Is this the game we will point too? Where the 2012 season turned around for the Detroit Tigers

Hopefully at some point the 2012 Detroit Tigers season will start to unfold that way we expected it too. At some point Prince Fielder will start to figure out American League Pitching, at some point hopefully even Ryan Raburn will warm up and hit the way we saw him do in the second half of 2011. At some point one of these games will be the spark, and years from now we will all reminisce about how on that one day in May the 2012 Tigers sparked a turn around that led to _____.

Maybe today was that day May 15th, 2012.

Of course we have seen flashes of what this offense can do before this. On top of that there is still an issue in the bullpen. Really what we are seeing is a pretty flawed roster that is unable to live up to the expectation the media placed on it. It seems like this is a team that thinks the AL Central is won. We have seen teams conduct themselves this way before, and it usually does not end well. Let’s face it if the size of the payroll was the ultimate deciding factor in who wins a World Series Title the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox would win the title each and every year.

While today’s win was nice, Raburn hit his first home run of the season and Prince Fielder broke out of his West Coast slump, Max Scherzer continues to be the weak link in the starting rotation and the bullpen is a mess. The Tigers used five pitchers today, and it feels like most games end up that way which means Manger Jim Leyland will over react and start ruling guys out of games who he feels have had to much work.

We keep coming back to that flawed word. I think Manger Jim Leyland’s approach to this season (and maybe for his entire time in Detroit) is flawed. Which MLB manger has had more payroll dollars to work with? Who has had more collections of big names? Sure, we could argue that Owner Mike Illitch’s approach to fielding a baseball team is flawed. However, some things that have come out recently have me more concerned about the way Leyland is approaching this season.

After getting ejected from a game last week in Seattle, Leyland had the brilliant insight that he saw Tigers hitters swinging at too many bad pitches. Now the rest of us are not at the ballpark everyday, but come one my six year T ball playing kid can tell that the Tigers hitters were swinging at to many bad pitches. On top of that the 3-4 record for the West Coast trip would seem to suggest that this was teh case, even more so if we look at the performance of the starting pitchers out west.

Now this is a team with a potent offense that is capable of scoring 10 runs (or more) almost at will. However, it is still a team that with Jose Valverde leaving the game with lower back soreness, is minus two (hopefully not for long) of the bullpen arms it started the season with. Let us also not overlook Scherzer’s continued control issues. While this was a good game for he fans, and the Tigers offense, before the Tigers win anything of substance this season there are many more issues to be worked out.