Who'd have guessed the visiting Cardinals would open the World Series by smoking the favoured Tigers? Not me, but nevertheless that's what we got. This isn't going to bring in new viewers, and I've gotta imagine the dropoff rate over the first half of the game was pretty high. Unless you're a fun of comical baseball plays (wild pitches, passed balls, and lots of fielding errors by Detroit) this one didn't really deliver much in the way of entertainment. On a day when another Michigan sports team, the Michigan State Trojans of college football fame, came back from a 38-3 deficit to win 41-38, you'd think the Tigers could've put a better effort on the field. With this result, the best the hometeam can hope for is to head to St. Louis tied, with 3 straight in Missouri meaning that the Cards could wrap up the title by simply winning their remaining home games (in case anyone reading this didn't understand what "grabbing the home field advantage" meant).
The commentators are already talking up the notion that it was the long layoff that hurt the Tigers (they'd won 7 straight playoff games before tonight, but the last one was about a week ago). My view has always been that long layoffs help when your team is banged up, as is often the case in the later rounds of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and hurt the team or have no effect the rest of the time, depending on the personality of the team. Teams with deep post-season experience usually aren't hurt, whereas younger or less experienced teams can end up getting distracted by all of the media attention during long downtime periods. So I guess in this case I'd agree with the experts since the young Tigers showed all the signs of not having their heads in the game, and they definitely didn't have injuries to heal.
Here's hoping Game 2's better. Much better.
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1 comment:
D'oh! Of course it's the Spartans.. what was I thinking!
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