Peter Aiken – USA TODAY Sports
The Detroit Tigers are flailing at a time they should be excelling. After scoring 16 runs on Friday, the Tigers couldn’t find much offense at all on Saturday or Sunday, and once again found themselves losing a series and lost for the fourth time in five games. The Tigers are now 2-5 in September, 5-8 in their last 13, and it has been the puzzling offense that has once again allowed the Tigers to head into a slight tailspin, continuing to strand runners on base at incredible rates and looking for someone, anyone, to light the fire back in the team.
Luckily for the Tigers, they still own a 5.5 game lead in the AL Central, but home field for the first round of the playoffs looks to be slipping away with each passing day. You have to start to be concerned thinking about the Tigers’ exhaustingly limping toward October, rather than gelling as a team with energy and pep. Things can change on a dime in baseball, so it’s not time to start completely running around your house in circles crying about another wasted year (Is it just me who does that?), but this is not the trend you want to see as the games get more important.
To put it simply, the Tigers’ offense has to find some level of consistency and better at bats must be taken in big situations. The starting staff is as strong as you are going to find in the majors, so it is going to be on the shoulders of the offense to take this team to where they want and expect to go. Inconsistency is one of the worst traits a team can have if they are going to run the long gauntlet of a postseason, and it has been why the Tigers have fallen just short in the past. It would be great if this year does not turn out the same.
