Box Score

Summary

This game turned out to be the pitching matchup that everyone expected. Not on the level of last week’s Bonderman-Halladay contest but was pretty good nonetheless. Jeremy Bonderman is really starting to come into his own and made it through seven innings allowing only three hits while striking out six with only 86 pitches. Gil Meche worked a bit harder pitching 111 pitches over 8 innings and giving up six hits.

Royals errors helped the Tigers out once again with an errant throw, on what should have been a double play, by KC phenom Alex Gordon. On the flip side the Tigers had a good defensive day with Jeremy forcing multiple popups and Granderson making some amazing catches in center field.

Tigers pitching was pretty strong for most of the game from Bonderman, Zumaya. One stat of note, Tigers pitchers had given up zero walks until handing the game over to Jones in the ninth. Jones then walked the first batter and it went downhill from there. Rodney came in the 10th and immediately gave up a home run to John Buck to put the Royals ahead.

It is a real shame the bullpen could not get Jeremy the win here, this game should have been won. You do have to give it up to the Royals offense that took a page from the Tigers book and really did play all nine innings.

Pitching

Pitching that Detroit has come to expect is exactly what we got to start the day off. Bonderman was consistently ahead of KC batters forcing them to swing on some of his toughest pitches. Some communication problems seemed to arise with Rabelo behind the plate and many mound trips happened one involving Jim Leyland.

Joel Zumaya pitched a single inning of relief. Tiger starters have generally eaten up a large number of innings which has allowed the bullpen to remain pretty rested and available. Joel, as he has done all year, just completely overpowered the KC hitters. For such a day with no sun and few in attendance he was extremely pumped up.

Jones gave up his first runs of the year in a pretty disappointing ninth inning. He was unable to get ground balls and KC just constantly hit loopers over the infield. This was the first blown save of the year for Todd Jones who has been tough up until now. Zumaya really should have stayed in the game through the ninth. He honestly had great stuff and had thrown only 7 pitches total. There was no reason for him to sit with an off day tomorrow, I don’t care how much you want to get your closer in there and show confidence.

Batting

Gil Meche seemed to learn from his last outing against the Tigers and held them back quite a bit more this time around. Mike Rabelo is still yet to get a big league hit and it was easy to see why today. He took a number of bad swings and even when he fouled the ball off he was way behind the ball.

Granderson was on today going 3-for-4 with a strikeout and a double. Polanco racked up his 9th multi-hit game of the season, first in MLB. Outside of that the bats throughout the game were not too strong with Sean Casey taking multiple golf swings resulting in three popups. Gary Sheffield continued his struggles going 0-for-5 leaving Polanco on base in the 10th.