huge against teams like the Yankees and Twins this year. Perry has taken his game to another level so far. This pen has a chance to be a mid70s% pen at protecting leads like it was in 2006.
Avila did a nice job blocking pitches and calling the game. He had a good all around game reaching base three times as well.
Mags aggressively turning on fastballs again is a great sight to see.
We had two Inge Haters sitting in front of us that were silenced by his sterling two way performance (three times reaching base and his typical game changing defense). One of the main differnces between the Tigers and the Tribe is - the Tigers have a 3b that turns hits into outs and the Tribe has a 3b that turns outs into hits.
Sizemore had three positive ABs (only got a Sac Fly RBI to show for it) and was solid in the field again. Jackson stung the ball a couple times early in the game, but came away with an 0-5 with 2 Ks. Jackson is now at 1 W - 8 Ks for the season. It won't surprise me if Sizemore eventually takes the lead off slot this year with Jackson moving down in the lineup. Jackson is showing tremendous raw hitting talent - so far this year (very impressed with ability to hit to the opp field gap) - but he's not really a contact hitter - and his his W to K ratio is going to have to improve to stay in the lead off position. No surprise Sizemore is showing more htting competency and bat control - though the hits are not falling for him yet.
35K for the 2nd game of the season - nice. If fans are disappointed by the off-season or the direction of this team, you wouldn't know it by the 80K they've pushed through the turnstyles so far. Great crowd - great weather - well pitched and played game by the home team. Pitching and defense. This team has been all about it so far, and the results couldn't be much better. So far, the Tigers and Twins look to be the class the AL Central - again.
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